San Francisco Restaurant Blog

Sending out a monthly restaurant newsletter is a great marketing tool because it can be a lot of fun for you and your customers. You don’t have to stay 100% on topic – add an occasional crossword puzzle, include positive comments made about your restaurant during the month, announce upcoming events and birthdays, and ask your customers if they’d like to participate by contributing to the newsletter.

But there are printing costs involved with a newsletter – right?

Imagine that you found out a reliable printing house was looking for new customers and there happened to be people on your list that they’d like to advertise to. Do you think that other business would print your newsletter for free in exchange for a space on the back to place their logo and contact information?

You bet they would – if they were smart!

If they were really smart, they’d not only include their logo and contact information, they’d put an exclusive offer that would allow them to track the results of this marketing opportunity – you can suggest this and let them do the first printing as a trial to see what happens.

If the printer gets a couple calls, they’re likely to do it again. Even if they don’t, the idea of getting their name out there might just be attractive enough for them to continue for a while anyway.

Whether you’re fine dining, a corner caf顯r a coffee house, it’s very likely that there are business people eating your food that should also be on your mailing list – that is pure gold to another business wanting to get in front of those eyeballs, especially in a format that is “different” than their typical advertisement.

Finding smart people is key to this joint venture and restaurant marketing technique – you want to be dealing with somebody who understands the true value of your proposition and will be reliable in following through with it.

The “six degrees of separation” rule should play a large factor in deciding who you’d like to approach. The rule basically says to look at your immediate contacts to see if there are any partner candidates.

If there are not, begin asking those contacts if they know of somebody who might be interested… and then work out from there. This joint venture technique is often better than cold-calling a printing shop because you can start the conversation by saying that you were referred.

Nathan Gilder is the Director of Restaurant Revolution, a business and restaurant marketing resource for the foodservice industry. He is also the visionary behind the next-generation restaurant coupons system titled CouponCuisine.

Nathan specializes in creative enterprise: developing new and unique business techniques that engage and attract customers, employees and joint venture partners.

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