Restaurant Marketing: 3 Important Strategies to Prepare for the Holiday Season

For most companies, a co-marketing strategy is a high neglected and underutilized marketing technique. The holiday season is a time for you to recognize that teaming up can produce greater results for your business. What collaboration and co-marketing do is that they bring new ideas and audiences, additional expertise, and more ways to leverage each other’s relationships in order to expand your activities, promotions, and events. Hence, identify the strategic partners and local m with whom you would not only like to work with but also execute your co-marketing activities efficiently. With a customer base of yours as well as a new customer base of your strategic partner, you can use your promotion plan to the hilt.

1) Early planning is half the battle

Early planning is vital to the success of any marketing strategy. To promote your restaurant this holiday season, make sure you start early with good planning. While it’s never too early to start planning, you can hire and train your staff early on. Due to the seasonal nature of holiday shopping and given that the competition is very high, you need to up your marketing game and make the best impression this year – therefore, the well-trained and driven staff is just what your business wants.

The next step is to plan out all the special events and sales you would want to organize during that holiday season rush, which may include Halloween contest and Black Friday & Cyber Monday discount deals, just to name a few. Don’t forget to include a back-up plan into your preparations for those what-if scenarios based on your previous experiences. Last but not least, double-checking the inventory is a must in order to ensure you have the required merchandise ready for your special events.

2) Let customers know about your activities

Once you had your ducks in a row beforehand, in terms of special events and sales, it’s time to focus on the customer engagement and make your current customers and potential prospects informed about these special events and sale offers. The earlier you inform your customers, the better the opportunities you’ll have. But you can get your message across quickly? One way of doing is to create a landing page on your website as well as on your social media sites where the customers may sign up for the event you’re expected to host. Another fast and efficacious way of delivering your message is through SMS marketing services. Though SMS marketing is a great tool to target your audience, it’ll require you to build a customer contact list before you start informing each one of them with links to those special events and sales landing pages.

Promoting yourself on social media can prove to be another effective way to keep your customers informed and engaged. It may, however, call for an advertising budget to spend on your special events and sale promotions. If you’re a small business and cannot afford the costs related to social media advertising, look for other possible ways – like, doing regular posts on your Facebook page and conducting polls, etc. – to use your online presence to the maximum degree.

For more inspiration, create a festive in-store look with bright posters about your planned events and activities, along with lights and decoration items.

3) Initiate a Co-Marketing Strategy

For most companies, a co-marketing strategy is a high neglected and underutilized marketing technique. The holiday season is a time for you to recognize that teaming up can produce greater results for your business. What collaboration and co-marketing do is that they bring new ideas and audiences, additional expertise, and more ways to leverage each other’s relationships in order to expand your activities, promotions, and events. Hence, identify the strategic partners and local merchant with whom you would not only like to work with but also execute your co-marketing activities efficiently. With a customer base of yours as well as a new customer base of your strategic partner, you can use your promotion plan to the hilt.