Make no mistake. Good Local Store Marketing involves prospecting and the better your prospecting, the better your Local Store Marketing results.

Allow me to introduce a great resource for you to help you with your prospecting ability.  Ted Stevenot has built a business on an innovative method of prospecting that systemize’s the procedure and removes all of the ugly emotions and excuses that tend to accompany prospecting.

I know Ted personally and have read his book, The Prospect Factory with great admiration. Learn more by going to Ted’s site: www.prospectfactory.com.

Local Store Marketing will not be successful if you fail to deliver the goods when the customer arrives. When I say “deliver the goods” I’m talking about real, personal, customer service.

At one time, Southwest Airlines was struggling to compete with the larger airlines. They hired Jan Carlzon who was then President of Scandanavian Airlines to consult with them. He was able to quickly turn things around for Southwest by employing his “Moments of Truth” strategy. Carlzon contends that there are thousands of small, but very important customer interactions with your staff and customers that determine whether customers will return or go to the competition.

Carlzon was so successful with this principle that he turned other companies around and wrote a book with the same title- Moments of Truth. It’s a quick read and I suggest you check it out.

Your restaurant would be well served if you stopped and focused on all the interactions and “touches” that occur from the moment the customer pulls up in your parking lot.

Don’t design a great Local Store Marketing plan without great customer service plans. You will only succeed in speeding up your demise.

Interestingly enough, I just reviewed a very clever “order pad” designed by our printing partner, Smith and Jones, that can be a wonderful training aid and Local Store Marketing tool for your servers. If you want to see a sample, email me (scott@intrimarketing.com), and I’ll shoot one over-put “order pad” in the subject line.

You knew the answer to that question without looking here.

But I will give you some free internet marketing advice to help you along.. provided you have your own website of course.

I want you to list your site on Yahoo Local.   (http://local.yahoo.com)

When you get to the site, you must create a Yahoo account and password if you do not have one.

After logging in, scroll to the bottom and click on “Add a Business”. The rest is pretty simple. You will now have your restaurant site indexed in Yahoo Local and you will begin to show up on searches.

As you learn about internet marketing, make sure to pay attention to local internet marketing techniques.