ColourPresents

Competition is fierce in the restaurant industry in today’s economy as restaurant owners are finding it increasingly difficult to fill their tables on a nightly basis. It doesn’t matter what the cuisine is or the posh nature of the establishment: the recession has hit this industry hard, to the point where every restaurant is scrambling for ways to effectively market themselves in matchless manners.

Forget about traditional promotion studies on studies show that mobile promotion and campaign video e-mail are the most effective forms of promotion in today’s world. The beauty of mobile promotion is that you can effectively utilize SMS text messages to build an opt-in database of strong and targeted potential customers much simpler than thought feasible by traditional print media and do it cost-effectively as well where your restaurant mobile promotion actually costs less!

With that in mind, here are mobile business-building steps you must take to insure your restaurant can compete in today’s recessionary times for effective restaurant promotion:

1. Purchase a mobile keyword and brand your restaurant around it.

Effective restaurant promotion begins with this step. Your mobile keyword can be a version of your restaurant name or you can make it generic if you’d like (text HOTDEALS to 69302 as an example but beware, mobile text message promotion has become so popular plenty of strong generic keywords are already taken)

Together with your mobile keyword in place, generate a value offer to entice your future customers to opt-into your campaigns. (for example, text to 69302 and get 5% off your bill). The better the offer, the more people will opt-in. When people text your offer on their cell rings, they will immediately be sent a coupon to their rings to redeem at your restaurant ( a coupon they can’t forget at home) and you can market to them in the future whenever you like with more valuable offers to keep them coming back repeatedly.

Reference your keyword on all of your promotional items, (net site, restaurant signage, business cards, receipts, billboards, and yes even print promotion in case you still can’t make the break from traditional promotion) and you’ll build your opt-in database quickly.

2. Generate a barcode scan to deliver content 2D Barcodes can deliver any content you’d like directly to a user’s mobile tool including videos, texts, social media messages, mobile coupons, even your whole menu, all by basically using the camera on your phone as a scanning tool & downloading the mobile scanning program free. Mobile marketing barcode scanning works fantastically for restaurant marketing because it turns untrackable marketing in to trackable information. The possibilities for restaurant mobile marketing using barcode scans are countless & because it’s so new to the market, your customers are definite to be amazed at their ease of use & convenience. They also provide a wow factors second to none & will skyrocket customer loyalty & incremental sales since an amazed customer is a repeat customer.

3. Create a video for your web-site & upload it to YouTube. This seems obvious as YouTube is now the #2 search engine on the net, which means in case you don’t have some kind of presence on YouTube, you are missing out on a powerful (& free) source of potential customers. It doesn’t must be an elaborate production either, perhaps a one or two minute video of a tour of your restaurant & perhaps some shots of food preparation in the kitchen perhaps even include your keyword offer & your 2D barcode scan! The key is in case you tag the video correctly & learn how to rank your video for relevance, you’ll see a immense amount of traffic to your web-site due to video promotion.

4. Incorporate mobile promotion campaigns to drive reservations to your restaurant. The objective of the above steps is to grow your opt-in permission based promotion list. Now you require to stay in contact with these people with a variety of value-added updates or offers. Depending on the way you setup your lead captures, you can send video emails to your subscribers or send them text messages the point is to interact and turn them in to customers (or repeat customers hopefully). For example, if your restaurant is hosting some kind of benefit or charity event, you may require to blast out a message telling people not to miss it and make their reservations right now.

Or generate a mobile campaign marketing on mobile devices where your commercial is shown and clickable for immediate reservation capabilities. Again, the possibilities are countless. Consult with a mobile promotion company for best practices on how to make this work to your advantage.

5. Create an app for your restaurant for download to mobile devices from the iTunes store. Keep in mind how they mentioned how popular YouTube is? Well, there’s literally thousands on thousands of downloads from Apple’s iTunes store each day on every subject. Perhaps somebody may find your app while looking for restaurants on iTunes? It’s entirely feasible and a nice app can do wonders for your brand awareness.

Every restaurant has their own web-site, some are promotion by video, and lots of more are diving in to text message promotion. However, iPhone and iPad application promotion is untouched and makes for an excellent opportunity for effective restaurant promotion for restaurant owners looking to be on the forefront of a brand spanking new and thrilling web promotion expertise.