This is a great idea which shows how you can make a profit from bringing together two groups of people who need each other! It also shows how solving a problem for a specific market can bring you more customers and clients for your service than you might have thought possible.
What’s more you can also choose to outsource a lot of the work involved, making this more of a ‘hands off’ opportunity than you might think. Everyone has a wealth of restaurants of all kinds nearby, and every single one represents a chance to make a good income on a regular basis.
Take a moment to think about all the restaurants you have in your home town. Which ones immediately come to mind?
The chances are the first ones you think of will be the big, brand name restaurants because they can afford to advertise and let everyone know they’re there and what they offer.
But there is a big chance there are plenty of smaller restaurants in your area that you have never heard of (you might even have walked past them without realizing they were there), purely because they don’t have the funds to advertise in the same way as the competition.
This is where you can make a real difference.
If you think about this in a logical manner you’ll soon see that you can put together a marketing plan which allows the smaller restaurants to find new business, and gives the potential customers in your area a reason to visit them.
What you would need to do is get hold of a few sample cards (think postcard sized) which demonstrate the service you could offer to these restaurants. You can often find online printers that will give you twenty five or more postcards printed for free – all you do is pay for postage. If you get a good design together that promotes a fictional restaurant and gives your potential clients an idea of how your marketing plan works, you will have a powerful marketing tool to show people.
The idea is to promote the restaurant by offering a discount on a meal there. You could also produce a sheet of ideas as part of your marketing plan. For example, a three course meal for a fixed price; 10% off a meal on a certain day; free dessert with a main meal, and so on.
Basically these can be suggested to each restaurant you come into contact with, and the idea is that they will pay you a fee to have postcards printed up and delivered door to door in the local area, to encourage people to come and visit the restaurant and take advantage of the deals advertised on the postcard.
This is where postcards will work better than leaflets or any other form of advertising. Firstly they tend to have more perceived value than a simple sheet of paper, and secondly they are more likely to be kept by people who receive them. This means that more people are likely to take advantage of your marketing efforts – and that could result in repeat orders from each restaurant.
Make sure that the cards need to be presented when visiting the restaurant in order to take advantage of the deal. This means the restaurant will know exactly how well the advertising is doing, and it will boost your business as a result.
You will need to distribute the postcards door to door but you can pay someone else to do this for you. Make sure you pick someone trustworthy that will complete the job though, since you want to ensure that every single card gets delivered.
This is a great little business idea that can also work for other local businesses too if you want to expand it at any point. The great thing about doing this is that you can deliver any number of postcards through the doors at the same time; so long as you bundle them up first so you can put a sheaf of cards through each letterbox you won’t have any problems at all. And if you become friendly with a local printer you could offer to advertise their business on a card in exchange for a cheaper service…
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