How To Crank Up Your Restaurant's Revenue

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The Front Burner

Your Restaurant’s RevenueCRANK UP

Marketing Strategies

Taking the plunge into business takes courage and a belief in yourself and your ideas. Not everyone has the self-confidence required to run a successful restau-rant. The fact that you believe in your business sense enough to work at it as hard as you do says you have something special. Otherwise you wouldn’t be putting this much time and effort into your operation.

Unfortunately, the talent and vision that form the core of your restaurant are often lost in the sea of compe-tition your customers choose from every day. If they only knew what you already know about the great-est attributes of your restaurant then you would never have to worry about finding customers.

This edition of The Front Burner features many ways to communicate effectively with existing customers and plots strategies for finding new ones. A marketing strategy is certainly important to the success of your restaurant, but far too often the foundation of an ef-fective campaign is overlooked.

Before you commit to a marketing strategy, identify the two or three things you do really well. Those couple things should be easy to find – they’re the reasons you get out of bed every morning and get to work. The key is to weave those bedrock ideas into the narrative that makes up your marketing campaigns. Whatever channel you decide to use for marketing your restau-rant, communicating your vision will ensure success and help you connect with customers.

Michael LewisTundra Founder

“Taking the plunge into

business takes courage…”

Good food, great service, and a unique concept are the fundamentals of a successful restaurant. If you don’t impress your customers with these three things, they won’t be coming back any time soon. Sending happy customers out the door to tell their friends about their experience in your restaurant is the most effective way to get the word out.

Unfortunately, word-of-mouth marketing can only get you so far. Eventually you’re going to need to cast a wider net in search of customers. On the other hand, any marketing that’s more involved than your regulars tell-ing their friends about you is going to cost money – a prospect that will surely give any restaurant owner pause.

Fortunately, there are ways to market yourself without busting your budget or taking away from the time you need to run your restaurant. That’s why we decided to compile 10 easy marketing tips that will help you crank up your revenue. These strategies are designed to deliver maximum punch per dollar without taking up a lot of your time.

Look for these Top 10 tips throughout this edition of The Front Burner…

unique marketing efforts by

1. Social Media Marketing

2. Manage Your Online Reputation

3. ROCK Your Marketing Efforts

4. Completely Change Your Menu

5. Nothing Sells Like A Good Secret

6. Serve “Fast Food” For Lunch

7. Turn Your Restaurant Into A Hot Spot

8. Harness Email & Ride The Gravy Train

9. Recharge Your Happy Hour

10. Take Your Restaurant Marketing Underground

PLUS…Is Your Kitchen FDA Compliant With New Changes To The Food Code?

Controlling Insects & Pests

10 Easy Marketing Tips That Will Crank Up Your Restaurant’s Revenue.

4

Tip#

Social media. It’s the thing everyone is talking about in the marketing industry. The best part about restaurant social media marketing (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is that getting your message out there costs you nothing but time – a precious commod-ity to be sure, but a heck of a lot cheaper than a local newspaper ad or radio spot. Already many restaurants have employed clever strategies to engage cus-tomers and generate business for their restaurant online.

A social media marketing campaign, if done right, can become an effective cus-tomer making machine. It’s not easy, and will require some work. But if the right strategies are employed, your restaurant stands to benefit.

Facebook is probably the most popular so-cial media platform for anyone in marketing today. Does that mean sales are going to go up the minute you hit “publish” on your Face-

book page? Well, maybe not, but the bottom line is that having a fan page definitely can’t hurt you, and may very well help. If you don’t start bringing in loads of new customers, you’ll at least im-prove retention among existing ones.

More importantly, a Facebook fan page can be a great way to collect information about your customers and get feedback about your restaurant. You can leverage this information to connect with customers in new ways and expand your email marketing cam-paigns. You’ll also have a direct line to customers, revealing what they don’t like about your establishment as well as what’s working well.

So how exactly do you create a great Facebook page? And how do you start gaining fans and generating interest in your restaurant?

Twitter is a “micro blog” tool that al-lows users to send short 140 character messages to a list of subscribers. The original goal of the site was to give friends a way to update each other on what they’re doing in real time. Of course, as we all know now, Twit-ter has quickly become much more than that. Chief among the things Twitter has become, besides a news distributor, a social media site, and a busi-ness communications tool is a popular vehicle for marketing and branding.

In the food service industry, restaurants and chefs have used Twitter to engage customers with content that gives them a behind-the-scenes view of what’s hap-pening and unique promotions that bring in extra business.

Chefs are using the site to engage cus-tomers by giving out recipes and asking for feedback on new dishes and ingredients. O t h e r restaurants are advertising meal

specials and events to draw in loyal customers on specific

days. Some restaurants have even started tweeting months be-fore the doors open for

the first time, resulting in a packed opening night.

Here are some best practices that will help you succeed and get the most out of your restaurant marketing efforts:Post regularly. Some Twitter users send out several tweets every day. You prob-ably don’t want to annoy your customers with a lot of updates, especially at first. But you should definitely choose a sched-ule and stick with it. That way your follow-ers know when to expect an update and (hopefully) they look forward to your next one.

Be creative. 140 characters doesn’t give you a lot of space. It also doesn’t give you a lot of time to catch someone’s at-

Some Facebook Strategies:Build a great fan page. As a business you’ll want to create a Facebook fan page rather than a profile. The bad thing about a fan page is that you can’t communicate with others the same way you’re used to. A fan page is much more reliant on people finding you and engaging you.

The good part about a fan page is that you can do a lot of customization. Create custom tabs, set up a couple RSS feeds, and you’ll be well on your way to making your fan page stand out for your customers. There are countless step-by-step guides to building Facebook fan pages on the web. A quick Google search will return you more articles on the subject than you know what to do with.

STEP 1: FACEBOOK

STEP 2: TWITTER

Social Media Marketing In Three Steps

5

tention. Boring tweets will get deleted, guaranteed. Straight-up sales pitches will also be ignored. Instead, use colorful, cre-ative language to engage your subscrib-ers and draw them in.

Do more than just sell. Yes, the ulti-mate goal here is to get people through the door of your business. But if all you do is sell, sell, sell, you’ll start seeing unsubscribe notices pouring in. Throw your customers a few juicy bones before you set the hook. Give out a few recipes. Tell a story about the behind-the-scenes action. Ask for opinions on a new dish. Get them looking forward to your next tweet. Then hit ‘em with a dinner special.

Customize offers. Want to know how much all your hard work

is paying off? Offer a special meal deal to your Twitter subscribers only. Give out a special code that allows them to redeem the deal. Every time a customer uses the code, you know they are there because of your Twitter efforts. This strategy has the added benefit of making your followers feel special because they are the only ones getting the deal.

STEP 3:FOURSQUARE

Foursquare is part of a newer subset of the social media phenomenon

that has been dubbed “hyper-local social media.” It works like this: as you patronize your favorite local haunts, you “check-in” with Four-square, which allows you to see if friends are nearby and post information about the venue you’re currently in. The more you check-in, the more “badges,” or awards, you get. For instance, you can become the mayor of a certain bar or club if you check-in the most times from

that location in 60 days.

Tech-savvy restaurants and bars caught wind of the mayor and other Foursquare badges and started ad-vertising to this ready-made customer base, offering free drinks and other comps to the Foursquare mayors of their establishment. Most people had no idea what the heck a mayor was, but those who did quickly spread the word to their friends, and it turned out to be a hot way for restaurants and bars to market themselves effectively to their hippest customers.

In general the hyperlocal movement is beneficial to the food service in-dustry because it provides a real time medium through which restaurants can advertise to their customers. For now, Foursquare and the inevitable copycats that are forthcoming will be largely limited to big urban centers like New York, Chicago, and L.A., but it’s not that farfetched to imagine a hyperlocal medium of one kind or an-other servicing communities of all sizes.

Tell everyone about your page. With a fan page you can’t just go around Facebook friending as many people as you can find like you can with a regular profile. Therefore you must drive traffic to your fan page in order to get some fans. The most obvious places to do this are on your website and in email marketing campaigns, but it would definitely benefit you to explore some other options, like business cards or even your menus.

Offer your fans something unique. Once you’ve started to build a fan base, reward them with some sort of promo-tion – a free appetizer, 2-for-1 drinks, anything to get your fans to actually come into the restaurant and spend money. The added benefit for you is that you’ll be able to gauge exactly how successful your fan page is based on how many people use the promo you only released through Facebook.

Managing Your Online Reputation

Tip#Engage customers with

content that gives them a behind-the-scenes view.

Even more impressive than Modmarket’s fresh and tasty menu is their extremely savvy marketing campaign. The restaurant is a great example of how a great concept can expand quickly with the help of some well executed strategies.

Modmarket’s founders are skillful practitioners of many of the marketing strategies you’ll find in this edition of The Front Burn-er, but one of their most successful campaigns comes from an innovation all their own: using receipts as advertising space.

“We view the receipt as an asset,” says co-founder Anthony Pigliacampo, “We’ve taken what was going into the trash and turned it into a marketing tool.” All Modmarket receipts list nutritional information for each item the customer ordered, not only placing the restaurant ahead of the curve on menu labeling but also reinforcing Modmarket’s message: we’re a healthy alternative to other fast casual chains.

“People like the fact that it’s transparent. We’ve had peo-ple come in just because they’ve heard about it,” Anthony says of the nutrition information on receipts. But Modmarket’s use of all that white space on customer receipts doesn’t end there. At the bottom of each receipt is a bold black arrow pointing to the right that reads “Turn Me Over.” On the back is a limited-time promo giving the customer 10% off their next order, provided it happens in the next two days.

Read more about ModMarket’s unique marketing efforts at etundra.com/modmarket

You’d think finding a place to eat lunch in a health nut haven like Boulder, Colorado that featured simple, all-natural ingredients made from scratch for a good price would be pretty easy. Boul-der residents Anthony Pigliacampo and Rob McColgan realized a couple years ago that finding good, affordable, healthy food prepared fresh and fast was much harder than it should be. The two friends then set out to fix this problem.

Their solution is Modmarket, a fast casual restaurant located in the heart of Boulder’s 29th Street Mall. The menu and the food follow a simple set of principles laid out by Anthony and Rob when they started.

SERVE FOOD THAT…Tastes great

Is made from scratch

Features simple ingredients that anyone can recognize

Is served quickly

Is affordable, and…

Wouldn’t turn you into the guy from “Super Size Me” if you ate it every day.

The crazy thing is how revolutionary this simple credo has turned out to be. Modmarket’s daily offering of fresh salads, brick oven pizza, gourmet sandwiches, and made-from-scratch soups has been an instant hit with the Boulder locals, and founders Antho-ny and Rob are hard at work on a second location in Denver that opened at the start of the year.

DENVER 1000 S Colorado Blvd

Denver, Colorado

BOULDER 1600 28th Street

Boulder, Colorado

303.440.0476 modMarket.com

“we’re a healthy alternative to other fast casual chains.”

84% of American consumers say online

reviews affect their decisions on products

and brands.

Managing Your Online ReputationTip#

Everyone’s got an opinion! And in the internet age, everyone can and does voice their opinion online. So do you have any idea what people are saying online about your restaurant? This is not to say that the opinion machine driv-en by the internet is all bad. It is, however, a decidedly dou-ble-edged sword. On the one hand, positive reviews and feedback com-ing from your happy customers can bring new customers in droves. On the other, one jerk who may or may not have actually had a bad experience can pick up the megaphone and start screaming nasty things about your restaurant.

HERE ARE 4 WAYS TO MANAGE YOUR REPUTATION: 1. LISTEN TO WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING. You can’t manage something if you don’t know what you’re dealing with. So tune in to the internet and start listening. Some places to start: Yelp, OpenTable, and UrbanSpoon are just a few of the myriad web-sites that post restaurant reviews. Don’t forget about the social media behemoths either: you should be on Twitter and Face-book anyway, talking about your restaurant, but if you’re not, go there today and get started!

2. RESPOND TO YOUR CRITICS AND THANK YOUR FANS. The internet is all about conversation. You’ve listened. Now it’s time to answer. No matter how you respond, do it with a healthy dose of common sense. All the things that annoy you about people at a dinner party are the same things that are going to annoy your customers online. So avoid them.

3. TAKE THE INITIATIVE. Don’t let the naysayers define your restaurant’s reputation online. If you’re not offering an alternate narrative, then people will start to think everything they read about you is true. Here’s where Twitter and Facebook come in. These services are free. These services are popular. These services are also considered culturally important. Take the time to learn how to use them and then start talking about how great your restaurant is. You’ll be amazed how many people want to listen. All this costs you is your time, and the potential for new customer development is virtually unlimited.

4. GATHER INTELLIGENCE. This goes hand in hand with Step 1, but you can’t really gather effectively until you’ve started the conversation that follows from Steps 2 and 3. Once you’ve es-tablished your own presence online, you can start to really learn exactly who your customers are and what they want. This is the revered Holy Grail of marketing: knowing customers better than they know themselves. You can achieve this through effective online reputation management.

Tip# How To ROCK Your Marketing Efforts

Denver based Smashburger, an emerging fast casual chain, has shown just how effective tapping into the local music scene can be for a new restaurant. The company’s Rock Your City program encourages local bands to submit their videos via YouTube prior to the grand opening of a new location. Smash-burger then selects the best applicants and posts their videos to the company website so that fans can vote on the best one. The winners get to play at the new location on opening day in exchange for free burgers plus a local radio broadcast.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE BAND’S EXISTING MARKETING EFFORTS. Any band even remotely serious about their prospects will have at least a preliminary marketing effort online. And since both you and the band want people to show up for their gig in your restaurant, this is a great opportunity for you to advertise to the band’s fans through their existing online presence.

LET YOUR CUSTOMERS TELL YOU WHO THEY WANT TO HEAR. Smashburger’s strategy of taking submissions and then allowing fans to vote for the winning gig is the perfect way to get the most mile-age out of a live music gig before the band ever steps foot on the stage.

INCORPORATE LIVE MUSIC INTO YOUR OWN MARKETING EFFORTS. Include links to YouTube clips of the bands that are going to perform in your establishment on your website. Post live music schedules throughout your restaurant and email your customers when their favorite bands have a gig.

Live music is a great way to connect with your customers and turn them into reg-ulars. It doesn’t take nearly as much work as you might think, and the payoff in new business can make it more than a worthwhile endeavor.

If you’ve got the space and an inclination for live music, keep these tips in mind before you rock out your own establishment:

Tip# Completely Change Your MenuIn recent years smart restaurateurs have turned the psychology of perusing a menu into a science designed to get customers ordering your best menu items on a consistent basis.

HERE’S HOW TO GET STARTED OPTIMIZING YOUR MENU:

DROP DOLLAR SIGNS. Anyone who has sat in a res-taurant trying to decide what to order is a liar if they tell you

they don’t look at the price for help in making a decision. So if every customer is going to be looking at that number beside menu items, you might as well make it as appealing as possible.

A study by the Culinary Institute of America showed that menus without the symbol “$”

or the word “dollars” saw an increase in sales of over 8% per person. That’s enough to make anyone scrambling to get the white out!

STRATEGICALLY PLACE BEST SELLERS AND MONEY MAKERS. Customers scan lists of appetizers, en-trees, and desserts in a predictable way. Naturally, they look at the top item first. Maybe not so logically, they check out the very last item second. Then a customer will usually go to the second item from the top, then second from bottom, until they get to the middle.

NOW THAT YOU KNOW THIS, TAKE THE MENU ITEMS OF EACH CATEGORY AND SPLIT THEM UP INTO GROUPS:

Place the items that fall into best seller and high margin groups in the prime locations at the top and bottom of your app, entrée

and dessert lists. Place high margin items in the top right of the menu and lower margin items in the lower left as well. The customer’s eye will track to the upper right first, giving items placed there a much higher viewing percentage.

MASTER THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY.When someone looks at a menu, they will inevitably compare prices. That’s where the Theory comes in. More often than not, customers will choose a middle-of-the-road option. The trick is to define “middle-of-the-road” for your customer.

That’s why a smart restaurateur will create one entrée that is ri-diculously expensive – absolutely and shamelessly high end. You may never sell a single one, but it doesn’t matter. That unafford-able entrée will give your customers a compass by which they will judge the rest of the menu.

Make sure you have some prizes with real

value to them.

Nothing Sells Like A Good SecretTip#

It all started as an attempt to perk up January sales. If you’re in

the restaurant business, you know how quiet January is. To combat that trend Houlihan’s, a well-known casual dining concept based in Kansas City, MO, decided to play Secret Santa during the holiday

season by giving customers a “secret envelope.”

In every envelope was a prize – and some envelopes had sweepstakes-worthy prizes, like a Caribbean vacation. Others contained Houlihan’s gift cards for different amounts. The catch

was that to redeem the prize, the customer had to return for a meal in January.

The response caught everyone at Houlihan’s by surprise. The secret envelope promo added an element of adventure for the customer that really drove excitement. Sales soared, a lot of buzz was gener-ated, and soon Houlihan’s decided to make the secret envelope promo a regular twice-a-year event.

There are some complications for independent restaurants. Every state has rules for sweepstakes promotions, and it’s probably not very cost effective to give away a Caribbe-an vacation. Additionally it can get complicated decid-ing how to value different prize levels and how to distribute them evenly.

That doesn’t mean your restaurant can’t implement a se-cret envelope type campaign, especially if you make it a raffle. Instead of a sweepstakes, hand out raffle numbers to customers and then collect their numbers when they come back a second time. Drop those numbers into a hat and hold a drawing on a set day. There’s a good chance you’ll collect a lot of numbers the day you hold drawing.

No matter how you decide to implement a secret envelope campaign, make sure it gets picked up on the internet and the local media. The best part about a campaign that has an air of mystery to it is its potential to go viral. Make sure you take advantage of this tendency to the fullest.

Also make sure you have some prizes with real value to them. Naturally you can’t afford to give away a Caribbean vacation, but you should focus on variety and include some big prizes with a lot of value. Nobody will care if all you give away are $10 gift cards to eat at your restaurant.

Serve Fast Food For LunchTip#

“Fast food” is a successful promotion more than one national chain has used to grab new customers:

QUICK LUNCHES FOR PEOPLE ON THE GO.

Weekday lunches can be a hard shift to nail down for any restaurant. Sometimes it’s busy, sometimes it’s completely dead. One thing is certain, however. Most peo-ple are at work and are busy. They want to know they can get in and out of a res-taurant quickly without having to worry about being late for whatever it is they need to do next. Guaranteeing a quick lunch is a great way to let your customers know you understand their busy schedule and are ready to meet their needs.

Customers love the idea of getting any-thing for free, and rest assured - they’ll be

watching the clock tick while you scram-ble to get their food out. That’s why you’ve got to make sure this baby doesn’t back-fire on you. To start, stick to high margin, easy-to-prepare favorites. That way you can price them aggressively and know that your line can whip them up quickly even if it gets hectic out there.

If you get busy enough to be forced into giving away a couple meals here and there, then consider your speed lunch promotion a success. That’s why you keep the menu to a limited number of high mar-gin specials. No one will be disappointed when their food arrives two minutes too late.

Step 1 Guarantee your customers they’ll get their lunch in 15 minutes or less after they order from a limited lunch special menu or it’s FREE.

Step 2 Make sure lunch is served in 15 minutes.

It works like this:

Turn Your Restaurant Into A Hot SpotTip#

Make electrical outlets scarce. When WiFi hotspots were first brought in to restaurants, many owners wor-ried that patrons would turn into serial “table campers,” hanging out for hours on end without or-dering anything more than a cup of coffee and surfing the net. The reality has been that the vast majority of customers do not overstay the standard table turn-over time, however, the best way to ensure this is to make sure they can’t plug in their laptops.

Create separate networks for customers and internal use. Just because you already have an internet network set up for your business’ comput-ers doesn’t mean you should make that same network available to customers. The last thing you want is some creative patron getting in to your POS system or other important information through your network.

WiFi isn’t for every restaurant concept.

Tip#

Turning your restaurant into a hotspot is relatively easy and has proven to help boost lunch sales by as much as 8%. It also encourages customers to come in during that extremely slow period between lunch and dinner, and helps facilitate business meetings, which can translate into some good sales for your establishment.

If you are considering setting up a WiFi hotspot in your restaurant, keep a few key things in mind:Give away internet service for free. First of all, that’s what most other hotspots do, and so your customer al-ready expects to get service for free. Sec-ondly, you’ll be increasing sales and cus-tomer loyalty by giving away free internet.

Password protect the network. Have servers give out the password to patrons when they are seated. This helps prevent people from neighboring build-ings from pirating your connection and slowing it down, and you can at least limit access to paying customers at the same time.

Carefully consider who you want to tar-get with your WiFi service and what kind of customer is likely to use it. Obviously, a fine dining atmosphere targeted towards couples out on dates doesn’t jibe well with a WiFi service. On the other hand, if that’s your dinner crowd but you want to jump into the business lunch market, advertising a WiFi network could make a lot of sense.

Boost Lunch Sales Up To 8%

Turn Your Restaurant Into A Hot Spot

Tip#

Don’t send emails unless it’s requested

Offer something every time you send an email

Track conversions

Use a proper email marketing system

Email is a great way to reach your customers because it’s cheaper to send than print advertisements and much easier to manage as well. If done right, email can quickly become one of the most effective ways for you to connect with your customers.

However, there are definitely some do’s and don’ts when it comes to email marketing:

Don’t send emails unless it’s requested. Sending unsolicited email is also known as SPAM, and we all know how annoying that is. That’s why the best way to collect email addresses is to offer a little something in return and get your customer to volunteer their email address.

Offer something every time you send an email. The hard truth is that your customer really doesn’t want to be bothered reading an email about a restaurant. What they do want know is when your happy hour is and what days you offer specials. Don’t send an email unless you have something to offer. Otherwise you’re just clogging up an already busy email inbox.

Track conversions. Use coupon codes or some other system to track the success of your email marketing campaign. Try differ-ent types of offers and see which ones have the highest con-

version rate. Does a 10% off coupon on any meal work better than a buy one, get one free drink during happy hour deal? The only way to know for sure is to get customers who heard

about the deal through your email campaign to use a code when re-deeming their discount.

Use a proper email marketing sys-tem. Don’t try to send emails out from your Hotmail account. For one thing, it looks unprofessional. For another, you will get labeled as

spam sooner or later. There are a variety of options out there. Make sure you do your research first.

The most important thing to remember when it comes to email marketing is to experiment. Best practices only take you so far. Try different types of offers and presentations until you find the one that gets the most customers in the door. This is also why tracking is so important. If you can’t tell if you’re having a busy Tuesday night by chance or because of last week’s email, then you can’t improve and refine your campaigns.

Email marketing is usually something most people associate with retail, but it can be a very effective marketing tool for restaurants as well.

Harness Email & Ride the Gravy Train

Tip# Recharge Your Happy Hour

Once you’ve got ‘em in the door, keep ‘em! Customers are there because you’ve gotten their attention with some good deals. There’s never been a better opportunity to get them to stay. Use happy hour menus to advertise dinner specials and train your staff to drop some great deals on happy hour patrons before they leave. At the very least, they may come back for dinner another time after learning your deals don’t end at 7 pm.

Once you’ve got ‘em in the door, keep ‘em!

These aren’t the happy hours you might remember from five years ago. It isn’t just a couple domestic beers on tap for $2 any-more. Many restaurants are taking their happy hour all out, with special tapas style menus at bargain-basement prices and pre-mium cocktails for $5. Happy hour has also gotten much longer, from 2-3 hours to 4-5 hours of deals.

If you’re considering adding a happy hour or spicing up the one you’ve got, keep a few key factors in mind:

Happy hours should make the customer happy. These days, your customers aren’t looking for a dollar off a domestic beer. They want more, and they’re getting it as restaurateurs continue to fight for business. Make your happy hour a smokin’ deal if you really want to ratchet up the buzz and the traffic.

Create a special menu. There’s no need to lose your butt on your dinner apps just to stay competitive. Take your highest margin apps and entrees and turn them into smart, fun, finger-style dish-es that can be prepared fast and efficiently, preferably with a margin you can’t lose on.

Spend some money advertising. If you’re changing up the menu and slashing drink prices, you need volume. You’re not going to get volume if you don’t get the word out. Start with your regu-lar customers and then hit the rest of the market with whatever you’ve got (and whatever you can afford): email marketing, lo-cal ads, flyers, etc.

It started in San Francisco, where a chef known only as The Dissident Chef launched a series of events known as Sub Culture Dining.

“Underground fine dining” is a trend that is spreading throughout the U.S. like a fire in 60 MPH winds.

What is underground dining? It can take many forms, from sumptuous seven course meals served in an abandoned warehouse to super-secret, invite-only seats in a chef’s home kitchen. The common threads binding this move-ment together is five star cuisine served in a novel environment, prix fixe, and a limited number of lucky invitees.

Social media has also played a huge role in the success of the movement, with many underground chefs posting coded messages on Twitter, Facebook, and even Craigslist informing members where the next event will take place.

The combination of superb food and a sense of exclusivity and adventure has fueled the success of underground din-ing. For traditional restaurants, the phe-nomenon has raised the bar of diner ex-pectations. On the other hand, there is incredible opportunity here to do some-thing exciting and fun that will market your restaurant well and help you ex-pand your culinary horizons.

Some ideas for taking your restaurant underground:

Theme nights. No, don’t put up a couple plastic palm trees and call it Gil-ligan’s Island. Transform your restaurant into something completely different. Dress your staff differently. Serve some unique specials and really take things to the next level. Make your regulars feel like they’ve never been in your restau-rant before.

Interactive dining. Your best cus-tomers probably have a little chef envy hidden somewhere deep inside, and it’s just dying to get out. Help them con-nect with their inner chef by putting on an event in which your customers par-ticipate in the preparation of a prix fixe dining event put on by your restaurant. This is the latest and hottest trend in un-derground fine dining, and foodies ab-solutely love the opportunity to live like a chef for an evening.

The ultimate take-out. Abandoned warehouses? Defunct wine cellars? Just because those underground chefs have start-ed making weird places cool places for eating doesn’t mean you have to be stuck in your restaurant for all time.

Take what you do, sign up 50 or 100 of your best customers, and put on a prix fixe meal extravaganza in some cool, quirky place outside your restaurant. If it can work for a rebel chef it can work for you, and your customers will love the unique experience.

The underground dining movement has spread across the coun-try so rapidly that it has quickly become mainstream. Incorporat-ing a few exclusive underground events of your own into your repertoire is the perfect way to build solid relationships with your very best customers while also creating buzz about your restau-rant in the local community.

Take Your Restaurant Marketing UndergroundTip#

Effective restaurant marketing doesn’t have to be expensive marketing.

In fact, the best kind of marketing you’ll do for your restau-rant is the kind that doesn’t require a big check up front. In the competitive environment restaurants find themselves these days, big spending on marketing is almost surely out of reach for all but the very largest chains.

For the rest of us, strategies like customer engagement through social media marketing (p. 8), creative promotions like secret envelopes (p. 26) and hot happy hours (p. 46 ) are a much more effective (and affordable!) way to reach customers and keep the dining room full.

Focusing on affordable marketing solutions doesn’t mean you can’t harness the power of technology. Using Wi-Fi to pump up slow afternoon business (p. 32) and email mar-keting to reach your customers directly (p. 39 ) when they aren’t dining in your restaurant are two great examples of ways technology can be put to work.

Whatever tactics you incorporate into a marketing strat-egy for your restaurant, make sure you track the results as accurately as possible. Only by testing strategies, measur-ing results, and then continuing with those that work and discarding ones that don’t will you be able to settle upon the most effective marketing tactics for your restaurant.

1. Social Media Marketing

2. Manage Your Online Reputation

3. ROCK Your Marketing Efforts

4. Completely Change Your Menu

5. Nothing Sells Like A Good Secret

6. Serve “Fast Food” For Lunch

7. Turn Your Restaurant Into A Hot Spot

8. Harness Email & Ride The Gravy Train

9. Recharge Your Happy Hour

10. Take Your Restaurant Marketing Underground

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The Back BurnerA restaurant blog