Whether you’re a start-up or a more established business within the hospitality industry, how successful is your marketing? It’s a fact that marketing is often one of those activities that can quickly get pushed down the list of priorities, as day-to-day business tasks have to be done.
However, for any pub, restaurant, café or hotels today, marketing plays a critical role in ensuring you can successfully promote your business. If you’re not doing some form of marketing, every day, you can be sure that your competitors will be finding ways to attract those customers instead.
Have you recently opened or you are more established but you have no in-house marketing resource? Perhaps you have regular ad-hoc projects but no time to manage them? If that is the case, how successful is your marketing? Have you considered outsourcing your marketing to someone who does have the time and experience to support you. As long as you choose an experienced individual who knows your sector, they can add value from day one and give you some much-needed focus.
Here are a few things to consider:
- Before you jump straight in with both feet and engage someone to support just one element of marketing, such as your social media, for example, be clear on what your goals are in the short and mid-term. Is social media alone going to get you the increased customer numbers?
- Getting clarity around your goals means you can then work with someone who is able to offer a variety of skills and experience across a range of marketing channels.
- Don’t start posting like crazy on social media, or sending emails in the hope you get some interest. Your initial focus should be on identifying your target audiences and then developing a marketing plan to engage with those in the best way. This ensures you have some clear objectives, goals and measurement in place so your marketing gets some real input, focus, momentum and, of course, achieves a decent ROI.
- Once you’ve got these in place, the key to successful marketing is consistency – ad-hoc activity will not get results.
Some food for thought to give your marketing a little dedicated TLC but if all this is totally out of your comfort zone, then why not work with someone who is experienced in marketing and knows the hospitality industry? This input could give you the support you need to get started with some regular marketing and make a really positive impact on your business growth too.