Clark Keller
Hi! I’m Clark Keller, president of Data Driven Marketing, a small business marketing resource for over 15 years. My own sales and marketing background, however, goes back a bit farther than 15 years. But you probably already guessed if your glanced at my picture! My experience with high-tech companies in the Pre-Data Driven Marketing years, gave me a thorough understanding of emerging technology and the vision to see how it could be applied to small businesses to enhance their ability to compete effectively with much bigger organizations.
Our restaurant division focuses on the marketing needs of independent restaurants who often have budgets much smaller than the bigger chains but who have the same needs to increase sales and keep their names visible within the community.
There’s More To Marketing Than Coupons!
When I evaluated the general marketing practices of a cross-section of independent restaurants in several states, it became clear to me that if they did any marketing at all beyond the Yellow Pages, it was almost exclusively in the form of coupons…newspaper coupons, shopper’s guide coupons, local hotel in-room coupons, internet coupons…coupons, coupons, coupons!
Here’s what the coupons accomplished:
1. Temporary bump in sales volume for the restaurant
2. Training customers to wait for a coupon before they come in.
So I decided to apply the same marketing techniques that I had successfully implemented in other markets—dental practices, jewelry stores, small manufacturing companies, and newspapers— to independent restaurants.
The purpose of this blog is to share with you, in small, easy-to-read segments my 30 years of experience. Most often I will focus on the use of technology to make your job easier and business grow. But there will also be a lot of just plain good-sense marketing…you have probably heard some of it before, but the hectic day-to-day requirements of running a successful restaurant can often push this information far enough back in your memory bank that you might forget it.
So I hope you will visit often. I also hope you will take advantage of our FREE marketing guide on some of the best ways to get new customers, month-after-month and year-after-year. You will find a link on our home page, click on the image below, or just click here. I think you will find it has valuable information for marketing your restaurant.
Hope to see you again, soon
