Food Preparation Business Plan

The What’s For Dinner? website will be the virtual business card, party scheduler and payment acceptance source all rolled into one. It will showcase our services and highlight the benefits of using our company.  The website will be a crucial portal for party scheduling, as well as having availability cross-referenced with party menus. Customers will also use this website to register for their parties and pay for them using PayPal, which accepts MasterCard, Discover Card, Visa, or e-checks.

6.1 Website Marketing Strategy

The What’s For Dinner? website will be a strategic and very important part of our marketing mix. It will be used as a marketing tool to attract new customers, and as a sales tool to schedule parties, select menus, and pay. We will be promoting our website in all marketing programs, including newspaper ads, yellow page ads, business cards and flyers. We will also purchase targeted key word searches to help potential customers find our website. In addition, our website will feature prominently on all napkins, packaging, and receipts which current customers bring home, making repeat business easy and convenient.

Our main internet strategy is to direct the majority of our potential clients to our website first, as the introduction to our services, prices, and availability. This will reduce the time necessary for staff to provide basic information over the phone, allowing them to answer customer questions and provide more details, once customers know who we are, what we do, and how we might help them.

To encourage customers to use the website, we will offering special discounts to those who register their parties with our website and pay online. Our website must be easy to access and navigate, and must answer every customer question we can anticipate. It must use a legitimate, well-respected security feature and a reliable payment method. If it is all these things, many of our repeat customers will be happy to save time by researching party options and scheduling them online.

Clearly, we expect website use to be highest among younger, internet-savvy customers. We anticipate that our senior customers will use phone and direct contacts for most scheduling and payment interactions.

6.2 Development Requirements

The What’s For Dinner? website will be developed with the technical resources of a local web design artist. He has designed websites for over 325 businesses, most with e-commerce capabilities. He is designing a database interface which will let us adjust the schedule and track click/sales ratios, and easily update menu offerings.

As the website development progresses, he will work with a local graphic artist we have hired to come up with the website logo and graphics. We are still researching hosting possibilities, but feel our needs will be best served by subcontracting out the hosting of the site and the technical back-end supporting.