.png)
How do you track your costs?
You measure your cost of goods compared to your sales. That's a direct cost in providing the products.
You measure your labour compared to your sales. That's a direct cost in serving your product.
You need to measure your marketing against the sales that it creates as a direct cost of bringing in new guests.
Many restaurants base their marketing investment on total sales generated. You need to measure the marketing dollar spent than the sales generated as a result of the marketing.
It's true; it's challenging to track every sale back to a marketing strategy, but what you can track is an incentive. When an incentive is redeemed, you can ask if this was the guest's first visit. Now you can track how many new guests came in as a result of your marketing.
Here is the formula.
(New guest vale times new guests that dined with you)
Divided by the marketing cost
Anything over 1 means your marketing is producing more value than the investment is costing.
YES, your restaurant can survive without a marketing strategy.
As long as you have a great product, you can coast through like a glider in the sky. Just like a glider needs help from Mother Nature to stay in the sky, you will solely rely on word of mouth, which is out of your control.
However, adding a sales and marketing strategy is like putting engines on your glider. Yes, there is an investment, and you need to be consistently adding in fuel. But you can control the speed, the altitude, and the destination.
Instead of just surviving like a glider, wouldn't you want to accelerate your restaurant growth by having a sales and marketing plan?
Communication is vital!
Whether it is with your life partner, business partner, staff or customers, how you communicate with them can be the difference between barely surviving and thriving.
Brad Bodnarchuk is working to help others understand and execute their true potential each and every day.
What percentage of people decide to go out for dinner solely based on a restaurant's Instagram feed?
In fact, unless you are paying for advertising, the only way people would know about your Instagram account would be from a link through another source like your webpage or a listing service?
When you do an internet search for the best restaurant in your city, do links to Instagram accounts come up?
How do you measure the engagement of your posts to the number of guests that post brought into the door?
How much of an investment of time and money are you putting into your social media strategy, and how much of a return are you receiving?
It just seems there are so many unanswered questions, and it's all part of a hope marketing strategy.
Maybe we are wrong?
Would love to hear your thoughts.
