In our next topic when it comes to strategies to increase restaurant sales or scaling your restaurant– marketing is key. As marketing figure Gary Vaynerchuk would admit: The restaurant marketing landscape continues to evolve with the rapid expansion of the internet and related technologies. This continual evolution has not only provided insights to the restaurant marketing landscape, but the strategies themselves have taken a new form. So, what’s key? Essentially, Gary Vaynerchuk’s biggest restaurant marketing insight is: Value Creates Value.
Delivering Value
In a recent blog post Gary Vaynerchuk wrote, “The next decade will be one enormous game of value of output – and whichever companies figure out that game first and can execute it will pick up disproportionate market share.”
This insight from the marketing mogul is clear: whichever companies figure out how to deliver the most value to their audiences and prospects will be the companies on top.
Methodologies in marketing and brand building are evolving quickly, and offering valuable content is emerging as a dominant strategy. This is completely changing the way we should think about marketing.
Making A Connection
Our focus needs to shift from traditional “advertising” to instead putting out value. Fronting the value of your business not only grabs the attention of your audience but it allows you to make powerful connections with them. These connections have profound effects on your business, that greatly outperform an individual transaction.
It’s a simple idea but implementing it into your business is a bit more complicated. But, we’re going to sort it out here, so you can effectively start thinking about how to adapt your marketing strategies.
Determine Your Platform
First you need to find a platform that you’re going to use. This should be determined by a number of things.
- Volume of targets on platform
- Cost to access attention: Organic reach potential, cost of ads/post boosting
- Your talent and ability to produce high quality content at scale
The mindset being: reach as many people in your target markets as possible, with the highest quality value offering, for the least amount of your resources.
Gary V further illustrates this, “Attention is the singular asset. And right now, the attention of the world sits in mobile devices at scale on a handful of social platforms. And, the game is about communicating with them in written, audio, and/or video form.
Ideally you’d do them all – but if you really don’t have the resources, think about what you’re best at. Are you a great writer? Do you feel comfortable on video? Or, are you more introverted and want to do a podcast? It doesn’t matter what it is, just start talking – then start doing it a lot more.”
Focus Your Attention On Value
Your attention as a restaurant business should be moving away from “ads” to providing value to customers. You’re probably not going to start a podcast for your restaurant, nor should you. It probably isn’t going to be as effective as other outlets. But, once you figure out which platforms serve you best, start by providing value to create relationships with your customers.
If Gary Vaynerchuk’s insights to restaurant marketing could be boiled down to one rule, it would be to provide value. That requires you to focus on your message and be sure the communication you put out provides your customers value.
