Fall is quickly approaching. And if you're in the restaurant marketing business, by Halloween you're hoping to have hit your fourth-quarter stride before the holiday season closes in.

The convergence of holiday sales and a final quarterly push can make the difference in your end-of-year profit margin; especially if you play your cards right - your gift cards, that is.

What do restaurant-themed gift cards and loyalty programs have to do with a well-developed fourth-quarter strategy? They help restaurants take advantage of the one thing that makes them different from any other business out there: location, location, location.

Life at the Nexus of Prime Marketing Real Estate

From a restaurant marketing standpoint, restaurants are ideally located in the heart of several niche markets, which other businesses struggle to access. This puts restaurants on the cusp of some pretty large-scale earning potential if they make the opportunities work for them.

So, what does a professional life full of well-balanced restaurant marketing look like? Let's take a closer look at those markets and the numbers that go with them.

In the restaurant marketing business, certain markets come with the territory.

Restaurants are naturally:

• A social gathering place where people like to connect with each other and enjoy the comforts of good food, a warm and friendly environment, and well-managed services.

• Confined to a local service area. Even if they offer delivery services; restaurants don't extend those services beyond local boundaries.

• Where reputations are made. People love to talk about a good meal and even publish their own opinions and reviews in blogs and online forums.

• Immediately accessible. The majority of restaurant-goers can easily access information about local restaurants using a mobile device.

As you can see, restaurants can and should tap into social media, buying local, online review sites, and mobile marketing. Restaurant-themed gift cards and loyalty programs only serve to boost the profits that are already naturally there.

The ability to access social, local, online, and mobile markets doesn't lead to actually doing so without a little context. To give you an idea of why investing in promotional items are important, consider how people find restaurants these days.

According to restaurant trend statistics, 72% of the population uses social media and online reviews to find a restaurant. Investing in the right promotional and mobile campaigns can help you get found online. Add to that a healthy dose of SEO and content marketing, and you have a recipe for success.

Finding the Right Mix of Marketing

Talking around the restaurant marketing issue is all well and good; but realistically, what kind of returns can restaurant-themed gift cards and loyalty programs produce? Let's revisit those trend statistics for a moment.

It's no secret that businesses put a lot of money into attracting new customers. In a service-oriented business, the wisest thing you can do is to keep growth and retention well-balanced.

The biggest mistake a lot of restaurants make is spending 5-10 times more money (the average is 8 times) to attract new business, while neglecting their existing customers. The irony of this strategy is their existing customers are likely to spend 67% more than the new customers.

Restaurant-themed gift cards and loyalty programs are a great way to sustain your growth and retention efforts. Make new customers an offer they can't refuse and keep current customers coming back. How well does the strategy work? Restaurants that use gift cards and loyalty programs average 88% more profits than restaurants that don't.

You can increase the profits by cross-promoting your gift cards and loyalty programs on social media and mobile platforms.

That's savvy investing because two out of four customers use social media recommendations to find a restaurant, and 30% of internet usage comes from a mobile device. That works out to about 3 out of every 10 customers.

So here's the final question: What's stopping you? If it's a simple matter of know-how, plastic printers can help. We not only custom design restaurant-themed gift cards, we can customize the loyalty programs that go with them. All we need are a few design and demographic details from you.

Everything can be set up to run automatically. Get a few pointers on how to monitor the program and read the reports; after that, you can hit the ground running.The best news of all is there still time to experience these benefits for that fourth-quarter push.

Simply contact us at www.plasticprinters.com to get started. We'll help you succeed from there! For more information about how loyalty programs work, check out this month's blog post entitled: 5 Surprisingly Simple Steps to Learn the Language of Loyalty.