Chefs+Tech: TripAdvisor Says Restaurants Don't Have Time to Market Like They Want

Editor's Note: In September we announced that Skift was expanding into food and drink with the addition of the Chefs+Tech newsletter.  We see this as a natural expansion of the Skift umbrella, bringing the big-picture view on the future of dining out, being fanatically focused on the guest experience, and at the intersection of marketing and tech. Bonus: We now publish C+T twice weekly. Survey Finds Most Restaurants Want to Market More Restaurateurs know that marketing is vital to business success, but most don’t spend as much time on it as they’d like. In a newly released survey, TripAdvisor looks at restaurant marketing in five markets around the world (U.S., UK, France, Spain, and Italy). What they found isn’t too surprising: the majority of restaurateurs surveyed said they spend 10 percent or less of their time on marketing their business, and 12 percent globally have hired a marketing specialist or worked with a consultant. But this doesn’t reflect what restaurateurs want to be doing; 71 percent globally (and 85 percent in the U.S.) believe they should be marketing more. Review and ratings sites, like TripAdvisor and Yelp, have become established players in the restaurant space; plenty of people take to online reviews when deciding where to dine. Extending that content to restaurant marketing is an easy leap — the reviews and images are already there, contributed for free from the community. More importantly: potential customers are already there, searching for the right spot to d