Editor’s note: This article is written in collaboration with an NYC marketing expert from Lasting Trend. Lasting Trend is a marketing agency located in Brooklyn, NY servicing small to medium-sized companies.

Launching any business requires a marketing strategy. This is especially true when you are opening a restaurant in New York City.

First, you’ll need to develop your pre-opening restaurant marketing strategy. The weeks or even months that come before the day the restaurant even opens can make or break the business as readily as anything else

It doesn’t matter how amazing the food is or how great the dining experience, if no one knows about the restaurant no one will come. But don’t worry. There are many tools available for restaurant opening marketing. Contacting a skilled and knowledgeable marketing agency in NYC is your first step.

Pre-Opening Advertising

Your pre-opening restaurant marketing strategy should take advantage of the 6-8 weeks prior to the restaurant opening to do some critical work. In this time, a new restaurant owner can build an audience for her establishment and create a “buzz” for the business. The main goal is to increase awareness and build excitement. The owner should also test different marketing messages, tactics, and channels to develop a sense of what works.

A successful pre-opening advertising campaign leads to:

  • An audience excited to try the new restaurant
  • A base of email subscribers and social media followers
  • A firm understanding of what marketing tactics work for the restaurant and its audience.

This allows you to build loyalty and recognition before the restaurant even opens.

Register Domain Name

The bulk of your marketing will be on-line. As a result, the very first thing you should do is register your own domain name. This should be the name of your restaurant. If this name is already taken, don’t fret. You can look on-line for tips from sites like lifehack. One easy one is to simply tack NY or NYC onto the end of the name to make it unique.

Launch Website         

Once you’ve registered your domain name, you need to launch your website. In the beginning, it doesn’t have to say anything beyond the restaurant name and “Coming Soon.”

You should also include an email registration form so you can start building a mailing list. Other content could include a description of the different types of food your restaurant serves, opening date, etc….

Next, you’ll need to start thinking about the website strategy and incorporating some content marketing tactics.

The site can’t be stale and never changing providing no incentive for your visitors to ever come back. No. You need to provide some kind of value so visitors have a reason to pop in every week to check it out. This could be anything from a weekly recipe to video tutorials on cooking. The choice is yours.

Create Attractive Landing Pages

In addition to the website, you’ll need to create some attractive landing pages. In Lasting Trend an employee can work on a landing page for up to 8 hours (so take your time). Because a landing page consists of a single standalone page designed to entice the customer to complete a single action. In the case of a restaurant landing page, that action will likely be to join the restaurant’s mailing list or something else simple like that.

Here are a few tips for your landing page/s:

  •  Use Only One Call-to-Action per Page
  • Remove Unnecessary Distracting Images/Text from the Page
  •  Sell What Makes Your Restaurant in NYC Unique
  • Use Natural Language Throughout
  •  Use an Exit Pop-up 

Doing this should help you capture more leads.

Run Social Media

In this day and age, developing a social media platform is critical for any business. And the sooner you begin, the better off you’ll be. The key is to start small. Pick one social media site, develop your platform there, and then branch out when you are comfortable, and you feel like you have learned a few of the tips and tricks that benefit your restaurant the most.

A good place to start is Facebook. They have an enormous reach and a vast number of groups and such catering to specific communities. So, start your restaurant opening marketing efforts by setting up a business page on Facebook to grow your audience and develop your voice.

In the case of a restaurant in New York City, you’ll have to make sure your actions on Facebook are focused on that community.

Once you get started, try to learn about what makes the most effective social media content for your business. What type of content should you use? When should you post it? How often should you post?

Answering these questions can provide guidance for your future use of social media and help you set up an effective editorial calendar.

Do Some Local Marketing

You should also do a good deal of local marketing throughout the pre-launch period. You could start by registering your business on Yelp, getting a free page, and upgrading if/when you feel inclined. The thing about Yelp is that it is designed to showcase local businesses to their respective communities. It’s an excellent resource you don’t want to overlook.

Another option available is to create a Google My Business (GMB) account. GMB allows you to manage how your business listing appears in search listings and on maps. You can respond to reviews and edit details like phone number, hours, and more. Again, it’s an excellent resource that shouldn’t be dismissed.

Create Marketing Plan for a Restaurant Launch

It’s also a good idea to use the time you have in the pre-launch period to develop the marketing plan for your restaurant launch. It need not be overly complicated, but it should be multi-channel. That is, you want to spread your marketing resources across several different venues.

This allows you to compare and contrast the different channels to see which is most effective at giving you a return. If Yelp is producing better results than Google, focus more on Yelp. You want to keep the number of channels small enough to manage, yet broad enough to maximize your reach.

After your initial opening day, you’ll still refer to your marketing plan with regularity. You can tweak it and update it as you see fit. As time passes, you may want to swap out the channels that aren’t working well to try out newer channels that may prove more lucrative.

A good marketing plan can probably be written up in under a day.

Grand Opening

As the big day approaches, you must develop a restaurant grand opening marketing plan.

You should be prepared with some promotional campaigns and discounts to attract customers. For example, you might want to give a certain percentage as an opening discount for the meal and have a few giveaways as well.

It’s important to include things like your business card or maybe a menu or such with the giveaways. You need to tie it back to your business in some way. You don’t want your customers forgetting about you!

Another good tactic is to work in a way to get a referral. You can offer gift cards or give away discount cards for multiple people.  Be creative!

First 3 months After Opening

Once you get started, you can’t take your eye off the ball. You need to be focused on first impressions and your reputation through the first three months of your business and beyond. You’ll also have to adjust your marketing strategies as time moves on.

In the first 90 days, you should enhance and adjust your Facebook efforts as well as your other digital tactics. The goal is to find customers and keep them coming back!

Offer Quality and Quantity Service

Of course, the most critical feature of any restaurant is the food it sells. You want to serve the best quality food you can in quantities sufficient to satisfy. This is true whether you are opening a simple coffee shop, a lunch and dinner buffet, or a fine dining establishment on the Upper West Side.

All the marketing in the world will not save a restaurant that offers poor fare—whether it be poor in taste or unsatisfying in some other way.

So, even if it’s just noodle soup, make it the best it can be! You won’t regret it.

Your Place Should Be Clean

The last critical aspect of the restaurant business we will mention is cleanliness. First of all, a restaurant that doesn’t maintain some minimum level of cleanliness will, sooner or later, run afoul of the Health Department. And being closed down for being unsanitary is not something from which you can easily recover.

A further point is that cleanliness can be turned into a competitive advantage. Be as clean as you can. This includes all areas of the restaurant. To be specific:

  • Cooks and the staff should have impeccable hygiene and attire.
  •  Food preparation areas should be regularly and thoroughly cleaned.
  •  Dishes and utensils should be run through the dishwasher after every use (of course).
  • Foodstuffs should be thoroughly washed and rinsed before preparation.
  • And the dining room itself should be spotless.

That last, in particular, can draw customers back again and again. Cleaning is definitely not an area in which you should slouch. It is a subtle, but significant aspect of your restaurant marketing plan.

Why Are All Mentioned Points Important?

One of the critical takeaways from this article is that there is a lot to juggle to open a restaurant in New York City Marketing is a critical aspect of that. And Digital Marketing is essential in this era. Once things get going, the work spent maintaining your efforts is as important as the work that went into starting.

Just suppose your restaurant becomes popular shortly after opening. This can happen in a lot of ways. Some other website wrote about it in an article. People find about it on Google seeing a number of five star reviews. Word spreads. People start visiting your website. That draws them in, too. All that is marketing.

If you have a nice, clean restaurant with excellent food, you’ll get return customers. And return customers are always a plus. After all, it’s a well-known marketing fact that new customers cost more than a returning one.

So, do your due diligence before opening. Develop a restaurant opening marketing plan. You won’t regret it.

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