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The Best Restaurant Advertising

If you own a restaurant, I can sympathize with your plight. I've been in advertising for 35 years. First working for an ad agency, owning my own, then being a sales consultant for the Yellow Pages for 25 years. I have had many restaurant accounts and they all have one thing in common; the need for customers. The trouble is that they are also heavily invested in the kitchen equipment, staff, rent, and other overhead. So, when it comes down to advertising, they have little left. But without patrons, the business will fail. So where do they turn?

It depends on many factors. Major national chains like McDonalds are franchises where they participate in joint ventures as part of their agreement. So the parent company does the TV and radio ads and other promotions for them. If they are independent operations that are part of a group like the Olive Garden, they can do local ads or piggyback on the national ads. In both cases, they use the larger media like TV and radio. The smaller, localized single entities run by families are not so lucky. They can rarely afford television with their more limited budget.

That’s where I usually fitted in. As a Yellow Pages representative, I would explain how they could target their market in the most used product of its kind. Everyone had the YP. Whether at home or traveling, even all the motels and hotels had a YP. They simply placed a decent sized ad in the book with some examples of their offerings and they should expect some business. If they tried to tell me they were considering another media, I would educate them. It went like this.

No one would look in the newspaper for a restaurant, unless you are placing a discount, special, or coupon. Then it made sense, but just for the short term. As far as direct mailers, ditto. You would have to make the recipients an offer they couldn’t refuse. Local magazines might be fine for a high-end establishment like a bar, club or specialty restaurant. But their rates are fairly expensive. Obviously, unless you had multiple locations, TV and radio are too costly as well. So the YP was the best local choice, at the time. And that time was prior to the advent of the Internet.

By the mid-nineties, I was selling banner ads on the net and encouraging restaurants to have a basic website. More and more users were looking online. Pizza had become a primary search word. The Yellow Pages had already tried selling menu pages in the regular print product, but they had to be full pages and that was a high-priced product. In comparison, online menus were cheaper to produce. They could be in color and as large as needed. Today, there are many sites that list restaurants and their. Why menus? Because people can see the price and cuisine choices, which helps them decide. The only other primary consideration is location.

So, what am I saying? I’m saying that restaurant should be in the local YP and also online. And they should post a menu if possible and have their location highlighted. That’s the best of both worlds. With all the possible choices, how does a restaurant decide where to be listed? Of course they should have their own website and be listed on all the major search engines. Or they could place themselves on an existing website where people already go. One site that offers free menu posting and is free to be used by the public is the one with the name you’ll never forget; menuelephant.com where they also include a Google map for every listing. They have over one million already listed. But, a word of warning if you do go there. I hope you like purple a lot. Otherwise, color yourself happy that you found such a remarkable site.

Jeffrey Hauser was a sales consultant for the Bell System Yellow Pages for nearly 25 years. He graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA in Advertising and has a Master's Degree in teaching. He had his own advertising agency in Scottsdale, Arizona and ran a consulting and design firm, ABC Advertising. He authored a book about his directory years, "Inside the Yellow Pages" which can be seen at his website, http://www.poweradbook.com  and he is currently the Marketing Director for http://www.thenurseschoice.com , a Health Information site and http://www.menuelephant.com  which posts restaurant menus on the "site you'll never forget."