Devil in the Details: Three Ways Your Restaurant’s Kitchen Impacts Your Marketing Strategy

The kitchen of your restaurant can have a large impact on your marketing abilities. Although it may be ‘behind the scenes’ so to speak, the way your space and equipment is used will have long-reaching effects on how your customers are served and how your food is presented in marketing campaigns. Here are some of the items that you’ll need to get a handle on so that you can effectively market your restaurant.

Serving Capacity
Your restaurant kitchen has a capacity at which dishes can be prepared. This may be in relation to the number of staff that are available or the simple logistical potential. You have to determine the optimum number of dishes that can be prepared at any given time. This needs to take into account your best day and your worst day. You don’t want your patrons to be waiting an excessive amount of time for their food. The point of quick kitchen turnaround time is that you can meet the expectations of your customers and serve quality items, and understanding these logistics impacts your marketing strategy. If either of these standards aren’t met, even the best marketing strategy isn’t going to maintain the success of your business. Once you know your capacity, you can tailor your marketing strategy to pull people in at slow times and not overwhelm your servers from a badly timed lunch promotion.

Cleanliness Factors
How clean your restaurant kitchen is makes a huge difference in your ability to market yourself. It’s one of the most important factors in attracting new customers, in fact. This can be reflected in your health scores or even in the quality of the dishes that are being served. From deep cleaning the whole space to regular steam box and grease trap maintenance, the way you maintain your kitchen will impact the cleanliness of the entire restaurant, which affects how your customers view your professionalism and food service. The cleanliness of your kitchen will also impact your workers, from the cooks to the servers, and this directly affects their interactions with the customers. A professional, clean kitchen will create an environment that encourages your staff to be professional as well.

POS Tracking
The input of orders is another important part of running your restaurant kitchen. You want things to stay organized so that you can expand your marketing efforts. POS tracking will also allow you to keep better track of the items in your inventory so that you don’t run out at an inopportune time. Again, such organization doesn’t seem to directly affect your marketing efforts, but it serves to support ad campaigns and onsite marketing because a well-organized and tracked system keeps customers from having complaints about lack of certain menu items. Another benefit of having the right POS is that it makes your bookkeeping efforts easier to manage. You don’t have to fumble through all of the receipts at night and try to input them into your system.

The kitchen may not be seen by your customers, but it can have a big impact on your marketing strategies. Use these guidelines so that you can grow your restaurant business.

Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and blogger. She lives and works out of her home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She loves the outdoors and spends most of her time hiking, biking, and gardening. For more information, contact Brooke via Facebook at facebook.com/brooke.chaplan or Twitter @BrookeChaplan