You have finally opened your dream business – a restaurant – and you’re now ready to put all your other plans into action. You can’t expect instant results if you’ve barely opened shop. It takes time, effort, and patience to get your business on solid ground. Of course, once your business has gained ground, you need to keep it afloat, and this is where your customers come in. Now the question is how do you attract new customers to your business?
Slogan Does It
In any type of business, you need to have a business branding statement in order to attract potential customers, partners, and other business contacts. Also known as a slogan, this tells the world all about your business. It can be your promise that you offer delectable, to-die-for dishes that would keep customers coming back for more. It can even help create an emotional connection to your dishes as well as emotional loyalty to your business.
In order to develop a brand statement and to use it effectively, you need to ask yourself a few questions. This breaks down your concept into manageable chunks. You can then combine them together to create your message. Ask yourself the following and list down all the answers that come to you:
- Who are you or what is your business about?
- What do you do and how do you do it?
- What do you specialize in or what are your best characteristics?
- What do you want people to remember your business for?
- Who is your audience and what does your target market like?
- Who are your competitions and what do they do?
- What benefits are you promising?
- Why does your audience have to believe you?
Logo: Your Company’s Face
After coming up with a witty, catchy slogan, it’s time to create a logo. A logo is crucial to a business, for through its image, shapes, colors, and fonts, you’re actually providing people a quick and lasting way to identify your business. It should give some sense of meaning about your business and you need to use it in all your other business-marketing materials – from your menu to your ads.
You need to make your logo unique and appealing to potential customers, so, make the effort to really think about your logo and hire a professional designer if you need to. Make sure that you have variants for print and online media that are similar enough to be easily identifiable.
Some of these variants of your logo should include:
- Different sizes
- Different positions
- Full color
- Black and white (grayscale)
- A dark version for a light background
- A light version for a dark background
Online Presence through a Website and Social Media
In today’s Internet-based world, it’s important to create and maintain an online presence. Doing so will let you gain attention while providing credibility in a shorter amount of time than you would offline. So, be sure to get started with this as soon as you can. Get a website and create accounts on popular social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Be sure to update all of them constantly with content that’s timely and relevant to your business.
Your website should look clean and presentable. At the same time, it should grab people’s attention and keep them focused on your content there. It should have all the relevant information about your restaurant: the menu you offer, your office address and other contact information, your history, promos and latest news, and other things that folks need to know. You can also choose to offer downloadable content on your site, particularly discount coupons.
Meanwhile, you can use your social media accounts as a way to get in touch with your customers. You can tell them about your upcoming events or product releases. In addition, they can give you their feedback and critiques much more easily.
It’s easy to tell that all three elements discussed here are interrelated and point to one thing – effective marketing strategy. By following the above-mentioned, you can easily attract new customers to your business.
Lionel Luigi Lopez
Lionel Luigi Lopez is a business writer, entrepreneur and a musician. He is also an active blogger and marketing strategist. He runs a small business in Manila and is still active in music.
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