The Best Ways to Build Restaurant Brand Awareness

Biphoo

2 Feb 2017

566 Views

Creating Your Restaurant Brand, you’re finally doing it: following your dreams and opening up your restaurant. Congratulations! That’s a huge deal… to you.To the rest of the world, you’re just one more best new york restaurant opening up where lik

The Best Ways to Build Restaurant Brand Awareness | Creating Your Restaurant Brand

To the rest of the world, you’re just one more best new york restaurant opening up where likely a string of unsuccessful ones came before you. How are you going to make yourself stand out?Good branding is the root of a successful marketing campaign. Bad branding will slash your marketing results, even if your campaign is otherwise flawless. Great branding, on the other hand, can elevate your marketing — and, by extension, your business. Here are my critical tips on branding your business, its importance, and the process behind it.

Branding is more than a logoWay too frequently, famous new york restaurant owners refer to branding design as “logo design” and think of it as a small task — after all, a logo is “just a small drawing,” right? Even worse, many restaurant owners use that mindset as justification for refusal to pay more than a nominal amount for their logo design. Big mistake! A logo is a part of a complete branding system, but not even close to the entire thing. Your brand is the aesthetic framework that will permeate every piece of your signage, marketing, and web presence. It includes your logo, your main color scheme, your fonts, and overall stylistic decisions (for example, the user of a different hand-drawn image on every piece of marketing material).

Your brand will affect literally everything that your customer sees in and about your new york city restaurant tips.Definitely, don’t discount the validity and difficulty of brand creation based on the “size” of the deliverables. Many graphic designers consider branding design to be the hardest part of their jobs. One well-made logo design often has dozens of hours of thought, research, and discussion behind it, not to mention as many as hundreds of different sketches and variations. Any less work isn’t enough because your branding is your face to the outside world. Pretty important, right?Start EarlyIdeally, you should have a complete branding system in place before you open your doors.

After all, your new york restaurant reviews at launch are some of the most critical, and your first few months of business are when it;s most important to draw people in. A well-done branding system will help you immensely here, maybe even more than it will at any other time. Plus, your signage, menus and even decor will probably be entirely decided by your logo and identity design.Hire a Designer. A good one. Seriously. Just do it.I get how for people who don’t have a background in design, it seems ridiculous to drop hundreds or, more likely, thousands of dollars on a finished project that may seem insubstantial (meaning, you aren’t getting something that is physically big or extensive).

Hopefully, by now, I’ve convinced you how important your new york restaurant and bar identity is. And on top of that, it’s hard. Very hard. As in, probably not something you can do yourself unless you’re really talented and experienced in design.My whole premise is about taking control of your own marketing and web presence on a budget, and even as a web designer and digital marketing specialist, I do fully believe that it’s possible to create a decent website and a decent digital marketing campaign on your own. This isn’t one of those things. If you’re going to hire someone else, for one thing, make it this. Need help finding a good designer? Lucky for you, I wrote a whole article on that! Go check it out!Think about what you wantBefore your first meeting with your graphic designer, make sure you think about what parts of your brand you’d like to emphasize. The more information you give your designer, the better.

If you’ve done your homework and picked a talented designer with a strong portfolio, they should be experienced in bringing out the best of a business through an identity design. Most will have some sort of questionnaire for you, whether it’s a formal written one or just a casual conversation. Even so, this conversation will go much more smoothly if you’ve given a lot of thought beforehand to what you’d like. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to get yourself started: What’s my restaurant’s style?This one is pretty obvious, but can be surprisingly hard to pin down. Sometimes, your restaurant style was built right into your goals when you opened the place (i.e. “I want to open a cozy, traditional Irish Pub with great food” or “I want to create the most stylish, hip restaurant in town”). Other times, especially with very NYC traditional restaurants, it can be harder to figure out.

Think about not only the type of food you sir but what your decor looks like. How would someone else describe your restaurant? Aside from the food, what do they like about it?What words do I want someone to associate with my restaurant?In the previous question, I asked you what words someone would associate with your new york restaurant list now.

Now I’m asking you about your goals and hopes: how do you wish someone would describe your restaurant? What are you hoping to get across? Write all of these words down.What are the best qualities of Nyc restaurant?Thinking about what your restaurant does best is basically recording everything that you should play up in your identity and branding. Hopefully, all three of the answers to these questions overlap significantly.

If they don’t, it means that what you wish your new york restaurant guide was and what you consider it to currently be are pretty mismatched, and that might be something you want to address before moving forward with branding. But ideally, this third answer will be a bit of a mix between the answers to the first two. Basically, you’re trying to list your most appealing qualities so that the designer knows what traits are most valuable to you.

Ready to get going?Feel like you’re ready to embark on your identity design adventure? By now you should have a basic but solid foundation upon which you can build a relationship with a designer. So go ahead, get started! Start pouring over those design portfolios — and when you’re done, come back here for more tips on where to go next!

Biphoo

2 Feb 2017

566 Views