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What are the most efficient ways to market a web-development agency aimed at the restaurant industry?

I am trying to set up a web development agency, which will work in restaurant Industry. This startup will address all technical aspects of running a restaurant in this digital era. Primary target is restaurant websites and on-line table and food booking systems. Can any one point out what all are the best Marketing strategies I can use? Note: I am from India and I would like to market my company outside India, Mainly United States, Australia and Scandinavian countries.

Answer 7485

This is a very broad question, but here is a basic list of distribution strategies you can use at almost any startup:

  1. Word of Mouth. Find your first few customers through personal connections. Do an amazing job for them and they will refer you to their friends, who in turn will refer you to their friends, and so on. Encourage this through a referral program: e.g., you get 10% off your offer for referring a friend and your friend gets a 10% discount too.
  2. Advertising. Advertise your business on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
  3. PR, Media, Blogs. Build a relationship with bloggers, journalists, and other media people and get them to write an article about your company. Submit your site to as many publications and aggregators as you can. For example, you could use Promotehour to find a list of places to submit your startup and JustReachOut to find journalists on any topic.
  4. Inbound Marketing. Create content around your startup, such as blog posts, talks, open source code, etc. The goal is to teach your audience, for free. Once they start seeing you as an expert, they will be more likely to hire you.
  5. SEO. Create lots of content (see inbound marketing above) that ranks highly in search engines.
  6. Social Media. Share the content you create (see inbound marketing above) on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc. Build a following.
  7. Communities. Search Meetup for local meetups. Search Lanyrd for conferences. Search Reddit, Hacker News, Quora, and Stack Exchange for online communities. Get involved and help the communities, and eventually, they may want to hire you.
  8. Sales. Find leads online and reach out to them. For example, you could find restaurants with crappy websites and quickly put together a prototype that shows how much better their website could be. Send them the link in an email and the prototype will make them realize the value of your business in the most real way possible.

See Startup Distribution Resources for more info.

Answer 7479

First of all, you mention several things that are definitely making things harder for you (depending on your ambitions.)

The fact, that you are about to launch a digital product in the physical sector, in other markets (countries) can greatly limit you.

A. I would partner up with agencies or individuals, preferably within sales, to do the ground work for you. For each country (or in America, state) you enter you can make contracts for exclusive rights to distribute your product - with a revenue-split. This keeps the sales person and you motivated to make it happen.

B. I would consider launching in a nearer market if possible and travel there myself.

This is solely to create volume and presence.

As for your marketing tricks, here are a few of the tips that made my own digital development agency go (very) large in less than two years. I tried to adapt it to the restaurant-niche:

  1. Identify restaurants that have or create hype. Reach out to them and offer your product for free - for ever, in turn of their endorsement. Having one or more “popular” restaurants on your side, will make the next 100 not-so-popular restaurants sign up easier.
  2. Reach out to any food, restaurant or similar kind of life-style blogs. Provide them with gifts, well written (non product pushy) guest posts with pictures you have the rights to use. Make it a simple copy/paste task with additional benefits for the blogger. You’d want to have the rest of the “popular” restaurants - the ones you didn’t offer anything for free - interested, by presenting popular restaurants and popular bloggers - all talking about you.
  3. When this is done in the restaurant-niche, you should definitely make sure that tech people related to this industry also get to see, feel and test your product for free of charge (again, “free for life” works tremendously for me.)

However, your marketing isn’t going to solve it all. It costs a great amount of money to display your marketing ads, email campaigns etc. I would consider, when starting up in US, to reach out to a call center (preferably with a great track record and a reputation of not being to intrusive). I’d make a deal with the call center on a percentage of every acquisition. That could be 35% of every sale, they get to keep. The last 65% is for you.

This is to kick the door open into the market and gain grounds fast.

Also, next time it would be a good time to mention whether you have intellectual property rights, how many competitors etc - since this obviously affects your marketing strategy.

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