You’ve established multiple restaurants, built brands and opened new locations. Now it’s time to take it one step further. Expanding into a hospitality group is an exciting adventure for any entrepreneur. This can be a hectic time for the owner, as these events often happen in conjunction with launches of new brands and locations. With so many new moving parts alongside the day-to-day management of current restaurants, it can be tough to properly establish your new hospitality group, let alone properly marketing it. Below are some of the ways you can start strong with a restaurant hospitality group to make sure it has the impact it deserves.

Develop a Brand-Wide Marketing Plan

Just like you would develop a marketing plan for an individual restaurant, you need to develop one for a hospitality group. This will help you not only identify your key goals, but also to help establish responsibilities, costs (in terms of both time and money), and to decide between what is vital for your plan to succeed and what can wait until later. Check out this Worcester Business Journal article from our very own Laura DiBenedetto on marketing plan basics.

Have a Strong Brand Presence

While your hospitality group’s brand shouldn’t overshadow your various restaurants and locations, it does need to bring them together and help you to cross-promote each entity. This means that during the design phase, it’s important that your group appeals equally to patrons of all your locations—not just one.

Naming Conventions

If you haven’t already settled on a name, it’s important to have one that can represent ALL the brands under your umbrella. If you have a vegan restaurant and a BBQ one, you want a neutral name that can cover both. Think of a name that covers the core tenets you used to start your restaurants or that holds significance for you.

Logo Design

Similar to name conventions, your logo should not play favorites when it comes to your various brands. Like with all logos, you’re looking to create something recognizable. However, you also don’t want something that would outshine your individual restaurants’ branding.

Hospitality Website

The last part of a successful hospitality group concept is a website. This website will act as the base for your online presence as a hospitality group but also act as a portal to your various restaurants. This will allow customers to find your other brands in the area—a key part of hospitality group marketing.

Coordinate Your Marketing Across Brands

One of the major jobs of a hospitality group is to help coordinate the various brands and locations on everything from logistics to staffing. The same attention should be spent on marketing to help improve all brands by coordinating your marketing across all restaurants in the hospitality group.

• Update Websites: Just like your restaurants, your websites have been built in different years. This is the perfect time to bring all websites in line, especially with new features like delivery app integration or online stores. Consistency in look, feel, and – most importantly – technology are critical components to be mindful of.
• Cross-Promote on Social Media: Make sure to use social media on all brands to promote your numerous locations and other restaurants underneath the hospitality group umbrella -especially in the event of grand openings or group-wide announcements.
• Sync Your Event Planning: A lot of restaurants have holiday, live music, or other types of events. Make sure to coordinate between all restaurants in the same area to make sure there is always something to go to and your events don’t compete with each other.

Need help launching and marketing your new restaurant hospitality group, or bringing your existing group to new heights? It’s time to contact Vision Advertising. We have years of marketing experience, including designing and launching hospitality groups, as well as working with established ones. From creating restaurant websites to coordinating your social media, we’re here to help.