Time is everything to a restaurant management team or owner who are trying to market their business on little time. Most restaurants are busy from sun up to sun down just prepping to serving customers.

So the time to market that restaurant in their given market seems so far from realty. The management team doesn’t really know too much about marketing a restaurant because their expertise is mostly in customer service.

Employees are busy, and the owners are there working themselves are off on business. So what most restaurants do is that they hire some big marketing firm (which is not good) and pay them thousands of dollars to implement things they would’ve been doing themselves for free.

I don’t want to see you guys spend money in today’s market that you just don’t have to spend. There are somethings you can do, and have one of the employee do early in the morning or even better during your lunch time.

Yes, only 1 hour a day of this form of marketing will allow your restaurant to be light years ahead of the local competition. Guarantee the other restaurants in your area are not doing what I’m about to tell you.

Plus this is totally free…

1. During lunch take an hour and sign up for Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. This will only take you about a good solid 30 minutes to do because you will have to fill out all information concerning your business. With Facebook you will need a regular account to be able to set up your Restaurant Business Page. I did a step by step Facebook guide on setting up business pages on Facebook if this is something you’re not familiar with.

This should take mostly your whole lunch to do especially when it comes setting up the business page. Now that’s completed its times to market your business without the hassle of spending thousands of dollars.

2. During your next lunch….One of the easiest ways to promote your restaurant is to get content out online about it. Meaning you need to let the local community look behind the scene of the restaurant. This comes in the form of creating content that can be found in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Plus this content can be shared by the customers and the thousands of people who will come across it.

There are two ways of doing this which is the free way and the paid way. I will explain them both in full so you can determine the best method for your business as of today.

Free Method

You can set up a free domain website on sites like Blogger or WordPress. Theses websites give you the opportunity to setup free websites on their server. You don’t own the website at all because it’s just an exstenion of their websitewhich looks like this.

www.yourname.blogspot.com or www.yourname.wordpress.com

Theses sites are under your control in form of creating content but as far as that goes that’s the only authority you have over the site. You can post as much content as you want but they own it, and if they decide to shut you down at anytime then they can. So it’s very risky using their free domains in the long run but if you don’t have any money then its your best option as of today.

Paid Method

The best thing I recommend, and believe me I’m not saying this just for my heath is to get your own domain name such as something like this.

www.yourname.com

With your own domain you can do endless amounts of things that you can’t do on those free sites. You now have full control over everything under the sun, and own all your content so no one can just come along and shut you down over night.

So all you have to do is to get a domain from BlueHost, and get someone to setup the website up for you. The site doesn’t have to be spectacular just something that looks good, and able to express the restaurant views and content.

3. During your next lunch…Now the site is set up its time now to start writing content for the site during that one hour lunch every single day. The reason for this is because all the content you post on the site can be read by the customers, and those who are interested keeping up with your restaurant events, specials and more.

All I ask for this to work is to make sure you put the name of your city in the title and body of the content to let the search engines know that you’re trying to allow people in community to find this online.

Putting It all Together

All you have to do now for this to work like a charm is to create a piece of content each and everyday during lunch time. This can be you or an employee who is good at typing content that is at least 300 to 500 words.

This should take no more than 30 minutes to do during each lunch break. Take the next 30 minutes to read over the content, and add any photos of video and ect..that you want to add that benefits the customer.

Finally once that content is posted its time to share it on that Facebook Business Page you setup and on Twitter and Linkedin. Now you are sharing your content online so millions can see what you guys are doing at your local restaurant.

Next you want to make sure all your customers know about this website, and have them come over to leave comments and encourage them to share the content you write each day. Over time you will see more and more people coming into your restaurant on account of this marketing tactic if your consistent with it.

This is something I’m setting for the local restaurants in my surrounding area of Shreveport, Bossier City and Minden La. I’m making an effort to brining creative marketing strategies to help local businesses in my community. Hopefully this will give you the blue print of implementing this for your restaurant starting today.

All comments, views and opinions are welcome below.