Why Restaurant Managers NEED To Prioritise Marketing!
Warning, this may be controversial! Many general managers will argue “how can I focus on marketing when I have so many operations tasks to look after!!” It’s true. From ensuring an excellent product and top customer service, to ordering, scheduling and maintenance, restaurant managers have A LOT on their plates. It is a role that constantly requires fire fighting, and it can be really difficult to find the time to take a moment to sit, think and plan.
But I’d like to (gently) float the idea that perhaps managers should consider prioritising marketing over some of their other tasks. It isn’t to say that anything from the operations side is less important (you can’t serve wine if you haven’t ordered any), but can you as general managers offload some of these tasks onto your support team and free yourself up to spend more time on marketing? Can you firmly enforce your SOP’s with your team to a point where you don’t need to oversee them quite as much?
A lot of independent restaurants simply don’t have the budget to afford a full time marketing manager and thus a regular marketing practice tends to fall by the wayside in favour of more urgent tasks. However with the industry so intensely changed since COVID 19 and margins growing steadily tighter, marketing is now more important than ever to help attract customers.
Here are my suggestions to get on top of your marketing in a General Manager role!
Dedicate a minimum of three hours every week to sales and marketing. Set yourself up somewhere quiet, away from constant interruptions and work on marketing ideas, plans and implementation.
Trust your team! Delegate some of your day to day tasks to the employees around you. This will help build them their skills, and give you more time to focus on marketing.
Take a walk around the neighbourhood and see who is around. What shops or offices have re-opened? Can you drop in some vouchers for take away lunches or discount cards? Are there bigger box stores with long lines of customers waiting outside where you could pass around marketing materials?
Check out the competition. Visit different restaurants in other parts of your town or city and see what they are doing to attract customers. Head online to visit restaurant websites and social media accounts for ideas and inspiration. Often restaurants in big cities around the world like London, New York and Sydney are doing exciting things that you might be able to try at your venue.
Listen to marketing podcasts, read marketing blogs (like this one) and watch Youtube videos to keep on top of the latest marketing trends. The How I Built This podcast reveals how huge multi million dollars businesses got started, from Zumba to Ben and Jerry’s Ice cream. These entrepreneurs provide SO much amazing insight into business strategy and all of them are very much applicable to the food and beverage industry.
Ask your staff to help with marketing tasks. For example, if you aren’t a great at taking pictures for social media, ask an aspiring photographer on your bar team to help! For more on using your teams skills, check out THIS article.
Get organized. Use planners and spreadsheets to get all of your plans down on paper. Head to my SHOP to check out more marketing and organizational tools.