Congratulations. You've managed to open several (successful) restaurant concepts, and business is booming. The only issue is - these restaurants have very different themes. One is a seafood place, and one serves Santa Fe style food. Still another is a taco station which is more like the Santa Fe style restaurant - but not quite the same as it. With all these different brand identities, you want to be able to capture customer information to market to the entire group, and you also want to make sure your loyal customers at each location know about your different brands. But how do you cross market without confusion? Here are some tips.
First, create a strong corporate group identity. If you're big enough, it makes sense for your core brand to have its own logo, website, social media, etc. This core brand can then share information on all the groups and tie everything together, so to speak, for the different restaurant concepts. In terms of a brand name, choose something that speaks to your own personal identity in order to have a strong cohesive group name and concept. Use the core group's social media to share images from all your restaurants, and develop a hashtag with the group's name to be used in all Instagram posts to tie everything together.
Next, consider offering a loyalty program which can be used at any restaurant location. By tying a loyalty program together for all your locations, you can also create a database of email addresses for email marketing. In terms of emails, it probably makes sense to have some sent to the entire group and some to individual per restaurant. For example - selling gift cards at the holidays? A good pull for the whole group. Beer dinner or farm dinner or wine dinner? Send to the whole group. Happy hour deals for a specific location? Send to one segment only. So save your list in 'segments' and have the ability to market across as broad or as narrow of an audience as you'd like.
Finally, keep your social media separate for each concept. It may be confusing for visitors to understand why you're sharing photos from a (competing - for all they know) restaurant on your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat pages. So unless it's a very specific reason, use each separate social media channel to market that restaurant and concept only.
