There are many ways to market your food business. These days, with so many choices of where to eat, how you market your business will definitely impact on the success of your business. Traditionally the following avenues are open to you for marketing:
facebook
other social media instagram, twitter etc
local paper for both advertising and submitting food articles
business cards
neon signs
sidewalk blackboards
your own website
radio
Yellow Pages
letter box drop in your local area
food guides, especially online ones
food guides, especially online ones
deals websites, like scoopon, groupon etc
Getting to the local market
In addition to using most of the above in our restaurant, we also printed leaflets of our weekly menu, and hand delivered them to local business houses. Doing this I became so well known that the local businesses would allow me to pin the menu list to their notice boards. At the time there were 51 other restaurants in the Crows Nest area, all vying for business lunches, so every little bit extra helped. The cost was minimal and the results were almost immediate.
One night at about 9.30 pm a customer approached us hoping we would still serve dinner. Many of the other restaurants closed their kitchens by that time for meals, serving only desserts and coffee after that. As we were the owners and the chefs, we had no problem with this request, and soon it was also part of our marketing strategy.
Crows Nest has a predominance of two types of businesses - restaurants and film production companies. Pretty soon we were regularly feeding between 20 and 40 people after 9.30 pm, all of them from the film industry. As they were also good tippers, our staff seemed to enjoy serving them as well.
No matter what you do, the more fun you have doing it will always produce better results.
Whatever strategies you use, you must monitor the results. If a particular strategy is not working then you need to stop doing it and find something else which will work better for your business.