Five Catering Marketing Tips

Hey Catering Business owners! My name is John Cohen – Founder of Total Party Planner also know as TPP 

Today I want to share some 5 real tips to market your catering company. It’s time to really ramp up your game!

Who remembers the movie ‘Field of Dreams’ where Kevin Costner says If you build it they will come? NOT TRUE! If we aren’t putting any practices in place for world class marketing they will not come. We hear too many stories of companies with amazing products that close their doors, or worse, beaten by companies with far inferior products.

Here we go 5 tips to really ramp up your catering marketing efforts!

• Your website has to focus on conversions! Is it easy for prospective buyers to get your phone number? Or even more important, do you have a contact form that allows them to quickly enter their information for you to contact them? Also, keep in mind that studies show that the more you ask people to fill out the less they are willing to use the form. So find a good balance. Make it easy to find!
• Create a follow-up process. Now that you have a prospective client name from step 1 you need to have a process in place to reach out. Is it a phone call? An Email? It might be worthwhile to ask their preference. It’s very important that you at least send a thank you email letting them know you received their submission. Be consistent on your follow up but not annoying. Remember they contacted you!
• Focus on website SEO. These are good investment dollars if you don’t have the expertise. For example when someone types into Google ‘Caterers Near Me’ or ‘Best Caterers in my City” does your name come up in the top 2 or 3? There are many things that Google considers for ranking so make sure you have 
  1. Good written content about catered events on your website not just pictures and prices
  2. Your site is mobile friendly with no broken links
  3. Page Speed
• Create a referral program. Referrals and repeat clients can be the easiest, most fun, and most reliable source of business! After an event make sure you are constantly staying in touch with a newsletter, Happy Holidays, offers, etc.
• Brand Awareness. Be consistent with your look. This everything from your website pages, business cards, email templates, brochures, event signage, etc. In marketing, image is everything so be sure to look as professional and organized as humanly possible.

Growing up in catering, we certainly didn’t have websites and email but my parents took such pride in their logo and the biggest example was the money they spent on having the catering vans painted with the image. I know a lot of business was booked from that alone. 

A good catering program and CRM like TPP is going to provide you with some of the marketing tools you need like contact forms for your website, Proposal templates for consistency and follow up tools like automated tasks.

As a general rule of thumb you should be spending anywhere between 5 and 10% of your revenue on marketing initiatives. That’s how important it is!

For more catering tips, click here to help your catering business grow!

Have some tips to share? Feel free to comment below.