Successful restaurant management is both an art and a science. Along with managing staff, you need to find ways to keep your restaurant at the forefront of customers’ minds.
While every restaurant is unique, there are some general rules that can help managers improve their marketing.
Here are 8 restaurant manager tips that every manager should adopt.
Learning How to Be a Good Restaurant Manager? Master These Habits
1. Always Be Planning and Strategizing
Restaurants should always be marketing, planning, and strategizing, even during busy periods. Consistent marketing promotions can help get more people to your doorstep during your typically slow periods.
One important aspect of planning and strategizing is knowing and understanding your customers. Where are they spending most of their time? How can you reach them?
Making it a habit to get to know your customers and their changing habits can help you stay focused on the right marketing channels.
2. Keep an Eye on the Competition
Successful restaurant managers also make it a point to get to know their competitors and monitor their marketing activities. What are they doing to drive more foot traffic to their doorstep? What can you do better than the competition? What sets you apart?
Answering these questions can help you find ways to tweak your marketing strategy and improve results.
When analyzing the competition, consider the following:
- Their online presence. How do your competitors position themselves? Do they have a loyalty program? What do customers have to say about the establishment?
- Their pricing structure and menu offerings. How do they compare to yours? How are they marketing their menu items?
- Their staff. Are their employees friendly? How is their customer service? The customer experience also plays an important role in marketing. Ensuring you have genuinely happy and engaged staff can help you stand out in the crowd.
- Their weaknesses and how you can fill those gaps. What do customers want that your competitors aren’t doing? How can you fill those gaps and incorporate that into your marketing strategy?
Understanding your competitors and their strategies can help you stay one step ahead, making your marketing efforts more effective over the long term.
3. Be Persistent and Consistent
As a general rule of thumb, businesses have to make 6-8 touches before they have a sales lead. Potential customers need to see your restaurant multiple times before they consider it a viable option. That's why it’s so crucial to be persistent and consistent with your marketing efforts.
Make sure that you’re regularly:
- Posting on social media
- Blogging
- Creating new marketing content
Be consistent with marketing through the channels that work best for your restaurant.
4. Measure Your Progress and ROI Regularly
One of the most important aspects of marketing is measuring your performance. You can’t know if your efforts are paying off if you’re not tracking or measuring the performance of your strategies.
Make it a habit to check the ROI of your campaigns regularly and to measure the overall progress of your marketing. Ensure that you’re measuring all costs that are involved with your strategies to get an accurate picture of your return on investment.
Use all of the automated tools at your disposal to measure your campaign’s performance. By streamlining this process, you’ll save valuable time that you can spend on growing your restaurant.
5. Be Active on Social Media
Social media is huge. With 4.9 billion people on social platforms, it only makes sense for you to be addicted to social. You need to make posting on the restaurant’s socials a part of your weekly calendar and take time to:
- Create new posts
- Publish content
- Engage with followers
You'll need to do it all. The moment that you hit send on a post, your work is just beginning. A good manager knows that marketing means responding to comments, being friendly and even learning how to deal with negative comments and experiences.
If you master social, you’ll build an insane reach for the restaurant.
6. Willingness to Adapt
Adaptability can help you become a natural leader in any industry. When marketing a restaurant, there’s one thing that remains constant: change. You'll find that industries change, marketing requirements change and what worked yesterday to attract new customers is no longer working.
Marketing is a living, breathing part of your operations that will require you to adapt your strategies routinely.
If you’re willing to adapt and adjust to marketing trends, you’ll:
- Remain at the forefront of marketing
- Position the eatery for future growth
- Bring in new customers even during slow months
If you’re a manager who is willing to adapt their approach to marketing, you’ll be an invaluable employee who boosts their job security in the process.
7. Natural People Person and Relationship Builder
Want to know how to be a restaurant manager that boosts revenue and markets from within? You need to be a natural people person who is all about building relationships. If you want to market the restaurant, you need to:
- Talk to regulars – get to know them and their names
- Become friendly with patrons for good reviews and referrals
If you work on your “people skills” and make it a habit to greet customers, ask how they’re doing and get to know their names, you’ll find that guests will keep coming back.
8. Ability to Delegate Tasks
If you want to know how to manage restaurant staff as the business grows, it’s all about delegation. Restaurant management must have the crucial habit of being willing to give key tasks to their employees and trust them to complete them properly.
Managers who try to “do it all” quickly end up with higher staff turnover and unhappy customers.
Delegating allows for projects to be completed faster and more efficiently.
What tasks can you offload?
- Going through the restaurant closing list before closing each night
- Opening restaurant tasks to shift leaders
You can even use online platforms to help you better handle assigning shifts and freeing up some of your time in the process.
Restaurant management is all about processes and the right habits. If you build the habits above, you’ll better position yourself to manage and market the restaurant.