Do you stop advertising until things get better or advertise like mad to get sales back up to normal? The wrong answer could sink your restaurant.

If your sales are way off and you stop doing any promotion, your sales could go down even more. But if you spend money that you don't have on an advertising program and it doesn't work, that could be even worse. What should you do?

Let's look at your restaurant marketing options three ways

#1. Stopping all advertising when sales are down has saved many restaurants. The reason this worked so well for them is that the money they were spending on advertising was being totally wasted. It was just that as long as business was good, they could afford to waste the money.

They may have even mistakenly thought that business was good because of the advertising they were doing when in reality nothing was farther from the truth.

#2. It's always a good idea to spend most of your promotion money during the times when you can get the most customers for each dollar spend. For example, if you are in a Summer resort area and you get a lot of customers during the Summer months and not many during the Winter months, it could be tempting to spend money during the Winter months when you really need more customers.

But the fallacy of this is that the few extra Winter customers you would get from this advertising would cost you an arm and a leg to get compared to the cost to get a customer during the Summer months. So unless you have all the customers you can handle during the Summer months, this is the time to spend the most money on advertising.

Many restaurants make the mistake to spending money on advertising when there are no customers to be had. I lived on Hilton Head Island off the coast of South Carolina for almost 20 years and I saw this happen every Winter. It killed a lot of restaurants.

The successful restaurants cut way back or even completely eliminated all marketing expenses during the Winter months.

#3. Sales being down and cash being short could be the best thing that has ever happen to your restaurant. The reason is that it will force you to cut waste in all areas -- including advertising and marketing. And it will force you to look at and implement some of the low-cost and no-cost marketing techniques I've been revealing to you each week.

In Summary:

If your sales are down and cash is short, immediately stop all non-productive advertising. And consider all advertising to be non-productive if you don't have positive proof that it really is making you money.

Implement only free or extremely low-cost advertising and promotion techniques during tough times. The articles on this site are full of low-cost and no-cost promotion techniques. Go back and review (and then implement) some of them now.

When cash flow gets is better, you can (and should) test a few marketing techniques that require some cash to implement, but by all means, track every advertising campaign to see if it's profitable.

Remember my motto (and hopefully, yours too my now), When it comes to any advertising or promotion campaign, Track it or Trash it.

But wait -- everything is not bad. Some restaurants thrive where others fail

Last Tuesday night I went out to eat. There was a 45 minute wait to get a table at the restaurant I went to. The sad thing about it was there was a restaurant across the street that I had eaten at the week before that had shut down and gone out of business.

What was the difference between these two restaurants?

Here is one difference I know about. The restaurant that went out of business spent ZERO dollars and ZERO effort on promotion during the last year.

The restaurant that had the 45 minute wait to get a table had a story about them in the local newspaper the previous week. They spent zero dollars too, but not zero effort. This free article didn't just happen. Someone had sent a press release to the newspaper.

I hope this article has given you some inspiration and some information about what you should do to market your restaurant at this time.

Start by reviewing and implementing some of the no-cost and low-cost marketing and promotion techniques described in the articles on this site. Go back to the Home page at http://www.MarketingYourRestaurant.com to see these articles.