Marketing Guide: Restaurants & Cafés

At Primary Image, we offer a range of creative and marketing services for restaurants, cafés and takeaway businesses (including website development, flyer design and menu design), allowing your business to have an effective and consistent professional image at an affordable price.

We have years of experience when it comes to creating professional designs. Within our team, we’ve even had first-hand experience of working in the restaurant trade and, like everyone, we often make dinner bookings ourselves and see lots of good marketing (and some not so good!), so we know what works.

 

Website design

Whilst passing trade and word of mouth are important to restaurants, there are also many potential customers that like to research new places to eat, find out more about a place they’ve travelled past, or see what special offers are available in their local area.

The Internet has now become the preferred method for customers to research restaurants in their local area or to destinations they are travelling to. Customers may want to:

• Have a look at your menus
• View photos of the restaurant
• View a map and work out directions
• Know where the nearest car parking is available
• Find out your opening times
• Read about the history or background of the restaurant
• Make a table reservation online

With the rise of restaurant review websites, which allow members of the public to write anything they like about your establishment, it’s even more important that you create and protect your online presence and reputation, rather than having no control over what your customers may read after searching for your business.

Primary Image offers a professional and affordable website design service. Find out more.

 

Leaflet/flyer design

Delivering leaflets to local households is an effective way of promoting a new business or special offers available at your restaurant. However, with the pile of leaflets that get pushed through people’s letterboxes every week, it’s really important that you find an expert designer to create “something special” that gets noticed by your customers, otherwise you won’t get the best return on your marketing spend.

Think about:

• Having a really creative design, something out of the ordinary that doesn’t look like the usual templates.
• Using bright and bold colours to grab people’s attention.
• Including some blank space so that your flyers don’t look too cluttered.
• Using different shapes than the usual third-A4 (DL) size.
• Delivering leaflets during the evenings or weekends, when most people will have already cleared the mail from their doormats and are likely to give your flyers more attention.

At Primary Image, we can professionally design and print leaflets and flyers to your exact specification, with a choice of paper size, thickness and finish to suit your budget.

 

Attracting the attention of passers by

Many restaurants are in great locations, but could do much more to attract people passing by. Think about actually handing out menus on the street, talking to people and telling them how great your food is. This will help make your restaurant more memorable to potential customers.

Perhaps even hand out small food samples using disposable cups and spoons, especially during the early evening to tempt hungry people heading home. Whilst they may not make an order the same evening, the aim is to make potential customers aware of your restaurant (or takeaway) and give them a convenient option to consider in the future.

Don’t forget to have an eye-catching shop sign that includes your business name, the type of cuisine you offer, phone number and website address. It’s also vital that you include a menu in the window or have menu leaflets available to pick up.

Need some more advice? Let us create a successful marketing strategy for your café or restaurant.

 

Menu design

Add a touch of class to your restaurant with professionally-produced menu and wine list covers. These can incorporate your restaurant name or logo and are usually produced in either leather or faux-leather.

Some restaurants just hand menu flyers to their guests, but consider that flyers dirty and crease quickly, cannot be changed easily to accommodate special offers or new menu items, plus the font size is generally quite small and may be difficult for some people to read.

Whilst there is a small initial cost for producing menu covers, bear in mind that by using plastic wallets for the inside pages, you can print off menu sheets using any computer printer and the covers themselves will last for years.

Primary Image can produce menu covers to your requirements. We’ll also design a Microsoft Word menu template for you to use for your inner pages, which you can edit and print when necessary. Just contact us for a quote.