Every touchpoint a customer or prospect experiences is marketing. Some are major like a website, and some are minor like how the aprons look on your staff.

With close to ninety percent of communication being non-verbal, it’s important to take inventory of everything and anything that can persuade or influence a sale.

Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed for the latest episode of Forktales, the popular restaurant, beverage and hospitality industry podcast.

Though I know a thing or two about sales and marketing, I have always been a later adopter of social media. 

Leonard Bernstein once said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”

Never having quite enough time feels like a prerequisite for owning a catering business. Something always comes up to throw you a curveball. All we can ever do is roll with the punches.

The one thing we do have control over is the plan.

Getting reviews for your restaurant or catering business is one of the most important activities you can do to improve your catering marketing.

CaterZen’s catering software has made the arduous process for getting client reviews completely automated. We also ensure that your reviews are optimized for search engines and prospects.

When I first opened my restaurant in 1992, I wasn't thinking about niche markets.

In fact, back then, I had never even heard of Black Friday. I'm a buyer, not a shopper.

But when a local department store, Dillard's, called my restaurant to order a drop-off catering for approximately two hundred people, it piqued my curiosity.

Infomercials are full of lies.

When I was a kid, I was into advertising marketing before I ever really knew what it was. I would read magazines from the back to the front so that I could look at the ads first.

Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night and watch infomercials. I remember how cool I thought Ronco Pocket Fisherman seemed, that was one of my favorites.

So I was a fan of direct marketing, long before I had any clue what it was or how it worked.

Michael Gerber, author of the amazing book 'The E Myth', was very helpful for me when I was first building my business.

The biggest takeaway a lot of people have gotten from that book is that you should always be working on your business, not in it.

Anyone who’s followed my career knows about my famous x-ray mailer.

In May, there’s a week called "Hospital Week", where hospitals will feed their staff as a sort of reward and thank you for all that they do.

I printed sales letters for Hospital Week on a black background, with white lettering on a transparency film, so they looked like an x-ray.

Don't get bored with the old.

There's a reason why we use the expression 'the tried and true'.

Sure, it's great to try out new ideas and try to think outside the box once in a while.

But when you're planning your marketing strategy for the whole year, the most important thing you should be focusing on is utilizing the things that have already worked for you in the past.