Easy Way to Find Hundreds of New Guests

There are so many web sites and tools to help market your business locally that it can be daunting. The best ones are easy to use and understand. A great place to start and a favorite for introducing new guests to your restaurant is Meetup.com.Meetup is a social networking site that creates groups around a [...]

Let The World Know About Your Event

Having an event at your restaurant or participating in one in the community? Upcoming is a great site for creating on-line buzz and letting your guests and neighbors know. “Upcoming is a community for discovering and sharing events. It can help you find stuff to do, discover what your friends are doing, or let you [...]

Twitter 101

Twitter is a fast-growing social networking Web site.  People can communicate with each other 140 characters at a time.  So the messages are short and to the point. It is a bit like being at a huge cocktail party.  You can start conversations, or jump in and join another person’s conversation.  You can simply listen [...]

How much should you spend on restaurant marketing?

Although there are several rules of thumb, a typical restaurant should allocate 3% – 6% of sales to restaurant marketing. And remember – you cannot build a house with one pillar.  You need to have several ongoing, consistent methods of marketing, and not all need cost money.  Sometimes TIME and EFFORT have larger payoffs.  IE [...]

Local Marketing – Google Style

The Google Local Business Center is a must visit for business in general, but certainly for businesses attempting to attract customers in their local community.  As you may know, Google allows you to add your business to a directory and then enhance your profile with all kinds of information about your business, products, and services. [...]

The ROI of Social Networking

As often illustrated in one of our favorite books Duct Tape Marketing, the most common reasons stated by small businesses for not embracing social networking is that they can’t measure or, worse yet, don’t believe there is any solid return on the investment of participation. My question to you regarding the ROI roadblock is this [...]

6 Quick Tips For Newsletters

Did you know it costs six times more to make a sale to a new customer than to an existing one? You can use newsletters to focus your marketing on past customers. Keep costs down by collecting email addresses (fish bowls, contests, customer surveys) and putting your newsletters in a brief email!  3 or 4 [...]

5 Things To Know About Using Facebook

If you haven’t already – sign up for your Facebook Fan Page! 1. The Fan page –a few months ago Facebook added fan pages and made them more business friendly. Any business on Facebook should create a fan page for their business and start adding additional content there. The cool thing about fan pages is [...]