Building a Catering Companies Brand Image

by Stuart Leventhal

There’s no such thing anymore as ‘spare no expense’! Today, even corporate giants, staples of business and industry icons are counting their pennies. Certainly caterers need to be able to put together respectable meal packages that fit into their clients’ budgets. But, planning your catering marketing strategy around having the lowest prices is a grave mistake. You are in an industry that thrives on prestige. You want your company name and brand to be known for playing an important role in throwing the best parties and events in town!

Becoming known as the go to budget caterer will limit your customer base extremely. There will be tons and tons of potential customers who will never want their events, parties and reputations sullied because they are associated with the cheapest catering service in town. Remember, as a caterer, you service celebrations. Celebrations usually honor someone or something; a person worthy of praise, a happening of distinction or an over and above accomplishment. If you were the party thrower, would you want everyone talking for years about how you hired a low budget catering company to cater your boss’s prestigious award banquet? Or worse, never being able to live down how bad the food and service was for your favorite Aunt and Uncle’s 50^th anniversary bash that you planned!

No matter how inexpensive you make your catering service, you cannot afford to advertise, promote and market low price as the selling point. Catering is an industry where reputation means everything. The more you advertise how cheap you are, the more you tarnish your reputation! Instead, shout about how good your food is and how ideal your services are. Cultivating a classy, professional and reliable image then take that message to the streets! I’m assuming, of course that you already serve great food, have great menu choices and most importantly deliver great service.

Yes, everyone today is faced with a discretionary budget. Celebrations, events and parties, which you service, are considered frills. Today’s small and medium business owners have cut down considerably on the number of meetings events and parties they throw out of necessity to maintain their bottom line. This means you have to work harder to establish yourself as the premier caterer in the land. No longer can you sit back and rely on repeat business from your long time loyal customers. During these economically challenging times it is more important than ever to wage war with your competitors in order to draw in as many customers as you can.

We already talked about how lowering prices will soil your reputation and be the long term death of your business. And, increasing advertising is too costly during slow times. Besides, traditional advertising methods are no longer working. People are no longer responding to commercials like they did in the past. Today’s caterers need new methods for reaching their customer base and innovative techniques of persuasion if they are going to grow their profit margins and succeed in today’s market place. When your owner or upper management is asking you to cut the advertising budget and ordering you to scale down traditional commercials on a large scale, what can you do? You are being pestered to raise profits and grow customer counts. Your back is against the wall! The question is, are you going to fold and throw in the cards or rise up to the challenge? Yes, you can do everything your bosses are asking of you and more! How?

Every marketing plan today, catering included, must prioritize leveraging the most modern networking tool in man’s history, the internet. The technological information super highway is loaded with plenty of efficient marketing methods. Many are low cost and a lot are even free. The number one internet promotional method based on effectiveness and cost is social media. Now is the time to grow your presence on the web. Leveraging the proper social marketing avenues will expand your reach quicker and more effectively than any other form of advertising or promotion paid for or otherwise. Your catering business will grow and you’ll save money as you cut out the old, much more costly, traditional advertising; TV, radio, newspaper ads and the yellow pages that are not working anyway.

Evidence shows that today, people go online to search for goods and services rather than pick up a phone book. People want to know where they’re going and as many detail they can get prior to heading out the door. That is why catering businesses need to create an online presence if they are going to attract new customers and retain their regular customers. People are getting used to the convenience of having instant, available information, online customer service, plus the ease of phoneless order placing.

You don’t need to hire someone with a degree in internet marketing, you don’t need to sign up for night courses in internet marketing and best of all you don’t need a large budget. But, you do need to get started now before your competition passes you by!

The secret to growing profits in a catering business is developing your ability to find clients then convince them to hire you. Promoting online is not difficult or expensive. But, getting good consistent results can be confusing and even mysterious. If approached properly, internet marketing can be learned quickly and accomplished with a minimal amount of time and money invested.

Yes, I realize that most caterers do not have the knowledge or the time to invest in mastering online marketing. Some of you may choose to hire someone to implement your online promotions for you. Of course, like anything else, that option will cost you money that really isn’t necessary to spend. All that is needed is a little determination to learn something new; a new skill that I promise will earn you dividends for years to come. The internet is not going anywhere. It just keeps getting bigger and more efficient.

So, what do we have to do?

Local internet marketing means getting your catering business on the web and in as many places as possible, to create a positive professional online presence. You first need a website and then some marketing tools which will help people find your website. First we create a website then we rank your website well in the search engines like; Google, yahoo and Bing. What is important to note here is that the closer we move your website to the top of the search engines list of results, the more people will click on your link and visit your catering information on your website. A basic course on this can be purchased for $5 at:

http://a.5rr5.co/s/3pfaph

There are also numerous businesses you can pay to handle all your internet marketing needs. How you choose to set up, grow and maintain your internet presence is up to you just know that neglecting or putting off your internet marketing campaign can be deadly to any local business, especially a catering business. Besides your website, you will need to create a customer engaging blog with which you communicate with your customers on a regular basis. Free advice on blogging can be found here:

http://anewtale.com/blogging.html

It’s easy and free; if you write the blog post yourself, which I highly recommend. Although you can also contract out your blogging which won’t cost much if you hire a computer savvy student.

A social media course as well as free tips and other tools to help you increase the traffic to your website can be found here: http://anewtale.com/tweeting.html

The real trick to internet marketing is to structure your website, blog and social media accounts to all help build your email campaign. As a local catering operation it is much more effective to email your catering list a coupon, for example, than to post the same coupon on your website or blog. Your blog course, website building course and social media course will teach you tricks for capturing your visitors’ email addresses. Once you build a large email list you can contact your catering customers at your own convenience. A good email building course can be found here:

http://a.5rr5.co/s/3p62k2

*re-cap – The three components to a successful internet campaign are; setting up a website, maintaining a blog and engaging in social media. The mission of these three tactics is to gain prospects contact information, especially their email address so we can contact them at our convenience. The easiest, most effective and cheapest way to maintain contact with our customers is through a properly launched and maintained email campaign.

*More tips and advice about each of these important online marketing methods as well as other online promotion and advertising ideas and tricks of the trade will be coming soon since we need more room to do each of these important subjects justice.

Marketing a Restaurant’s New Catering Service

by STU LEVENTHAL

Once you know you have restaurant operations in line, meaning; your kitchen staff, food servers, managers, hosts and whoever answers your phone are trained and ready to tackle the addition of large bulk sales orders, you are now ready to begin ramping up your catering sales efforts and implementing your new, catering marketing plan. Let’s start by making clear, setting the sales team loose, pushing for more sales and marketing are two distinctly different things. Yes sales and marketing are closely associated and often work hand in hand with one another but they are really two totally different concepts which require you to construct two totally different plans. Sales people sell! Let’s not confuse that with marketing. We want our sales people; knocking on doors, making telephone calls, conducting onsite tours and business meetings and presenting off premise demonstrations of our products and services 100% of the time. Your ‘marketing’ is there to assist the sales force. Your new marketing plan will concentrate on positioning your products and services in the community and separating you from and raising you above your competition. Your sales team will use your new marketing pieces and newly branded messages to sell easier and sell much more.

Sales people usually work on commission and bonuses so we don’t want to be the thing that is holding them back from doing their job. Selling! That means marketing has to be done for them. Now, I’m not talking about taking out a high priced radio add that shouts, your restaurant now caters. That is called advertising. Plenty of upper managements bulk all their advertising, sales and marketing together as if they mean the same thing. Marketing entails positioning your sales people so they have everything they need to go after a particular market. For example, you need to design the sales tools to attack the business lunch market. A different catering menu is needed. People eat lighter and usually healthier at business lunches than dinner buffet style catering. You may also need to hire some day time delivery drivers and get them trained on how to load, transport and set up your new business menu items.

Want your sales people to go after day care centers? You need a whole different kids’ menu, a healthy themed kid’s menu, if you want day cares to be able to sell the idea to parents. Creating coupons for the coming super bowl party weekend is a marketing strategy from its time of inception. The coupons are advertising tools. Putting together the special menu items into interesting, tasty party packages then pricing them to sell is all marketing. Deciding how to get the message out there is marketing. Handing everything over to your sales people with the orders, “Sell!” is our goal. You design the marketing stuff then pass it off to the sales team and say “Go get them!” Your additional advertising also supports the sales team.

Many management regimes make the mistake of leaving the marketing up to the sales people. No! If they make phone calls, you give them their scripts to say, already written for them. Of course they can modify it to fit their own personalities. But, you still need to give them a well thought out, well developed script for any niche you want them to go after. If they are knocking on doors, you give them a package to leave; coupons, menus, maybe food samples etc. Keep your salesmen and women selling! Let them earn their commissions. Create then hand over to your sales force all the tools they need to do their job and your sales will ski-rocket.

RESTAURANT CATERING (101)

When a restaurant is considering adding a new catering service the first things to do are design or re-design all the advertising tools that will be promoting the service inside the restaurant. We need to let the customers know we now cater! That means signs, posters, new menus and notes on all the pages of the menus. Depending on the restaurant’s theme, you may want table top displays that advertise the new catering service on every table, counter and especially ordering surfaces. A display catering table is a good idea for a visual they can’t help notice. Set up a mock buffet with buffet pans and a nice, fresh flower center piece. Add stacks of take home catering menus and a fish bowl for customers to drop their business cards in as they try to win a catered meal for their office. This will help you gain leads to pass on to your sales people to contact.

First you set up your in-house marketing plan. That is everything you can do to promote your catering business without leaving the restaurant. Table toppers, foot notes on the menus, menu inserts, printed takeout bags, wall signs, posters, and the catering display table (preferably near the door). Remember the 80/20 rule; Statistics show, 80 % of all successful sales gained from a new promotion will be from customers we already have. If we are going to get a quick noticeable start with catering, we need to focus most of our marketing on getting the attention of the customers who are already loyal to us. We need them to buy in.

Once you have the restaurant decorated to promote catering everywhere possible, now it’s time to move on to the outside. Banners, lawn signs, helium balloons and streamers may be enough to start.

*If you are really committed to catering, you may even want to consider changing the main sign from, for example; ‘Salvatore’s Italian Restaurant’ to ‘Salvatore’s Italian Restaurant and Catering.’

Now, let’s think about how we plan to market to the first five block radius around our restaurant. The plan should be to blanket the immediate first few blocks surrounding our restaurant. These are our within quick walking distance potential customer base. We need to own this market! Slowly we expand our circle taking it wider and wider by just adding a few more blocks at a time. If we can, we add a half mile a week until we hit the five mile radius mark. The plan is to really cover and re-cover our immediate five mile neighborhood. We want to hit every establishment, in every conceivable niche this close to us. After five miles we will start specializing. That is when we start going after specific niches with marketing designed to take advantage of the needs of your particular area. We’ll need to evaluate all our competitors and look for the best promotional opportunities. But first we need to mark our turf!

Do you have formal catering order taking forms printed, in strategic places and readily available so the crew isn’t using drink napkins to jot down the new catering orders, customer information and special delivery instructions? Do we have catering containers to pack the new catering orders in nicely and serving utensils to give our customers when we deliver or when they pick up?

All personnel should already be trained to talk up the new catering menu and service as much as possible. But, we need to take it up another level. Customers want knowledgeable suggestions. If you just have anyone who happens to answer the phone taking your orders, many customers will go to where they get that extra special attention. Can you blame them? They are shelling out big bucks. They deserve VIP treatment and to talk to a specialist who knows how to make a fuss over them and their special occasion.  Sometimes, just caring is the only sales advice you need to implement in order to grow your catering sales.

We’ve already talked to death the importance of the kitchen being ready and operating on all pistons before you throw all the additional chores at them by pushing for catering sales. I’m going to assume you have committed leadership and everyone is on board with the decision to add catering. Let’s also restate how important it is to have a trained and knowledgeable staff, especially at the phone order taking level and server levels. These front line positions are often neglected when it comes to training but just being able to take a phone order is not being trained in catering sales! You are losing a lot of money if this is acceptable to you. Not only do you not get add on sales; dessert, beverages, salads; you don’t have anyone pushing the higher profit menu items. But worse of all you lose tons of whole orders because most customer first call around checking prices. A catering specialist knows how to steer the customer into thinking more about planning the perfect party or event. Another problem with just having phone answerers taking your catering orders and not having someone dedicated to catering sales is there is no follow up with the customer after the order is completed. Our goal is to gain customers not individual, one time sales!

*Important – when first starting out, it is not important to offer delivery. You can just have pick up catering until you are ready for this next, very big step. Adding delivery must be well thought out. Yes, delivery can be a game changer as far as building sales but it can’t be gone into lightly or halfcocked. Not delivering a party on time and with hot food still hot will break your catering program. Forgetting to pack the delivery vehicle with service utensils or forgetting the dinner rolls or condiments like butter or salad dressings will be a disaster as far as word of mouth goes in your community. Are you prepared if your driver calls out sick the day of a big event?

You should think of ‘delivery service’ as a special feature you can add to enhance your customers’ catered experiences, down the road. You should plan as a goal to add a delivery service once you hit a specified sales figure that will support a driver’s salary. At first, orders will not justify you purchasing a catering delivery vehicle so your driver will be required to use his or her own vehicle. But you will have to up your insurance to cover the driver and anything else that happens during the delivery situation while they are working for you.

Ways to Increase Catering Sales

By STUART LEVENTHAL
The best way to increase catering sales has always been through networking with as many businesses in your neighborhood who share the same customers as you do. That virtually means partnering up with any business in the towns you service that are not a competing caterer. Wedding planners, florists, event planners, party supply stores, costume shops, photographers; all sell to or service people who are your potential customers too. The idea is that by joining forces and working with another business who shares your target customer, together you can both benefit in a number of different ways.

First off you can each swap customer lists which will double your list of customers with no effort at all. This means that if you have 5,000 customers who you send your menus and coupons out to each month and a photographer has a list of 5,000 customers, instantly you now both have 10,000 customers to send your promotions to. That is a huge jump. But, now imagine how big your customer list will grow if you swap lists with five noncompeting businesses, each with five thousand customers on their lists. 5 X 5,000 = 25,000!

There’s a big difference between sending out 5,000 menus and coupons and sending out 25,000 menus and coupons. You are going to get a lot more business back from the 25,000 mailing! Now, if you were mailing your promotional materials out yourself, it would cost you a bundle to mail 25,000 envelopes. But, when all five businesses put their promotional materials in the same envelope, you each pay only for mailing your original 5,000 envelopes plus just a little more to cover the additional weight of the others’ materials. While each of you benefits because 25,000 envelopes are getting mailed each with your menu and coupons in it as well as the other four businesses marketing items too!

Now, if all five of you decided to join in on taking a newspaper add out together, you could purchase a whole page at a discounted rate then divide it up into five equal parts and you would end up paying a lot less for your portion than if you tried to buy the same size adds individually!

Whenever I’m working on advertising or marketing campaigns, I always try to exhaust all my free or almost free ideas first, before I start considering paying for advertising. This is because there are so many free advertising and promotional ideas which only take a little time to implement and they are quite effective. So it is silly to start right off the bat, paying for news, radio or Television advertising when half the time you get little or no return on your investment anyway. There is no reason to start worrying about marketing budgets when you have promotional ideas that take just a little effort on your part to implement for free.

One free idea that is very easy to do is simply for all five collaborating establishments agreeing to post each other’s marketing materials on their premises. You give them each a pile of menus with coupons stapled to them and they give you a stack of their promotional literature with their coupons. You can each set up a small area or display table for interested parties to take the literature they are interested in. Or you each could simply place a set of each of your four partners marketing materials in your customers’ bags at the check out counter.

Think of your Collaborating businesses as partners. You all are looking to gain the same thing; additional business. You are all also seeking low cost marketing ideas. You all are promoting to the same customers, let’s say newly engaged couples, just for an example. You are the only caterer in the group. There’s only one photographer in your group, one tuxedo rental company etc. We’ve talked about how you can use your combined buying power to get discounts from advertising venues. We’ve discussed sharing each other’s customer lists and displaying each other’s marketing literature in each other’s place of business. Now, let’s take it up a notch. Let’s plan to put together some marketing events in which all of our businesses will take part. The events will specifically target newly engaged couples who are gathering information about planning their wedding.

1. Your newly formed group can promote total package deals. One low price for all our services! Planning a wedding is hard work. You will be taking away a lot of stress by offering the solution of ‘One Stop Shopping!’ All it takes is for all the businesses involved to sit down and put together a few attractive package deals.

2. You can take turns hosting an event on each of your premises, switching each month. Or you can all share the costs of renting a hall to throw your shindig in each month. Everyone can set up a booth or table with all their marketing literature. There would be a flower shop booth, a DJ spinning music for the affair as well as giving out his or her business card. You, as the group caterer can show off your catering hors d’oeuvres give out samples tastes, put out a small buffet if you can handle the costs, as well as display an array of photographs of past events you’ve catered with testimonials from all your happy customers. The photographer can have albums highlighting his masterful photographs displayed on a table with business cards and contact info. He can set up a small studio type booth for snapping a few quick free give away photos of the circulating love birds who attend the show. Wedding dress and tuxedo establishments can put on a quick fashion show or bring brochures and samples of the hottest new wedding outfits. You can each take fifteen or so minutes to formally address the crowd from a podium promoting your goods and services. (Remember, any target market can be substituted here for this technique, just pick companies to partner with who specialize in serving the same chosen niche.)

As a caterer, you have many niches that you can market to. Pick one niche at a time to specialize in that is best suited to your interests and particular neighborhood situation. Build up your contacts related to that market niche. Do your homework. Network, then form partnerships with the very best, affiliate businesses in your area, who service that chosen niche. It will defeat your purposes to associate yourself and your catering business with businesses with bad performance records or faulty reputations. Once you’ve conquered one niche then by all means tackle the next niche.