How To Create an Effective Geo-Targeted

Restaurant Marketing Campaign

Restaurant marketing is essentially communicating what your restaurant, cafe,

bakery, pizzeria, etc has to offer to potential guests. It is a way of inciting interest and

describing the unique features of your menu, of your service, and of your location.

However, as valuable as marketing can be, it presents serious issues when it comes to

reaching the intended consumer.

Conventional marketing (including restaurant marketing) is all about broadcasting

or printing the message where a lot of potential consumers will be able to see it, but

only few will find it relevant. Marketing slowly has become more centered on specific

demographics, enabled largely by improvements in communication.

For instance, it is relatively easy to create restaurant marketing campaigns that

focus on a particular geographic area, like advertising in a local paper. You can also

target a particular “psychographic” group, such as advertising your healthy menu

options on a healthy living website. However, it can still be very difficult to reach viable

consumers, those that turn into guests and into food sales.

Location-based online marketing is the answer. If it’s not in place, over 90

percent of ad impressions are wasted on potential guests who are outside your

geographic area. Luckily, technology has advanced to allow geo-location marketing. For

instance, smartphones allow marketers to obtain device-location data and modern

search engines, such as Google, enable consumers to find what they need based

entirely on the geographic location they are in and what’s near it. Better targeting means

better conversions and more food sales.

These are the steps to take to make a geo-targeted campaign work for you:

PICK A SPECIFIC TARGET FOR YOUR RESTAURANT

MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Make sure that your campaign is targeted well to the area you operate in. Major

search engines like Google, allow you to target your restaurant marketing campaigns

based on City, ZIP codes, neighborhoods, or even a specific street intersection.

This way, when you advertise your coffee shop, you can be sure that most of the

consumers exposed to your message are within a range that would make sense for

them pay you a visit.

BE A GOOD NEIGHBOR

You can use your restaurant’s geographic location to your marketing advantage in

promotions by focusing on providing consumer incentives at a hyper-local level. For

instance, you could create a time-sensitive coupon to those who live within a few mile

radius of your foodservice establishment.

EXPLAIN HOW TO GET TO WHERE YOU ARE

With geo-location, you can also explain your location, to make it easy for your first-

time guests to find you. (People are lazy and most would rather go to your competitor

than spend time looking you up in the directory.) It’s very important that you provide a

map. Even better is offer directions from the person’s location (walking, by car, or by

public transportation).

CAPITALIZE ON THE NEW AND COOL

There some very interesting “new and cool” tools available to you as local marketer.

Many coffee shops (and we can’t not mention Starbucks here), are using programs

such as Foursquare and Facebook Locations to turn location into a game. Consumers

can “check in” at your location, allowing you to provide incentives for consumers to visit

a specific location more frequently by offering status (e.g. mayor status, badges), points,

or incentives based on the number of visits (e.g. free appetizer on your fifth visit).

Geo-targeted online marketing is a key part of growing your restaurant business and

brand, to attract local customers.

Local Internet Marketing is much more than just slamming together a website. The

real restaurant marketing work is about becoming “findable” in multiple places when a

local consumer is searching for your type of product.

Alex Makarski

http://restaurantcommando.com/

416-892-6545

RestaurantCommando.com is the #1 online information resource on guerrilla marketing methods for

independent and multi-unit foodservice operators. Restaurant business is not easy, but doggonit, it can

be simple if you follow the right business recipe.