26 Degrees in the Shade . . .

Promoting Your Bar Through Local Schools (continued)

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Local schools are simply fantastic organizations to promote through. The basic rule being: you give something and you stand to get a lot back.We have already talked about doing a pizza cooking lesson in school, followed up by inviting children to come to your local and try their hand a cooking their own pizza.

I want to add to my last post by stating that rather than asking children to phone you to make an appointment to come and cook their own pizza at your bar, thus leaving the onus on the children to keep the ball rolling, it’s much better if you take bookings whilst you are in the school for groups of 3 and 4 friends to come together and cook their own pizzas.

By doing this type of promotion you are aiming at the children and the parents at the same time and the promotion is not costing you anything.

The great thing about children and pizzas is; that when a child really wants to come and eat pizza, it invariably involves parents coming along or perhaps a small group of children, (we do occasionally get groups of between 8-18 children come to celebrate a birthday or simple just enjoy a pizza together).

• Make sure that they book beforehand.
• Explain about the unavoidable wait involved in catering for large groups.
• Make sure that you establish control from the minute they arrive. (It’s simple to do; just remind them that they are not in school, but in an adult restaurant and that they must keep their voices down or risk not being served at all or even made to sit on their own on a separate room).

Remember! You can’t expect a customer to become a return customer (a regular) until you have got them to cross your threshold for the first time and that should be your main objective when you co-operate with local schools.

(NB: In the 6-7 busy months you probably won’t need to do any promotion, but if you intend to run your business for 11 months a year, then it’s good to know about ways of promoting your business.)

Promoting Your Spanish Restaurant Via School Demonstrations

Schools love people from local enterprises who are prepared to come in and teach children about running a small business.

Basically you arrange to visit a local school and show children how to make the dough for a pizza. You can get them involved in weighing out ingredients and mixing.

Divide the children into groups of 4 and allow them all to handle the dough.

They’ll only be room in the oven and time available for a couple of the groups to actually cook their pizza and you should choose who gets to do that by drawing names from a hat.

The two pizzas that they cook can be sliced into small pieces, so that everybody gets a little taste of delicious hot pizza (Go for a margherita with ham and leave a section with no ham and then everyone will be able to enjoy it.)

Invite all children to come and make their own pizza in your restaurant (they must telephone first to make an appointment at an off peak time) and have leaflets ready to hand out with your address and telephone number. We also hand out A5 sized menus.

If you make the effort and do this type of promotion in the low season, you will definitely win new customers and build your business.