10 Restaurant Marketing Tips That Will Crank Up Your Revenue

After a year of dedicated blogging on The Back Burner, I took a minute to reflect recently about where the food service industry has been and where it’s going in 2010.  That reflection got me thinking: after a year and 350+ posts, what were the 10 simplest, most effective ways for a restaurant to boost their business? Over the course...

How To Rock Your Restaurant Marketing Efforts

A common misconception in the food service business is that booking live music takes more time and effort than it’s worth.  The process of finding bands, paying them, and providing enough space for them to perform can be a distraction at best and a downright money loser at worst, or so the theory goes. Yet many establishments have proven time and again over the years that bringing in local bands is a great way to connect with...

Need To Reach Your Customers? How About Communal Delivery?

If you’re a regular reader of The Back Burner, then you know how I feel about diversifying your revenue stream so that when diner’s spending habits change, you have multiple sources of income for your business.  As dining room visits declined last year, more and more restaurants started looking for different ways to reach their customers even though they weren’t coming into the restaurant anymore. Restaurants in St. Cloud,...

A.I.S.: The Ultimate Social Media ROI tool for Independent Restaurants

Here we are once again, the cacophony roared up after the SuperBowl over the legitimacy of ROI in social media whether it’s measurable, valid, does anything or whether it’s just a bunch of numbers the next “expert” throws up to validate his job/salary/cost. The roar seems to be mainly coming from marketers, advertisers and mediums which like to stir up the noise level about how wonderful social media is and yet fail to...

Green Initiatives: A Rise In Cost Or A Part Of Your Marketing Budget?

QSR magazine published an article recently about new take out packaging for restaurants made from recycled plastic water bottles.  Dubbed The Bottle Box, the restaurants that have used it say it performs just as well or better than normal plastic take out packaging, and that it can be customized with your establishment’s...

Community Based Restaurant Marketing: Get Some Real Bang For Your Buck

Fine dining restaurants in Denver, CO are pooling their resources this weekend to kick off Denver Restaurant Week, an annual event that allows diners to sample the city’s fine cuisine over the course of a week for an incredible price: $52.80 for two.  Tons of restaurants are participating in the promotion in an effort to draw new customers. This...

Restaurant Marketing: The Future Is Now

Foursquare is a location-based application for mobile devices that allows users to discover and rate local businesses and then share those discoveries with their social network.  Since I wrote about Foursquare last year, the company has really started...

Text Message Ordering: Why Your Customers Already Love It

One of the biggest shifts in customer behavior over the past few years has been the preference for take-out food.  All the major national chains (Applebee’s, Chili’s, etc. etc.) have added drive-up service for their customers.  And I’ve written on this blog about taking your restaurant’s food out, whether it be catering,...