Marketing starts with day one! Before you even open you can create a facebook, Instagram and twitter page/account and start letting the world know that you will soon be "the place to be". Share those pages with your friends so they can share with theirs, and so on and so on and so on... And that is just the beginning.
Once your doors open you need to capture your guests' contact information. Consider several ways to do this. During the opening weeks, have a drawing to win something for free, customers fill out a form with their name, phone number, e-mail and home address. You need to get as many ways to contact them as possible. After the first month, create a customer service survey and on that survey, ask for contact information, again- name, phone number, e-mail and home address.
Using these forms, create a customer database using excel with columns for first and last name, street address, city, state, zip, phone numbers and email address. This way you will be able to target customers by city/zip code and send different forms of marketing materials through e-mail, text and regular mail. It is important to touch your customers often and in different ways; the public gets bored easily - so keep it fresh.
Next blog will talk about the ideas and ways to communicate with your customers and keep them coming back!