One Thing Is Certain
You can’t expect to stand out from the crowd using the same marketing strategy everyone else does. If you want to transform your business, you need to first transform your marketing and the thinking behind it.
This is about more than just putting butts in your seats or heads in beds; it’s about creating the best relationships with your guests, future guests, vendors, staff, menu, operation and anyone else involved in helping you make more money.
At Summers Hospitality Group, we understand brand building, and the importance of a well-defined brand to the success of a business.
Everything we do is considered within the broader context of a complete and seamless marketing strategy, to make sure that all the parts of a marketing program work in coordinated support of each other to maximize their value. We know that everything a business does, the way they do it, and, in many cases, what a business doesn’t do, acts to add to or detract from the unique position in the Guest’s mind.
Frequently, staff or management changes, the introduction of a new menu or services, new and different competition or simply the passage of time can cause a businesses protection of its valued brand to decline.
This audit does three things:
- This is a overall analysis of your marketing & branding efforts to see if you’re doing everything you can to maximize your efforts
- Compares your business with its top 3 competitors (extensive analysis of product/service value, key messages, proof points)
- Derive key insights from the findings that will help in the development or refinement of your company’s strategic plan, positioning statement, key messages and proof points.
The marketing audit should review all historical, current, and planned marketing activity to perform a comprehensive gap analysis and net out a prioritized list of improvement opportunities (for ‘current state’ and ‘future state’ planning). This means it should assess everything from the usage and efficacy to the relevance and cost benefit analysis. It should address people, process, tools, technology, systems, and infrastructure through the lens of performance and productivity, as well as an evaluation of both the tangible and intangible contribution to the company.
THE IMPORTANCE OF A THOROUGH RESTAURANT MARKETING AUDIT
Comparing the marketing strategies of restaurants today with those from decades ago, the most striking impression is how much things have shifted, with many marketing strategies falling into obsolescence while others take their place. Over ten years ago, Pizza Hut was utilizing newspaper ads to market its pizza-shaped headphones. Today, the chain emphasizes its use of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat — outlets that didn’t even exist in the 1990s.
Reorienting marketing operations to these changed environments and opportunities will require an investment, and a third party with an objective view and the know-how to dig deep, but the return on that will far outweigh the time or financial investment. In essence, an audit is meant to hold marketing dollars accountable, so they perform at the highest level. Not only can a thorough restaurant marketing audit increase a restaurant’s marketing efficiency and effectiveness, it can have a tremendous effect on the bottom line, too.
IS IT WORTH IT?
It often surprises us – even still – that some organizations spend tens of millions per year on marketing and go for years and years on end with a nagging feeling they’re not as efficient and effective as they could be, yet still are also reluctant to invest a tiny fraction of that budget to hold it accountable; to conduct a proper audit and invest in the analysis and plans that they know will be required to ensure relevance and high-performance in the future.
At the same time, the easiest way to assess and assure performance (present-state and future-plans) is to audit what’s most important and to allocate where resources will be most effective. Seems easy enough to extrapolate from this the value of endeavoring to audit and plan marketing with the sensibilities of any astute investor: an ounce of planning is worth a pound of prevention (and 20 grams of analysis is found in every ounce of planning).
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE?
Depending on the size and complexity of your system – and the availability of data to analyze – such a process can run anywhere from six weeks to six months (our firm, for example, would typically sequence such a project over a 6 – 12-week period). Another factor will be geography and how much field work the company performs on your behalf (field observations and analysis can often prove invaluable in identifying real-world usage cases, guest journey mapping, interviewing staff and management, facilitating consumer research, and so on).
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*Results My Client-Partners Have Achieved With My Help*
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Increased Sales & Profits
We’ve documented that businesses whose employees are engaged (well matched to their jobs and enjoying what they do) lead to increases in the most critical top & bottom-line metrics: sales and profits.
Business & Professional Growth
Employees who feel valued will perform better, stay longer and contribute more to the business’s ability to drive top line sales and bottom line profits.
Increased Productivity
…as employees become fully successful in performing their jobs
Business Transformation
…as a clear vision of the desired future is identified and a plan to achieve it is realized.
Here Are 5 Ways I Can Help You Start Growing Your Business Today:
1. Register for one of my ThinkWorx™ workshops. Learn more about those here.
2. Join my BizWorx™ Coaching program and start growing your business the very day you start. I help business leaders rapidly grow their businesses with sustainability. If this fast growth interests you, call me at 855-744-4677 and talk to me about your opportunity at no charge.
3. Engage me in a GrowthWorx™ Consulting Project and finally set your business on the road to rapid and sustainable growth.
4. Conduct an Onsite Review in order to create a blueprint for growing your business in the coming year.
5. Have me Facilitate A Strategy Session for your leadership team. Most of our clients now do this every 6 months and it has provided the needed focus and accountability necessary to achieve sustainable growth.
5b. Have questions? Contact me to discuss your opportunity with no obligation to you for the first conversation.
The Bottom Line
Here are three amazing benefits of participating in our programs – they are in fact three indisputable reasons why everyone should:
- You get better.
- You get better faster.
- Eventually you become your own business coach.