Cross Promotion (1/3)

Quality food, friendly service, a good location, and competitive pricing were once the keys to success in the restaurant industry. Today, these are merely the requirements for getting in the game. In today’s highly competitive marketplace, a restaurateur must go beyond the basics to be successful. Restaurateurs must make a commitment to actively promote and market their restaurants among both present customers and potential customers. Taking advantage of the opportunities within one’s own backyard has been known as Local Store Marketing or LSM. There are four major areas of LSM explained in detail. These include Cross Promotions, Off-premises Promotions, In-Store Marketing and Community Involvement. In this issue we’ll introduce Cross Promotion in detail to our readers. What is it? Cross promotions are a method of distributing your coupon, discount or a message about your business – a means of getting someone else to hand out your message at no cost to you beyond the cost of printing and paper. One of the most expensive areas of advertising today is the rapidly increasing costs of distribution. Postal rate increases mean a higher cost for mailing your message to customers. If you are to compete successfully against those competitors who have budgets that permit them to dominate the broadcast media of TV and radio, you must become much more creative in getting your message to customers. Cross promotions are a low-cost and oftentimes “free” method to do just that - distribute your message to a wide range of prospective customers. What are the benefits? Three major elements of cross promotions make them very beneficial to your LSM program. 1) You are able to convince someone else to distribute your fliers or coupons free. The only cost to you is the production and printing charges. 2) A vast majority of the coupons you send out through normal methods of distribution are being received by people who are not able to easily take advantage of your offer. In a cross-promotion effort you control both the target geographic area and the number of coupons you wish to distribute. If you select a nearby grocery store as a partner, you know that its customers are your potential customers because they live in the immediate vicinity. If that same grocery store has 10,000 customers a week but you only want to distribute 2,000 coupons, you can limit the distribution to that exact amount. 3) The best aspect of a cross promotion is that it protects your regular price credibility. When you run an ad in a local newspaper, it is obvious that you are discounting your product. The cross promotion can reverse that perception because it transfers the responsibility of discount to someone else. Every coupon you print up should contain the line: “This coupon compliments of (your cross-promotional partner).” Basically, you want the manager of that grocery store to take credit for the discount. In this situation, the customer perceives that the grocery store has paid you to obtain the discount for its customers. It’s a nice surprise for the customer, and you can maintain the integrity and value of your product at its regular price. Different Types of Cross Promotion There are one-way cross promotion in which another merchant distributes your coupon as a surprise or extra value to his or her customers. In this case you offer to pay all of the coupons, pay for all printing costs and make it “compliments of his or her store.” There are also two-way promotions in which you and another business exchange coupons to distribute for each other and, in essence, trade customer bases.