The food industry can be challenging – particularly in Nebraska – 55 restaurants closed in the Lincoln area alone in 2014.
Nebraska is ranked 17th in the nation in terms of restaurant density. Lincolnites have gotten used to a revolving-door reality: one month a new establishment pops up; within a year, it’s vanished. (Makes sense: 90 percent of independent restaurants close during the first year).
The common denominator behind those failures is a lack of buzz. Nobody’s talking about them, or thinking about them either. When the average person thinks “Indian food” or “smoothies,” their mind automatically goes to some other, better-known place, perhaps somewhere they’ve gone for years.
So how do you avoid this kiss of death?
Your answer is good marketing and branding. You must carve out a unique niche for your business, and get people talking, or risk being forgotten entirely.
We can help you with that. Check it out:
·A local pizza place (Papa John’s) had a great selling point – they never used frozen dough, but needed help generating more buzz. With that in mind, we created a marketing campaign centered around a series of tongue-in-cheek YouTube videos called “Uses for Frozen Dough” (ex. curling, trap shooting, painting, discus throw). Thanks to some majorly amped-up visibility through in-store posters and their social campaign promoting this video series, sales increased 11 percent over the previous year.
·Within six months, our team doubled the number of Facebook fans for a local Brazilian steakhouse (Rodizio).
·A burger place (HF Crave) was suffering from a rash of harsh, unwarranted online reviews, not based on service or food quality – most from people who had never stepped foot in their restaurant. We assisted in completely removing all of these (more than a dozen) reviews from Yelp.
And these are just a few of our many success stories. The point is, we can take a your social media presence from half-baked to dazzling – giving you print ads, blog content that is search engine friendly, catchy videos, a stellar social media campaign, a professional, user-freindly website, email blasts, television and radio commercials that will reach your target market and catch viewers’ attention, not to mention many other services that scream, “LOOK ME UP!”
We know marketing matters, and at Transformation Marketing, we can make it work for you. From local to locally owned chains, we’ve had great success helping restaurants in the Lincoln and Omaha areas in the past. Give us a call; we’d be happy to tell you more and hear how we could specifically help you and your restaurant.