Marketing is an incredibly important part of catering. Just like most aspects of business, marketing can be the difference between incredible success and just barely avoiding failure.
Why Catering is a Profitable Opportunity for Restaurants
Catering is an awesome opportunity for restaurants that have the space and staff to accommodate it. While it’s certainly not for everyone, if you’re able to pull off catering, then it can be a successful new revenue stream.
Benefits of Adding Catering Services to Your Restaurant
Catering and restaurant work are very similar in some aspects, but their major difference is the way in which you make your money. Rather than a long-haul push every day for hours at a time (like traditional restaurant work), catering allows you to invest a bunch of time all at once into making the same amount of money.
In other words, catering allows you to bring in extra money with short-term time investments to supplement the rest of your work. Beyond that, catering is an excellent way to get your name out there and, ultimately, build brand recognition.
How Catering Can Increase Your Brand Exposure
Speaking of brand recognition, that’s one of the best benefits of catering. While your restaurant may be very well known in the area, catering allows you to get your name further out there. Each time you do an event and do well, you’ll have guests asking about your business and people interested in coming to your restaurant.
Beyond that, though, it can help you build more catering leads! A good showing at events will make others who need catering ask about you — and that’s what we want.
Examples of Catering Marketing Ideas
With that out of the way, let’s talk about some catering marketing ideas. Below are a few great starter steps to get your name out there and start building a rolodex of clients.
Create a Dedicated Catering Site
A dedicated webpage for your catering work is incredibly important. While you always can build out a separate section on your pre existing website, it’s generally best to separate the businesses. And let’s be clear on this — your catering and restaurant work are separate businesses.
Building another site allows you to highlight that fact, but more importantly, it helps keep the separation clear for guests that may be curious about your restaurant. Additionally, a separate site allows you to dedicate plenty of space to talking about your rates, offerings, and availability. It can help with scheduling, first contact, and (if optimized properly) can even serve as a passive means to bring in new clients.
Use Social Media to Showcase Your Catering Services
Social media is vital in marketing in our current day and age. Because of this, it’s crucial that we lean heavily into social media with your catering marketing. It can quickly help to build brand recognition, redirect curious (potential) clients to your website for more information, and just spread your name.
Beyond that, though, social media is an excellent space to get a lay of the land. It can help you to do market research on catering events in your area, meet event coordinators, and see what to expect from events with specific clients. In other words, social media isn’t just a place for others to discover you, it’s a great space for you to discover others.
Leverage Email Marketing to Promote Special Catering Packages
If you have access to customer data like emails, you should have an email newsletter. By extension, if you have access to a newsletter, you should use it for catering marketing outreach. Regularly release email blasts that break down your offerings, highlight potential discounts and specials, and generally show what you can do.
This means that you’ll need some solid photos from events and, more importantly, a plan for catering packages that’s ready to go. Catering marketing is nothing if you’re not prepared to engage with guests, so be prepared.
Partner with Local Event Planners and Venues
Put simply, event planners and venues in your area are the best source of catering work. They’re tuned into catering events all around you. Because of this, it’s a great rule of thumb that local event planners and venues should become your partners.
Once you’ve gotten your foot in the door and absolutely killed a few events, you’ll find that you need to go seeking clients a bit less. Your new planner friends will send potential new clients directly to you, they’ll get you in the door for events, and they’ll help you get to know the people that you want to meet.
Offer Incentives for Large Catering Orders
When selling particularly large catering orders, it’s important to understand when to cut your profits just a bit. Often, the difference between one caterer and another for clients can be as little as $100. So if you’re able to offer a $400 discount on orders over, say, 200 people, then you’re more likely to be the winner on that bid.
How to Reach New Customers for Your Catering Services
Okay, we’ve talked a bit about catering marketing ideas, let’s talk about how to bring new customers into the fold.
Optimize Your SEO for Local Catering Searches
Previously, I mentioned optimization for your website. The specific optimization that we need there (and everywhere else, really) is search engine optimization, or SEO. The more efficiently you’ve packed your website with keywords, proper layout, and countless other SEO elements, the better chance you have to show up in searches.
Promote Catering Services at In-Restaurant Events and Functions
Every time that you run in-restaurant events, you should be leaning on that to highlight your catering marketing. Run sample menus and scatter in mention of your catering events, hang posters, put out business cards, and have someone present who can talk about catering if needed.
I say this because catering is an odd field. It’s extremely focused on knowing people in the business. Because of that, it means that leaning on people who already know what you can do in a restaurant setting should be a clear-cut path to getting hired for catering events. The more you can show off (without making it all about catering), the better.
Offer Referral Discounts to Existing Catering Clients
The more existing clients you have, the more likely you are to get called up for events both big and small. Once you get a few under your belt, consider offering referral discounts to pre-existing catering clients. This, in turn, allows you to passively bring in new clients and reward those that have stuck by you.
Tips for Standing Out in the Catering Market
With so many catering professionals out there, it’s crucial that you differentiate yourself from the rest.
Build Customizable Catering Menus
While some caterers get by with one or two very specific menus, it’s often best to have a selection of modifiable catering menus readily available. This way, if a potential client doesn’t want your usual, you have other options ready to go. I’ve found that themed menus (Latin American, BBQ, French, etc.) is a great way to give clear rules for the menu while allowing a generally customizable set of options.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to bend over backwards for every menu, too. Sometimes, clients will have unrealistic expectations for what you can do with your available resources — this helps solve that, too. Rather than having to argue over their specific vision, you can offer a selection of pre-built menus and customize from there.
Highlight Your Specialty Dishes or Unique Selling Points
Whatever makes you special should be the highlight of your catering menus. For example, if you smoke meat and go all-in on BBQ, don’t start doing French fine dining catering menus — stick to what you do well! And the same goes for your resources; if you have a large space available through either an event center or your restaurant, lean on that! While that may seem obvious, you’d be shocked how often people forget to lean on their specialty when starting their catering marketing.
Create Professional Marketing Materials and Menus for Events
Finally, it’s time to talk about catering marketing materials. While you can certainly wing it and build out materials as they’re needed, having a professionally-made menu and materials is so helpful. Because of this, I highly recommend that you hire a professional graphic designer to build menus and marketing materials. While this will cost money, it’ll help put your best foot forward to new clients.
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