Updated: Jun 20, 2020
Famous writer Thomas Jefferson said, "If you want something you have never had, you must be willing to do something you have never done."
Happy 2020! I am excited to share with you the 2020 Restaurant Marketing Plan that will help you grow your sales for this year, and hopefully, bring you thousands of dollars in the next coming years.
Here are the things you need to do in constructing the Marketing Plan for your restaurant:
1. Set a Monthly/Year Gross Sales Projection
For us to set a stable sales projection for 2020, we do need to identify what our sales were for the previous year.
First, you need to know your total gross sales for 2019. Extract this data from your POS System and write that in your planner.
Also, we need to take note of our monthly gross sales, from January to December. This way, we can set a percentage for our sales growth projection. We must always shoot for two digits, a minimum of 10% is excellent.
So if we will have a minimum of 10% sales growth from 2019, then we will look at what it was for January 2019. With the 10% increase, what should our sales be in January of 2020?
It is incredibly important to do this step because it will determine the marketing initiatives that you will need to implement so you can hit your target sales for a particular month. How many new customers do we need to acquire? How many repeat business we require to put in place?
2. Run a SWOT Analysis
We must conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis of the marketing of our restaurant.
Strengths
Observe the marketing initiatives you currently have in your restaurant. What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats when it comes to your marketing system?
Maybe, you have a notable online reputation. Your online reviews are good. Your social content and online presence are outstanding. So these things could be your strengths.
Weaknesses
You may be doing well on Facebook and Instagram. However, a lot of people are into TikTok nowadays, and you still have not tried it yet. Perhaps, you consider this as one of your weaknesses because you did not maximize promoting your business into this platform.
Opportunities
Facebook Live is still in, but you have not thought of doing that yet. Maybe, that's an opportunity you need to work on, so once a week, go live on Facebook.
You may also want to take the opportunity to join Facebook Groups. It is free and works very well. Or maybe, you can make partnerships with your local realtors to have them sent you referrals. These are some of the opportunities that you must look forward to in 2020.
In the future, we can turn some of these opportunities into projects. To ensure that we are adding these into our marketing system, we must have a timeline, a project manager, and a team.
Threats
Lastly, determine the threats in your marketing initiatives. What are some of the warnings that you see? For instance, for us, in the first few years, we put so much effort into Facebook. We may have a large number of followers, but the organic reach is getting low.
Another one is maybe, email marketing. I feel like we put an enormous amount of time into creating an email marketing system. We batch-create things, schedule, and automate them.
However, it is not as effective as it has gone a little bit still, and we have thousands and thousands of emails. So I see this as a threat. We need to work on it and figure out how we are going to maximize it.
3. Outline a Marketing Budget Allocation Analysis (Pie Chart)
After filling in the SWOT Analysis, it's now time to study our budget. We need to look at 2019. What were all the marketing costs and investments we made in 2019?
Here are some of the examples of the marketing expenses that we are going to divide into pieces and form into a pie chart:
✔ Ad spent - Facebook ads
✔ Mailer/Print cost - printed to-go menus
✔ Software cost - Mailchimp (used for email marketing); Many Chat (messenger bot stuff) Later.com (social media scheduling platform); Text Message Marketing platform
✔ Outsourcing/Marketing agency cost - some people use social media agencies to schedule for them
✔ Sponsorships/donations cost - Fundraisers, the money that you donated for different organizations
✔ Food donations cost - Food drops (visiting businesses and giving away food for free)
✔ In-store events cost - beer-tasting event
✔ Content creation and cost - content photographer, writer, etc.
These are all part of your marketing money budget. And for us to set a realistic budget and reach our 2020 goals, we need to look upon our budget in the previous year and set it up for this year.
Putting these data into a pie chart will be helpful for you to compare easily all the expenses you that you are going to incur for the year 2020.
Keep in mind that marketing is an investment. This means that if it is costing you and not making you money, then you are doing it wrong.
We need to view our marketing with something that gives us a good return on investment.
4. Conduct a Marketing System Assessment
In this section, we are going to be assessing your marketing system. This was adapted from Howard Partridge/Zig Ziglar Business Assessment.