 The reason why we need to create a marketing plan for your restaurant is because we're always bombarded with a lot of noise, it's like going to Japan and you see all these different things that are yelling for your attention left right and center and a lot of these are actually just noise, noise to divert you guys from actually achieving what you need to achieve. So for example if you walk down the street your competitor has a buy one get one free promotion and you feel like that hey you know what I'm losing out when I'm not doing that type of promotion and you end up doing a buy one get one free promotion but ended up not really working with what you have set yourself out to which is the reason why having a marketing plan is super important because it not only allows you to have the clarity but also allows you to work step by step with a plan to achieve what you set out to achieve that's how you feel when you have a plan yes everything becomes easy when you have no plan you're just pulling your hair out trying to figure out why you're bleeding money and nothing seems to be working okay without further ado we're diving into the first step of creating your marketing plan for your restaurant so the first thing is you need to identify exactly what you want what does getting more customer mean to you or does it mean that for you you want to increase sales or do you want to build a community the methods of doing what you need to do in the future is completely different the strategies that you set out for increasing brand awareness is different from getting more profitability and it is very different from just engaging with the community which is a reason why you need to pinpoint exactly what you want and thus everything else will follow and just to show you guys what we do with 720 suites or ice cream shop is you know this is an outdated version but we identify exactly what our objective is our objective is to increase social media engagement and increase sales revenue so by us really defining our objective we now know exactly what to measure which is basically the likes the vanity metrics that would determine whether this is successful or not and then for us increase sales revenue is to sell 600 cups of ice cream right you need to identify and pinpoint exactly what you want whether it is to you know just have awareness so we have done campaigns where we collaborate with well-known companies just for the sake of leveraging off their name and build more awareness for our brand but in turn we don't make money so it's very very intentional why we're doing what we're doing and it is super crucial for you to pinpoint exactly what you want so now that we have identified our objective what we want to achieve we want to have more social media engagement now we can think about the sexy things the things that are exciting the marketing strategies that that would bring people into the doors the marketing strategies that would engage with people through social media and some of the brainstorming activities you can do is like hey you know what if you're looking into increasing sales we can think about monthly promotion seasonal promotion we can have better signages on the street having a sandwich board out there or even outreach to like offices organizations associations and wedding planners so then that way we can collaborate with them and leverage off their people and their arms in order for us to get more sales and these are just areas and activities so you can actually expand on this and you can actually see what people are doing as well as inspiration now if you're thinking about building a community for your restaurant then community events with creatives or meet-up groups so then that way people are are gathering within your space you become the glue within your community and that's how people associate your brand and your restaurant third step in creating your marketing plan for your restaurant is to choose your platforms a lot of people make a mistake of trying to do all the different platforms because you see restaurant a doing an exceptional job on youtube great now you're jumping on youtube you see restaurant b doing a exceptional job on instagram then you're jumping on instagram so on and so forth and at that at the end of the day you end up jumping on all the different platforms but when they're not in sync when they're not working together and aligning with all the different messages then unfortunately it's not going to work well for you guys so definitely make sure that you go out there and dominate the platform that where your customers are hanging out so hopefully that makes sense to you guys like for us with 720 suites all our customers are hanging out on instagram and that's the reason why we chose to really focus on building a really exceptional feed on our instagram because for us our target market are millenials and millenials that's kind of where they consume their content is on instagram now the fourth step is that now that we have identified everything we need to have smart goals what's the point of having these campaigns if we don't have a specific goal we want to hit it we won't know whether we have where we're good we're on par or we have room for improvement so at the end of the day having smart goals is not just any kind of things that you throw out there in the wall you're like hey you know what i want 50k uh in sales that's not a smart goal because it's not actionable it's not timely and it's not specific it's only specific to the the revenue amount but then it's not specific in terms of how when do you want to achieve that or do you want to achieve it within a weeks time or within a months time or within the whole year so being very specific is super super important so just to share with you guys some examples okay uh an example of a smart goal increase drink monthly sales by 15 percent by august 2020 so this is a very very smart goal because it's specific we're talking about specifically drinks sales we're not talking about your food sales we're talking about specifically drink sales by how much do you want to increase your sales by doing these marketing tactics well i want to increase it by 15 percent now you have a benchmark to see whether you're successful or not then you can tweak that by when you need to have a timeline for your smart goals because at the end of the day it gives you a a destination to hit uh and to actually push you to actually cross that finish line and that's the reason why having a smart goal is super powerful now having these smart goals is not a one and one and done all um and what i mean by that is it's not something that it should deter you from achieving it it's rather it's a motivation for you to to achieve these goals now you just need to think about hey you know what for us to achieve this goal what do we need to do we need to train our staff to frequently ask for up sales so these are the different tactics and different ways that you need to brainstorm to help help you achieve the goals increase table signages of drink special and these things all add up and play a role into increasing your sales by 15 by august 2020 as you can see our target is to have 600 likes 80 comments by the end of the voting period we want to gain 75 followers by the end of the voting period what is the voting period this duration goes from october 12th to the 31st so we have identified exactly what the outcome would be in terms of what is the very very specific it is timely and it is measurable and that's something that we were doing in 2017 so moving on community smart goals so for us we want to increase our email list by a thousand by august 2020 for example we want to be able to host a contest a $50 giveaway with email entry only adding wi-fi marketing platforms so on so forth increase community events to three per quarter by july 2020 number five work backwards a lot of us think about hey we have a goal and we want to achieve it and therefore the next step the logic next logical step is to what should i do it's very very difficult for us to come up with ideas and actionable steps for us to achieve those goals because we're thinking from the wrong perspective we're thinking from hey how do i get there and we take that first step second step third step in reality whenever we have these campaigns we think with the end in mind what is our end goal and then from there onwards how the next step backwards what does it look like we need to visualize what does it look like from the end and slowly work backwards and to identify each and every single milestones that we need to hit in order for us to achieve the end goal so we are going to reverse engineer the whole thing back to our current position so to give you guys an example we need to have that end goal map it out and something that you can visualize because if it's everything in here it's very very difficult to comprehend what you're trying to achieve and that's the reason why we have that marketing plan that we've worked out some of the items that you want to identify would be for example milestones what are some of the critical steps you need to hit in order for you to achieve your goal assets that need to be made whether it be promotional items whether it be social media posts whether it be newsletter write-ups you need to identify all these things post emails that needs to be scheduled and for when do they need to be scheduled and as you can see here the different colors identify the different critical points that you need to achieve some of the key dates finalize the two ice cream flavors campaign starts voting contest duration voting contest announce the new flavor the campaign ends so these are just some of the key dates that we we talked about but then of course we have a lot more different in-depth items that we need to have we need to create our newsletter we need to create our new flavor posts contest posts and the different posters that we need to create and we are identifying all the different items here in order for us to get ready for our launch and to finalize everything the next step is to make sure that we execute and we track a lot of people make the mistake of creating a marketing campaign but they don't have proper measures in there in order for us to track which is the reason why we created smart goals their smart goals are measurable goals that allows us to to to see how far are we away from what we intend on hitting for us it was 600 likes and 80 comments so we tracked that from before we start the campaign at the end of the campaign to see have we achieved the 600 likes have we achieved the 80 comments that we want to achieve and this allows us to track it right and we also need to make sure that there are timely deadlines because for us to achieve 600 likes it could take us a month it could take us two months but if we don't have a time and a deadline for these then it doesn't really make sense we need to have specific responsibilities for everyone so within for our campaign we need to work hand in hand with basically all our team members in order for us to execute properly whether it goes from design to prints to actually bringing our banners to our our retail locations to putting it up to communicating with pr this is the fun part reiterate and repeat exactly what i was saying previously um knowing exactly what works and what doesn't work allows us to reiterate and repeat what has worked and for us collaboration has been has been working like a charm because every time we collaborate with a brand and um we're able to get a lot of noise and as a result we are able to have more sales and thus um that's exactly what we did we iterated and we repeated these different campaigns as you can see in espresso we did one with vitro soy and we we had one with our new cups our new flavors and all these things these are calculated risk and calculated um campaigns that we're doing as a result of previous campaigns that we have done it validated the fact that hey this is working let's continue doing this now let's see where our rooms for improvement and therefore let's make it better and that's exactly what you need to do with your marketing plan is to reiterate all the time and so then that way you can repeat the success that it brings you and in turn allows you to actually get more and more customers through the doors and um and that's the whole point of the game is to test it out see what works what doesn't work and repeat stuff that works that's the essence of why we need to do what we do and in seven steps you're able to create a marketing plan that actually works