Archive for December, 2008

Restaurant Marketing Strategies With Marketing Ideas For Getting Customers

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
Garen Garson asked:




A marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan of attack. Creating a marketing strategy involves looking at every facet involved in the industry and analyzing how your business will approach them. There are five main elements to developing a solid marketing strategy in the restaurant business.

Creating the marketing strategy requires identifying specific marketing objectives. What do you want to accomplish out of your efforts? The marketing objectives could be anywhere from increasing monthly sales by 10 percent to drawing in 20 more customers per day.

Once the objective or objectives are laid out, be sure to determine a clear time frame for accomplishing the goals. Money spent on ineffective advertising is simply a waste. Establishing a time frame allows for a clear moment to reevaluate the marketing plan.

One marketing strategy is to focus on cultivating existing customers. Spend a minimal amount of money on advertising to bring in new customers. Spend the rest of your budget on keeping your current customers happy.

An often overlooked method of retaining customers is keeping records of your best customers. Remembering names, birthdays, anniversaries, favorite meals and drinks, can be extremely effective at making a customer feel at home.

An interactive promotion can be hosting Guest of the Month parties. Once a month draw a name from customer receipts to win a party for the Guest of the Month and 10 friends.

This not only recognizes the good customer, but it will also, potentially, introduce the restaurant to 10 other people. Sending customers a birthday postcard with a special offer is also an effective way to make current customers feel taken care of and loyal to the business.

Marketing your restaurant does not only have to be done in the traditional and more expensive ways. It is important to think outside of the box to stretch a hard earned dollar.

Maintaining customer loyalty and keeping your restaurant in the public eye are surefire strategies to a successful business.

Rebecca
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Ezine Publishing – Get Your Ezine Read With an Irresistible Subject Line

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
Debbie LaChusa asked:




These days publishing an ezine or email newsletter is a common small business marketing practice, especially for independent service professionals. It’s an easy, inexpensive marketing activity and it offers a great opportunity to attract new prospects to your business and to build trust and relationships.

After all, those who know and trust you are a whole lot more likely to buy from you.

Anyone can publish an ezine.

Whether or not your prospects and clients actually open and read your ezine is an entirely different story. People are inundated with email and information and you need to break through a lot of clutter to get their attention. Even if they’ve opted-in to receive your ezine, don’t expect them to read every issue.

What can you do to help improve the odds that your subscribers will open and read that e-newsletter you so carefully write and prepare for them every week or month?

Well for one, you must write a powerful subject line.

You probably spend a fair amount of time writing your EzineArticles. But how much time are you spending crafting your subject lines?

Subject lines are like headlines on ads. If they don’t grab the reader, the ad doesn’t get read. If your ezine subject line doesn’t grab your subscriber, your ezine won’t get opened.

So what makes a good headline or subject line? Here are 10 tips:

(1) Use numbers.

For example, “10 Tips to Keep Your Clients Happy” or “5 Secrets to Being More Persuasive”

(2) Ask a question.

For example, “Are You Missing Out on Free and Easy Marketing?

(3) Address your readers directly.

For example, “A Trick to Get Your Prospect’s Attention” or “Increase Your Sales with an Incredible Offer”

(4) Tell your readers “how to” do something.

For example, “How to NOT Waste Money on Marketing” or “How to Struggle Less and Achieve More”

(5) Tell them what to do.

For example, “Make More With a Marketing Funnel” or “Get People Talking About Your Business”

(6) Use a combination of several of the above tactics.

For example, “Hate Selling? You Can Still Succeed” or “Too Busy Working to Market? Here’s 5 Tips”

(7) Use the curiosity approach.

For example, “My $3000 Mistake and What You Can Learn From It” or “Did I Make a Mistake?”

(8) Challenge them.

For example, “Take a Giant Step” or “Discover How To Market on a Shoestring Budget”

(9) Include “selling” words.

For example, “spectacular” and “hefty” instead of “big” or “many.” “Words That Sell” by Richard Bayan is a great resource.

(10) Just be you.

Make sure whatever headlines you write are consistent with your personality and your writing style. It’s important that your subject line is congruent with your personality and ezine content, otherwise your readers may not trust you.

So the next time you’re getting ready to hit the “Send” button, take another look at your subject line and make sure it’s as powerful as possible. Ask yourself if it would get you to open the email.

And if it doesn’t pass the test, go back to the drawing board and pull from one of these 10 tips to make it something your readers can’t resist.

(C) 2006 Copyright Debbie LaChusa, 10stepmarketing

Brooks
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Pros and Cons of a Monthly Ezine Newsletter

Saturday, December 6th, 2008
Annie C Betteridge asked:




I’ve had a few people ask me what the goal of a good ezine newsletter is. The truth, though, is that I don’t really think an ezine works for every niche in every situation. Sure enough, you should offer some form of autoresponder regularly, but should it be a regular newsletter with information in your niche? That depends on quite a few factors – first and foremost of which is whether or not your niche is actually an information, news rich source of interesting article ideas.

The Pros

There are a lot of obvious pros and cons here. First off, you’re going to build your reputation as an expert in the field. You’ll show your readers that you keep your ear to the ground, pay close attention to the news that develops, and are capable of providing it to them as soon as it becomes available. That’s a huge step forward in building trust, no matter what your market is.

‘Additionally, a newsletter is a great way to draw attention to more than just your primary link. If you have multiple websites or are promoting products or services from other sites, a newsletter that is produced each month can be tremendously powerful, offering an ongoing forum for “new products” and “reviews”.

The Cons

So, what exactly is a con against writing a newsletter every month? To start with, your niche needs to be a good one to write about. Some niches may not have much in the way of “time sensitive” information to share with your readers. This can make it hard to come up with new things to write about each month.

On top of a dearth of information, you might find that a monthly newsletter is disruptive to the more personal tone you offer in your standard autoresponder messages. They can also cause a gap in between set messages that get sent out by your autoresponder. Because you’re loading up those autoresponder messages to be sent at intervals based on when your readers sign up, having a monthly newsletter can overlap, resulting in too many messages arriving too close to each other. It can also result in a leeching effect, drawing attention away from your primary offer in the autoresponders.

What You Should Do?

So, what’s the answer then? Should you have a monthly newsletter or not? Again, this question comes down to what your niche is and what your autoresponder plans are. I wholly recommend offering as much value as you can in your email marketing campaigns. If that means writing extra each month, by all means do it. However, if it in some way leeches away from your normal email marketing campaign, reconsider whether your ezine will work.

Javon
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