THE vast majority of restaurant owners feel confused, overwhelmed and fearful when it comes to the challenge of marketing their restaurant.

After all, most people who start a restaurant business do it because of a love of the food business itself. You can be an expert in running a restaurant, but that does not automatically make you an expert in marketing.

On the contrary, as restaurant owners and managers tend to be some of the most hard-working, hands-on business people there are, they are at a great disadvantage when it comes to finding the time to gain knowledge of expert restaurant marketing strategies, skills that it can often take decades to learn.

The irony is that, when it comes to running a successful restaurant, marketing is what it is all about. After all, it doesn't matter how perfect your location, your food or your service, unless you are guaranteed a steady and regular supply of customers, the future of your restaurant will always be in jeopardy. In today's miserable economic climate, it is not good enough to be good at what you do. We have seen this from the number of celebrity chefs who have even seen their businesses fail. No, the most important challenge facing restaurant owners and managers today is how to get customers to come to their restaurant rather than to their competitors' ...and to keep coming.

The only sure fire way for you to be able to say goodbye forever to sleepless nights, worrying about the future of your restaurant, is to make sure that your first priority is an effective Restaurant Marketing Plan.

When I refer to a Restaurant Marketing Plan, I am not talking about the haphazard and indiscriminate advertising that most restaurant owners engage in, in the hope that people will simply see their adverts and book. In days gone by, some restaurant owners may just about have survived by placing an ad with a logo, picture and phone number in various publications and hoping for the best, but those days have gone. It is just not enough. The type of Restaurant Marketing Plan I am referring to is a system of leading-edge restaurant marketing strategies that have been tried and tested, proven to work and that are different to the things that other restaurant owners are doing!

This is a big one and a fundamental difference in the businesses I know and have worked with that have become extraordinarily successful. So please, please stop and make sure you get this life-changing principle.

It is very simple. Most restaurant owners look around to see what everybody else in the industry is doing and then do the same. The trouble is, if you follow what everybody else is doing, you will get exactly what they are getting. And, the big problem is that the vast majority of independent restaurant owners are currently fearful and struggling. Many are kept awake at night terrified that their businesses are on the brink of collapse.

It does not make sense to do what the others are doing or, in most cases, not doing.

However, if you apply the actions of massively successful businesses who share your objectives, you too will be very successful. This might seem obvious, but how do we explain that at least 99.9 per cent of all restaurant businesses are operating as if completely ignorant of this one logical fact?

The great thing is that this is all good news for you! Do something different, apply strategies that have been proven time and time again to work, and it will be a simple task to streak ahead of your competitors. The most important thing to remember when testing out any new restaurant marketing strategies is to make sure that there is a response that you can measure. Never, ever pay for an advert, send out direct mail pieces or flyers or engage in any other types of marketing without making sure that you can test and measure results. Only then will you start to gain the information and knowledge that you need to build your Restaurant Marketing Plan.

The other point to always keep in mind is that there must always be a 'Call to Action.' Simply to advertise your presence is not enough - you must include an offer which is compelling enough to make your potential customer want to act right now. Make sure that you test out time limits. Statistically, people are far more likely to act straight away if they know there is a time limit (otherwise many people will put the intention to the back of their mind and never act at all!)

So why is there so much unproductive, unprofitable restaurant marketing out there anyway? The answer is very simple. As we have said, most restaurant owners, like yourself, comprise some of the busiest, most hardworking people in the land. Early mornings and late nights working hard in your business do not go hand-in-hand with spending time on gaining the skills and knowledge to devise effective restaurant marketing strategies, a skill that, without expert help, would be almost impossible to learn. Consequently, most restaurant owners are Advertising Victims, preyed on by media sales people and ad agencies whose only agenda is to make money for themselves. Ask yourself this...have you ever come across an advertising sales person who is agreeable to being paid only on results?

So, let’s just repeat this one more time because it is such a vitally-important, life-changing principle...the people who are exceptionally successful have a Restaurant Marketing Plan that includes strategies that are different. This is what makes them stand out. The strategies that I am talking about do not require any big risk taking. They have been proven to work in the most successful businesses and the rewards can be amazing.