Competitive Strategies to Market a Restaurant

Today in this modern period, where there already exists numerous well-established restaurants, to start a new restaurant and to make is successful is really a tough task. However, once it builds a reputed position in the industry then it becomes the gold mine which enumerates for the endless opportunities and dug a well of bucks for the owner. But this is possible only when you have the strong and hardcore marketing plans with you.

This is the time to dust off your old restaurant marketing plan and get started with new trends emerging in the marketing strategies of other successful businesses. You must have a keen idea on what works and what doesn’t.

Restaurant marketing isn’t the same as it had been. Restaurants generally embrace online marketing tactics and forget about the offline strategies. Yes, there are a lot many things one can do offline to promote one’s business. In this blog, you will get to know the various eminent strategies which one must implement to flourish his restaurant business.

Some of the most prominent marketing strategies are as follows-

Start a Food Truck-

Customers feel delighted if they see their favorite brand near their doorstep. It enables you to dish out your food to the folks you might never come in contact with. It is yet another efficient idea which would help you with your various marketing strategies.

Successful restaurant marketing strategy leads to higher sales scale and ultimately the fame, power of your business. Here I sum up our marketing strategies for a successful restaurant.

Online Marketing-

Starting from having a functional website to the promotion on various social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube etc. through regular updates of all your promotional activities, photos and videos of the special dishes, customers, and events of your restaurant. People generally share the stuff they are involved in. So you must also tag the regular customers and ask them to hit the like and share the posts.

Food Fests-

Don’t ever miss the chance to be the part of the local food fests organizing in the city. These food fests are the place where people come up from far off places and they get to know about the domains in the industry. You must be having a creative and striking hand, which will attract the customers towards you.

Promotional Strategies-

The restaurant can entice the customers through various coupons, discount vouchers, new product launches, free trials, bounce backs and loyalty programs. These tactics rope in the new customers to become the restaurant loyalties.

Affinity Programs-

Affinity programs help the restaurant to tie the knot with the other leading brands for mutual promotions. Tying up with an already successful credit card, for example, will serve the need.

Run Contests-

This is another better strategy which would make your customer happy and excited. Run some relevant yet simple contest and invite your loyalties and fans to participate and give them the chance to win some exciting prizes and this in return will give the reason for your customer to come back.

Menu Designs-

The menu of the restaurant plays a very important role to seek the customers’ interest in it. It is the foremost and genuine thing which attracts the customer towards your restaurant. Advertising through the menu is only possible when it is clear, sophisticated, vulnerable, visually pleasant and definitely credible. It must give the information about the daily offers and promotions.

Apart from these strategies, one can also go for traditional promotions through Newspaper, TV Commercials, Magazine ads, and even through the printed promotional materials like Brochures, Flyers, Business cards, etc. Though expensive, they create awareness among the people.

Infocrest’s marketing department holds an ocean full of new and exciting marketing strategies of which the above was just a small example. We here at Infocrest Finweb LLP provides you with innovative and highly competitive market plans which helps you to grow your business and makes you stand one among the toppers of the industry.

Street Food Business Plan- Money Out Of Streets

In the past few years, Street Food has become the hottest topic, with people thronging from miles around to get the taste of the street spices and develop a palate for the latest foodie craze. Whether it is a food festival or a market stall, it’s evident that people make money from this yummy business.

It’s a low start-up business which yields loads of money. Despite the low start-up costs involved, jumping into this business without any business plan is like preparing surely for a disaster. The market is very competitive and you need to have a clear idea of the steps you plan before taking the plunge.

You will generally be having the idea about what kind of food you are going to serve. If you are planning to serve basic, low-cost fast food, you will be flooding yourself with numerous competitors with similar business wherever you go. It would probably a need for you to become effective. You have to achieve as many customers as you can in a short amount of time, keeping waiting time as short as possible with maximizing profit.

And if you are thinking to start with the unique variety and high-end product, you won’t have to compete with the bulk. All you have to do is to achieve the highest quality of your food to justify higher prices and make yourself stand out among the competitors. You need to understand your audience and meet their expectations in terms of taste, money and quality.

Your business plan should include every key which are required to flourish your business. One such of the various such keys is the Time to make a start- this is not something to be asked but is something you must know. All the big pitches that you want to trade in summer handed out in spring, with appealing for in New Year.

The other important aspect which holds a major space in planning is the place where you trade. Your business plan must have a clear idea for which event, market or festival to target. The pitch fee will vary to a great extent. These are the places you may look at-

• Regular Markets-These are a good regular source of income and provide midweek trade as well as a coveted regular pitch, first amongst the street food trophies. Note that customer-spend will be significantly lower here as people are not there to sip on your delicious food but to nab a bargain.
• Weekend Markets- Weekend markets are probably more suited to street food as they attract the foodies and not the bargain hunters. Here, the potential takings are low as compared to even a small festival. Since they are weekend markets, you have to wait for the whole week to serve.
• Music Festivals-A well-established music festival can attract a fantastic crowd of music lovers. Here, your trade can excel as these fests are long running but again be careful of a bad ratio of traders to customers and be fearful of free food being handed out right next to your pitch.
• Food Festivals- A food festival can attract a fantastic crowd of food lovers keen to try something new. These festivals may be paid one or for free. I would approach paid food festivals with a healthy dose of common sense. Asking people to pay to go and pay for more food is a cunning business plan, and there are people out there who do pay. On the other hand, in the food festivals which are for free, the visitors count will usually be much higher but will also account for a higher number of bargain hunters.

The number of options can seem to be intimidating and it becomes difficult to determine where to begin. Start by validating which kind of event you would expect to see the street food business similar to yours. Attend such events and then analyze the pros and cons of each and every event with respect to customers, your interest and competitors. You must have a clear idea about everything related such as which business is doing well and why?

Your business plan must have a strong branding and marketing approach. A strong brand will help you stand out from the crowd, which is not just important for attracting customers but also securing spots at venues. Especially in the more established street markets, securing a pitch is more about who you know, and a strong social media presence or positive press coverage can help raise your profile.

Social media should be the centre of your branding policies. Posts on Twitter and Facebook would convey your message to a larger audience. These would create an army of online followers of your brand.

Infocrest Finweb LLP gives you a very unique, strong, competitive and creative business plan like the above. It is just one of the various innovative business plans which we provide to our clients. We target to guide our believers in achieving their most ambitious business planning and maintaining the paramount levels of professionalism and experience.

Better Vision induces Better Business

Pre-eminent companies are built upon strong and timeless vision. Let’s have a look at some-

•  “To organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” — Google
• “To be the pulse of the planet” — Twitter
• “To be earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” — Amazon

These statements may sound abstruse and pompous, but when you begin to think upon this, you realize why a plan like,” Having The Best Photo Editing App For Sharing Them On Instagram”, just won’t cut it.

Vision

It is an aspirational description of what an organization would like to achieve or accomplish in the mid-term or long-term future. It is intended to serve as a clear guide for choosing current and future courses of action. 

Need For Vision

Without a vision, a business is like a ship without a rudder, in danger of drifting aimlessly.  Many small businesses lack clear and concise vision, so they tend to hop from tasks to tasks without understanding the value created by individual actions.

When you see all activities are being useful, no activity is useful. The problem with a plan like, ”Keep adding good features ”, is that it’s hard for the people to understand what’s useful thing, to spend time on. If you don’t know where to go then every path seems good.

Marketing, Operations, and Skills required differs from business to business, and here comes the need for a clear vision. A clear vision will specify what you will do and ultimately what you will not do. Thus, it clearly will give you the idea of the key factors for a successful business plan.

Strategy versus Vision

We develop various strategies for our business to excel in the industry. But without a clear vision, these all are not of use. Vision and Strategies both are important. But there is a priority to them. Vision is always ahead of strategies. If you have a clear vision, you will likely choose the right strategy; but if there isn’t a clear vision, no strategy will save you.

Features of an Efficacious Vision

A gnarly vision must be-

• Concise and give purpose to your business.
• Capable of motivating you and others in the business.
• Providing the cornerstone for your business.

The vision for a company must also be robust for years at a time. Technologies, social networks, trends, all come and go, and a company must stay relevant regardless. Notice how Google doesn’t mention search, Amazon doesn’t mention books, and Twitter says nothing about apps or tweets. This is long term thinking. You can’t base your company around current technologies, trends, or other companies. It’s about what you are doing for your customers.

Summary

For a business to expand or succeed, its vision plays very important role. It not only guides you to take which path to proceed but also determines the plan of action to be taken for your business to flourish. It guides your employees with clear directions and provides them with a mission to achieve. 

At Infocrest Finweb LLP, we enhance your vision which helps you to develop a better business. We also provide you with competitive and creative solutions to meet your promising vision.

Sponsored Social Media- An Emerging And Best Marketing Methodology

I was going through my facebook when I found posts from a certain page which I didn’t like it; yes, these were the sponsored posts. The posts which manage to come in front of as many eyes as possible. And this is what exactly a marketer wants that his product/content should reach as many people as it can.

Since the social media as if is over-crowded with lots of stuff, marketing here becomes like a drop of water in the entire ocean. Here comes sponsored social media to stand out above the clamor of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter crowds and train the right eyes onto your product/content.

Digital Marketing is everywhere, but according to new researchers, sponsored social posts are actually getting noticed explaining their growing popularity. According to a recent report by sponsored social agency IZEA, consumers are noticing sponsored posts more than ever, about three per day. As a result, they’re considered among the most effective marketing tactics.

As a society and as consumers, we’ve become blind to traditional forms of advertising. Being able to involve advertising as part of the content is as old of an idea as the dawn of soap operas. Now, that same concept is being applied at scale through sponsored social.

According to a survey, 54% of 511 marketers utilized sponsored social in 2015, the same amount that used display ads. However, the use of latter declined by 4%. On a scale of 1-10, sponsored social marketing acquire 7.29, in terms of effectiveness, only content marketing ranked higher in this area. By contrast, marketers have soured on the old-school channels in the last year. TV, radio, magazine and especially newspaper ads have declined in sentiment.

Tony Longo, co-founder and chief executive (CEO) of Ground Signal, points out that sponsored social's rise in popularity makes sense because its native properties make the posts less susceptible to ad blindness. “Sponsored posts are in the concentration stream, not off to the side where we have been trained over the years to ignore,” says Longo.

Nearly a quarter of the marketers surveyed have sponsored photos. That's slightly less than videos, despite the video being seen as the most valuable form of sponsored social. 

Marketers expect to pay $475 for a video. A blog is valued at $411 and a sponsored email is estimated to cost $283. On the less expensive side of the spectrum, likes, Twitter followers and Pins are all expected to be less than $200. Only 11 percent of marketers opted not do any sponsored social.

Sponsored social posts are one of the up-and-comers in digital marketing. The tactic is steadily growing in popularity, especially as the ban on like-gating has forced brands to focus more on the quality of their posts. And as brands become savvier and target better, sponsored social media is likely to get even bigger in the future.

Infocrest’s marketing department holds an ocean full of new and exciting marketing strategies of which the above was just a small example. We here at Infocrest Finweb LLP provides you with innovative and highly competitive markets plans which helps you to grow your business and makes you stand one among the toppers of the industry.

WHAT IS COMPETITOR ANALYSIS?

To be able to effectively gain an understanding of the market you are preparing to enter, it is vital to have an in-depth knowledge of your competitors.

What is competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is a critical part of any company’s BUSINESS PLAN. It is an overall assessment of current and potential customers.

A good competitor analysis is a delving process report of the actual market turf that your company must maneuver in order to be successful. And to write a good competitor analysis you must

• Conduct a thorough research
• Be a market savvy technical writer
• Be objective.

 So now you know that you can write a competitor analysis; you should know what to write in the report.

A competitor analysis report consists of mainly five points:

1. A list of your company’s competitors
2. Competitor’s product summaries.
3. The strategies used by competitors.
4. Competitor’s strength and weaknesses
5. The market outlook.

 Let’s understand all these points in brief:

A list of your competitors: The biggest and most important question is who all your competitors are?

Let me tell you who can be your competitors:

• Companies with a product or service, which are addressing similar needs.
• Products/services considered being close substitutes.

Competitors can be divided in 4 parts as follows:

1. Direct competitors
2. Indirect competitors
3. Local competitors
4. Cross-over competitors

Identify your competitors and divide them in these 4 categories, and once you compile the complete list, you can highlight the companies which can be your greatest challenging competitor.

Competitor product summary: Analyze your competitor’s products and services. What products do they sell? What are the features and value of their product?

The strategies used by competitors: Observe your competitors closely. What type of media do they use to market and advertise their product and services? Know their customers. Read their quarterly and annual reports. Combine all these research and you will surely get a complete picture of their strengths and weaknesses.

Competitor’s strength and weaknesses: Well you can find this information in many ways. Check their website. Check their USP. If they are growing so rapidly, so what is it about their product and services that is promoting their growth?

Market outlook: This point should cover that what is the market potential for your company’s product or service? Is it growing or flattening? This portion of your competitor analysis is the measure of market trends for your products and services.

So did you realize till now that the competitor analysis report in your marketing plan is as important as your business? So don’t ignore this report as it will teach you how to overcome new and different challenges.

WHY DO YOU NEED A FINANCIAL MODEL?

If you are starting a business you must have heard about financial modeling. Let me tell you what exactly financial model is and why you need it.

Financial model is a mathematical model which is designed to represent the performance of a financial asset or a portfolio of a business, project or any financial investment.

Firstly let’s know which group of people needs a financial model

There are following groups of users who need a financial model:

• Business owners and entrepreneurs
• Finance and accounting professionals
• Financial modelers and consultants
• Individuals for personal finance

And these are the areas where they need financial models:

• Forecasting future raw materials
• Valuation of security
• Benefits of a merger
• Check the size of market opportunity
• See the roadmap to profitability
• Quantity and predict risk
• Portfolio performance
• Identify undervalued securities

Now the real question is why do you need to design financial models?

Well some entrepreneurs may think that financial models are just a formality, but the reality is that financial models can be essential tools for creating and analyzing the road map, an entrepreneur should follow. Here are some reasons for making a financial model:

1. The running cost in the model can help you to determine how long you can run the business without revenue.
2. It can help you in predicting that; when your business will start bringing in more cash, which is known as positive cash flow.
3. As you will begin to run your business and some of your assumptions prove to be inaccurate, you can update the model to understand your current situation.
4. If you make an effective plan and when your business is functioning then you can understand the impact of change in your plan and you can mitigate the risk easily.

Now you know the value of creating a good and effective business model so do not ignore designing it for you, and if you get any problem in creating it, do not forget Infocrest is always there for you.

If you want to learn financial modeling, remember we are soon launching our financial modeling course.

10 THINGS TO INCLUDE IN YOUR STARTUP PITCH PRESENTATION

Your pitch deck arguably is the single and most important document that you will create in life of your company. It is the first opening document with your potential investors. You can say Pitch deck is the most common language understood by the investors.

So what does a perfect pitch deck look like?

Well there is nothing perfect in this world but pitch decks are always being tweaked to ameliorate for the immediate audience for whom the deck is being presented. So a winning pitch deck is made up of different parts that complement each other perfectly.

Here are the essentials to be added in the pitch deck:

Cover Page: the cover page should have your logo, business name, a tagline.

Company Purpose: Define the company business in a declarative sentence. Summarize all the information and use this opportunity to get your audience interested in your company.

The Problem: describe the pain of the customers, and how your concept will solve the problem. You need to demonstrate that why investors should care about solving it with your company.

The Solution:  Solution describes the value proposition. It should solve the problem you mentioned.

Why Now: Describe why this is the right time to execute your solution.

Market Size: Show the market size for your product. Include profiles of your target customers.

Competition: Every business has competition even if it offers something new and unique. List your competitors and explain how your products and services beat them.

Business Model: How are you planning to make money? Show a schedule when you expect your revenue to pour in. show a list of your various revenue streams.

Team: If you haven’t heard of it read it now. Team! That is what investors are looking for. They are investing in your team and the dedication of your team.

Financials: Unless you are a later stage company the numbers in your projections doesn’t matter but putting together a set of thoughtful projections will enhance your credibility.

The matter of fact is that just be creative and try to avoid a dry, mind numbing presentations. So follow the concept of KISS (keep it short and simple) as at the end content is king when it comes to a deck.

   PS: And if you don’t get the time to write it for yourselves remember   

    

is here to help you for your most important document; Pitch deck!!