July 12, 2010 - by Abbie Hanks

VAT has increased, which means so should your marketing

When George Osborne announced his ‘tough’ budget I’m sure many of you winced in pain. Particularly when you heard that VAT would be a wallet sapping 20%. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for your restaurant’s marketing.

The challenge will be to find cost effective ways of reeling in customers from a, possibly, shrinking pool. The opportunity will be in harnessing the internet more effectively than your competitors for reaching new customers and retaining old ones.

Harness SEO so people can find your website

The internet has made it easier to stay in contact with diners than ever before. With 62% of diners searching online before eating out and 33,000 Google searches for restaurants every hour,[1] the web has replaced the Yellow Pages as the go to place for finding local restaurants. This means you’ll need a website that’s easy to find. Luckily, on this blog you’ll find plenty of SEO tips that can help.

As the sage advice goes, ‘it costs more to find new customers than it does to retain old ones’. These days you don’t have to rely on handing out 100s or 1000s of leaflets when it’s so easy to maintain contact with existing customers. With email marketing you can stay connected to customers and entice them back with special offers and discounts long after their after dinner coffee.

Spread your restaurant marketing messages virally with social media

Along with email are the social networking tools you now have at your disposal a.k.a. Facebook and Twitter. Whilst they both work in slightly different ways, both can be used to keep customers updated and to remind them of what a delicious meal they had. And as well as being quick and easy to use, these tools are completely free. In this post we share some Twitter tips to get you started.

So whilst the increase in VAT means people are going to have less money to spend, you shouldn’t batten down the hatches and cut back on your restaurant’s marketing when the internet provides you with cost effective tools for staying engaged with customers and enticing them back to your tables.

Useful links

10 Free SEO Tools for Seeing if Your Website is Being Found
Top SEO Tips for Making Your Restaurant’s Website Easy to Find
Make your restaurant’s website easy to find
How to use Twitter to build loyalty

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