The Elements of a Good Restaurant Marketing Plan Part 2

In Part 1 of this article, we talked about why you need a strong marketing plan and some of the elements you need to include. In Part 2, we're going to look at some of the other elements your plan needs if it's going to successfully guide your restaurant into a profitable future.

Marketing Strategy
The next big thing that needs to be included is your marketing strategy. While some of the other elements could be a little vague, you really want to be specific here about how you're going to sell your business to customers and what channels you think will work best in reaching those customers.
Let's say your restaurant sells gourmet pizzas. How are you going to sell yourself to customers so they'll give you a try when they can already get pretty good pizza from chains and local mom and pop pizza places? You might focus on the large amount of topping choices, including some exotic options like squid. You might focus on the upscale ambiance of your restaurant or the level of customer service your customers will receive. Whatever you would choose to do needs to be included in the marketing plan.

How to Promote
The channels you choose for conveying your marketing messages are also important. If you target families with children, then how do you most likely reach those families? Would a television commercial be more effective than a radio spot? Would a newspaper ad get more attention than mailed coupons? Those are the types of questions you need to answer for your marketing plan – and once you have opened make sure that you track which of your marketing activities is generating customers for you.

Goals/ Objectives
Additionally, you'll need to develop some goals for your marketing. The bottom line is that if you don't know what you want then you'll never know if you achieved it. That might work for some people in some parts of life but if you're serious about making it as a restaurant owner then you need to start setting some goals.

Your goals shouldn't be vague either. “I want to increase my restaurant's revenue” is not a real goal. You need to be specific: how much do you want to increase your restaurant's revenue and over the course of how much time?

Finally, you have to address the financial aspects of your marketing. It's wonderful to be able to plan to do a television campaign to market your new restaurant but if you can't afford that type of promotion you need to know it now.

While you could get very detailed with your financial information and you could include charts and graphs to illustrate your spending on different campaigns to attract different audiences, this isn't really necessary. A simple list of the campaigns you plan to do over the first six months or a year, along with your budget for each campaign and your anticipated results is sufficient if your marketing plan is for your eyes only.

Of course, if your marketing plan needs to be reviewed by a lending institution, a franchise operation, or potential investors, you might want to add in a few more bells and whistles. If the marketing plan is simply going to be a tool that will help you prepare for your restaurant's future, then it needs to be practical and easy to put together not aesthetically pleasing.

One last thing about your marketing plan – it needs to be written out. Some business owners claim that their marketing plan is all up in their head and they think that's enough. It's not. For one, you're not going to remember your entire plan or your research months down the road, especially not if you're trying to juggle all of the aspects of running a business. You also need it in writing so it's concrete and unchangeable. It's easy to change our minds about what we hope to accomplish or how much of a budget we can spend, but if it's written down those changes take a lot more effort.