Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

hi there

where is the restaurant located?? as a consumer i have seen that location is a big factor in the restaurant business. again, what kind of food you serve, all types of food or specialty food like chinese or indian or continental or all?? i suggest you to provide us more details about these.

anyway, the following are my 2 cents .....

1. yes, you hit it right, develop a priviledge card(loyalty program) for all your regular customers and offer them benefit if they have dinner like free drinks for every person (champagne, wine). this really helps in bringing back consumers and spreading WOM, but remember WOM also depends on the food quality.

2. Develop a Referral Program, in which you encourage your existing consumers to refer your restaurant to others and for each new customer, the referring customer will gather points and will win/get some gifts from your restaurant.

3. why dont you try to bring the people who have lunch at your place for dinner also. Organize a Bundle Offer for lunch and dinner.

4. if you in Financial districts, then there are business hotels, try to tap those and place some brochures for the guests of the hotels. most of the business travelers want to taste different restaurants other than their hotels.

5. develop a "Happy Price Menu" of say $15 or $20 for dinner and have multiple food items on that menu to choose from. also have combination menus and be flexible in meeting consumers' wants.

6. try to organize Exotic Dinner Week. during each of these weeks you have Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Brazilian Foods so that the consumers are attracted to taste these new and exotic foods. remember the quality and authencity of the food is imperative to be successful. during these Exotic Dinner Week create the entire atmosphere of the restaurant in that country flavour with native music, decorations etc.

7. also, if possible organize Country wise"Wine Festival" at your restaurant like Australian, Chilean, French, South African, Italian etc. wines. you can do the same event for the Champagne of various countries. this will create attraction for the consumers to have dinner at your place.

8. Organize a Musical Evening (i.e. Jazz, Classical, Pop etc.) on weekends so that people can enjoy an entire evening while having dinner with their loved ones.

now to communicate all these promotions you can try the folloiwing apart from what you have done.....

- Tie up with the credit card companies and send promotion brochures along with the credit card bills.

- put promotion flyers inside the newspapers and deliver to all the households rather than printing ads in paper which is costly. for this you need to tap the newspaper boys.

- in US all the newspapers are delivered in a rolled form. try to make a cylindrical cover of the rolled newspaper and use that to communicate the promotion. this will make the consumer to read the flyer(the cylinder).

- above all always advertise in and around your restaurant (inner wall and outer wall, doors, glass panes) about your "Today's Dinner Special" just to entice all those who have breakfast and lunch and those who pass by your restaurants.

you can also check the following links to previous question on restaurant.

https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstid=5678

https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstid=3897

https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstid=3090

hope these helps.

cheers!!

Are you the only Greek restaurant in town and are YOU Greek? One good idea is to start networking with other Greek restaurants in other cities. Owners of these don't post on KHE, but they might be a great resource.

Here's a listing: https://yellowpages.superpages.com/listings.jsp?STYPE=S&SRC=&C=greek+restau...

Michael