A new year is here and the world around us changes every day when it comes to keeping up with marketing trends and technology for your restaurant business.

In this post we break down the top items you’ll need to focus on right now to improve your top line revenue this coming year.

“No one plans to fail, they only fail to plan”

Start this year with a solid restaurant marketing plan.  Creating a road map of where you currently are and where you want to be, is crucial to long term success. 

1. Goals – Have a Purpose

This is the #1 area where most businesses fail in their marketing efforts. It’s like driving your car with no destination in mind. It’s sounds silly, but a majority of businesses are not planning properly and setting goals, then tracking their progress towards the goals.

I’m not just talking about top line revenue goals like, “We need to gross $3 million this year.” Yes, that’s a goal and it’s a great start, but how are you going to get there? Especially if you only did $2 million in 2016?

So where can you improve?  Can we set specific goals to grow the business?  Examples are:

• Increase our private event or catering lead generation by 20%

• Increase our email list subscribers by 500 per month

• Grow Facebook followers to 10,000

• Grow Instagram followers by 1,000 per month

• Increase brunch revenue by 20%

• Average $50,000 per week in revenue

2. Tracking and Return on Investment (ROI)

What is a lead worth to your business? What is the life time value of your customers?

You learned to set your goals above. Now let’s run programs to meet those goals and track which pieces of the programs are getting the best results, for a profit.

If you can see through analytics that spending $30 on a pay per click ad with Google Adwords generated a $2,000 catering event for your restaurant, how much would you continue to spend on that ad?  The answer is “All of it until you are sold out!”

Because it’s working, you can see it in the tracking, so scale it up.  All digital marketing has the ability to be tracked down to the goal you want to achieve.

We all have those moments when we fell for the salesman/woman and bought the ad we maybe shouldn’t have. Maybe it was $500, or $1000 or $5000. Only to think later, “Did I get any increase in business from that ad.”  The sad thing is most likely NO. So let’s stop wasting money on things we can’t track for ROI.

Old school ad formats are dying for a reason. They can’t be tracked and linked to your goals.

Newspaper = dead.