Best Marketing Strategies to the Restaurant Industry

Reservations- a show dedicated to providing today’s best marketing strategies to the restaurant industry. Join Jeff and Andrew weekdays on SwingPointMedia and if you’re a local restaurant and would like to be a guest and get a little additional exposure, comment below.

Transcript of the Video: Best Marketing Strategies to the Restaurant Industry

Welcome to another fun Reservations. We’re back at the gardens on El Paseo and I’m Jeff Harrison and I’m Andrew McCauley, and you’re on our fourth episode. That’s right, even though it’s Wednesday, it’s our fourth episode because we started last Thursday or last Friday. We have somebody, we want to tag Andrew. Yep, we appreciate that. Hey Andrew, you know a lot of times whenever a restaurant opens up, it’s always like the hottest thing on the list. Then when the next restaurant opens up, it’s not the hottest thing on the list. How does a restaurant go about or what would you recommend a restaurant do so the bloom isn’t off the rose if you’d say.

It happens a lot. Oh by the way, hello to all who are joining us too. Thanks for dropping in. If you have any questions by the way, pop them in the chat. We may or may not see them. I’ll check it. I’ll go in there and check it out. I will bounce in there and say, hey Monica is surfing. Hey, thanks for watching Monica, I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us.

Create A Database

So, back to the question. One of the things that many businesses do, it doesn’t matter whether its restaurants or any business for that matter, is that they failed to do one significant thing from the very start and let’s collect a database or create a database. A database can be of people that are frequent in your restaurant. It could be a database of people that are actually interested in but maybe never have gotten to your restaurant doors. Maybe you’ve given away a coupon or a code for someone to come along and enjoy a free cocktail or a discount sort of thing. But they fail to collect and keep that information. Because what happens when you’ve got that information is that you can go out and market to those people again.

So, imagine this, I just went to a nameless coffee shop around here and I walked in there and paid cash for my coffee right now. Not once did, I mean they asked me for my name, which I could have given any name, but the reality was that they’ll never be able to market to me again when they want to, right? They have to wait for me to go back into the coffee shop before they can show me their new ads or the new latest range of coffee line and stuff like that. And this is what a lot of restaurants do as well. They just forget to collect the data.

Now, if they were to say, hey, can you give us your email address or give us your name and your email address? That means that they can email us whenever they want to do the track. And this is what a lot of restaurants are failing to do

Capturing Information To Build Your Database

You know, this particular coffee shop he’s discussing and we won’t mention the name. But we go in there at least once a week and we’ve been doing it for how many years? Two or three years, once a week. We probably know the staff definitely better than they know us. They’ve never once asked us our name. They never once addressed us by name. Apart from this. Oh, that’s right, I’ll try to take that back. They do ask you a surname because they put it on there, but they never say, hey, good morning Andrew thanks for coming back. Or hey, it’s good to see you again, whatever, and nothing.

It seems like coffee shops are very busy and this coffee shop has been around a long time and they should have by now, they should have already known that I noticed when you go in there they start capturing information now about building a database for their further wifi use. But beyond that, they really don’t know a whole lot about us. I mean maybe I’ll never buy anything from them. I just go in there and take their wifi and I’m sitting in the parking lot. Well, they can and go to the bathroom now. Oh, that’s right, without having to be a customer. But that’s not the point. Well, I did notice I didn’t have the key the other day, so that was kind of nice.

Start From The Beginning

So, my point is if you’re a restaurant, start from the beginning. It might be great and a fun when you started out in this new restaurant. Everyone’s lining up at the door. But if you can somehow collect data database, there’s a couple of ways to do this, Jeff, by the way. You can ask for it. Of course, you can do a raffle prize or a monthly draw where they put their business card in and you collect data that way. Maybe it’s signing up for a, a member’s loyalty program or it’s a way to collect coupons that you may give out on a monthly basis. So there’s a number of ways to do it. But the trick is not only to do it but use that as well.

You know, I’m not ignoring you, Andrew, I’m just double checking. I just want to make sure if there are any questions that pop up that, you know, we attend to them. I see a lot of activity on the screen. One of the things I noticed that you said, build that database so you can communicate with them in the future. One of the faults that I see businesses doing when they do get my email address and it’s only short lived because all they want to do is sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. They’re never offering anything except buy me, buy me, buy me. Is there another way to handle that? I mean, a more effective way.

Becoming An Information Booth

Definitely. I mean, let’s think about it. All your customers have questions. Okay. Some have more questions than others and some questions are asked more than others. So maybe it’s a matter of, you know, what, I just want to keep in front of my customers. I don’t necessarily need to sell anything, but maybe I’m going to address once a month a frequently asked question about our business. Do we have private parties or do we do certain types of menus? But what you’re doing is you’re addressing a question that’s often asked often unasked because people think it but they don’t bother asking it. But you’re addressing that so that you’re giving information and becoming an information booth rather than just a salesman.

How Can We Use Tagging

You know, one of the things that as an example, if I were a restaurant now this week, it’s restaurant week. I would be utilizing that platform, that trending topic if you will, in your area. And I’d be talking about not just my restaurant but other restaurants because you know, talk to us a little bit about tagging. Like in this particular video, I did some tags on there, so I’d make sure immediately when this is being shown, it’s also on those pages. How can we use tagging on Facebook lives to actually get traffic?

Tagging is a bit like a tapping people on the shoulder and letting them know that something important that you want them to know about right? So you may want to go and tag some restaurants like we could go and tag, there’s a restaurant just up here, over to the right, my right, your left, wherever that is on your camera, that way. We can go and tag the page. Just say, hey, we just spoke about your restaurant or we’re talking about a particular theme in this video and we think you could be interested in it. So tagging basically taps people on the shoulder and lets them know that there’s something that they should know, we’ll see it here.

How To Get In Front Of Your Audience

When that happens, Andrew, and let’s say, for instance, you’re at your restaurant. Maybe you’re just starting. This is maybe a bit good idea. You’re just starting and you’re sharing content. You’re saying, hey, I do breakfast and I do lunch but I don’t do dinner. So you look at other breakfast and lunch locations in your area. There may be noncompetitive, but they’re close enough that you could overlap some of the clients. Could you kind of get in front of their audience if they have an audience by doing that tagging?

You can certainly do that and if you’re running ads to you can certainly use their, their fan base if you like to get in front of them. This is a cool thing about Facebook ads and we spoke about this the other day, a little bit about Facebook Ads. One of the things that you can do is get in front of you exact perfect audience. Whether it’s an audience that you created or demographic that you think fits your audience or they may like your competitor and you can put an ad in front of those people, which is pretty awesome.

How To Successfully Get The Information

Yeah, we see that a lot in, you know, somebody will come up and let’s say somebody like Tony Robbins as an example. Let’s say that’s your audience. Well, if you’re a local coach or speaker or something like that, that’s a great audience to get in front of and all of a sudden your reach goes from a few thousand to sometimes millions. Yes. And you get your message out there.

Okay, so we’ve talked a little bit about today about how we’re actually a lot today about if you or a new restaurant and you get that influx of activity because everyone said, oh, that’s a new restaurant. I got to go check it out. How do you sustain that? And you’ve talked about number one is get a database. Okay, so I want to. I want to circle back to that and it sounds so easy. It’s almost like saying, hey, you want to be rich to get a million dollars when the lottery great, but how do I do that? What are some things that just give me one thing that a restaurant could do to successfully get that information when they come in the restaurant?

Run A Prize Giveaway

I think I touched on it before, this goes back and this is old school. It’s nothing new, but you could run a prize giveaway. You’re already giving. I mean you’ve already got, while I’m in the restaurant?  In the restaurant coming in the restaurant and you might be coming in and say, hey Jeff, you know we’ve got a prize that month of free steak or whatever. It might be a good valuable prize and you’re only giving one away for that particular month and you might get a thousand people who put their business cards in or give you their email address. That’s a thousand people you’ve got.

Now let’s say that you’re giving away a prize that the value of $500. Okay then, you may not, may or may not want $500 dollars. Let’s work with me here for a sec. Retail, $5 retail right to you. It’s worth $500 to the restaurant. So it’s probably about 120 to 125 to 130 bucks, right? But it’s cost you, let’s say its $500 because it cost you as the restaurant and you get 500 names. That’s a dollar per name that you’re getting that you can market to later. That’s really cheap. So it’s super cheap. That is a very low cost of acquisition for people. And the good thing is you don’t have to wipe them. Once you’ve used them, you can keep using that name and address over and over and over again until they decide to unsubscribe.

We Tend To Want It When Things Slow Down

Hey, I want to say a special shout out to Jerrod Norman. Great guy, Jerrod. I appreciate you dropping in because he is on a track. He does interviews and he’s on 60 interviews in 30 nights. He interviewed a gentleman today who has done tremendous stuff. And he has another one later today. He’s just an animal. And also Bart Lewis Jr., hey guys, thanks for dropping. I know you’re very busy, so I appreciate that.

Here’s something that tends to happen. Stop me if I’m wrong and comment if you’re a restaurant owner and you’ve not done this, comment if I’m wrong, is we tend to want to do these activities that we’re talking about after things slow down. We wake up one day and we’re going, wow, you know the reservation sheets kind of light, what do we do? And then we started doing this but we have no traffic to build it on. So it should this be like, hey, this should be like part of your opening strategy.

We’re sitting here, we’re in Palm Desert. It’s getting hot here. It’s 110 and it’s only 10:30 in the morning or something ridiculous. Restaurants close here for summer. They close and that was crazy. That’s unheard of. They closed because they’re not busy enough and it’s mainly because they haven’t done the work before that. They get to the summer and they go, well, there’s no one around. There are still hundreds of thousands of people that live in the desert year round. We still want to eat. We got our favorite restaurants closed. What the heck?

Get Started

So get started. Day 1, collect the name and address. If you don’t do anything with it, you don’t do anything with it. It hasn’t cost you anything, but you’ve collected it and you’ve got it to use whenever you want. If you don’t collect it, you don’t have it to start with later. Okay, so we challenge you to go out and do that now.

Here is the biggest issue and there are tons of electronic ways to do this. I don’t want to get into any of them, but I just want to encourage you that there are tons of electronic ways to do this so that you get accuracy. Because the number one problem with gathering names and email addresses is everybody writes down on paper and then you get there that night at 2:00 in the morning when you close it up and you can’t read it or you do it wrong. Gather electronically. Don’t try to do it by hand. That’s so old-fashioned. There are so many ways you can do it where you can scan it, you know, all kinds of stuff.

Check it out. Maybe we’ll put some information in the resources. We’ll find a few things. Who will put them in there? If you’re interested in that, just comment below. Let us know. Okay? That’s it. Hey, we also want to encourage you, if you’re watching this, whether it’s live or it’s recorded later and you’d like to be on the show and you’re a restaurant owner, we’d love to come to your restaurant and give you a little bit of traffic, a little bit of an awareness because we do get a lot of viewers on this.

When The Tide Comes In, All Ships Rise

We’d love to just come to your restaurant and we’ll challenge you with a question or you bring a question up and we’ll help you work through it because I guarantee if you’re dealing with it, so are the restaurants and its benefit to all of you. It’s like, what’s that saying when the, when the tide rises, all ships where the tide comes in, all. That’s it. When the tide comes in, all ships rise.

So that’s what we are. We want to help you out. So hey, Hove asked a question. I noticed your guys. Audio is really good. Do you mind taking a picture of your phone? Actually, I’m not even using this. We actually have a wireless mic. So we’ve got a mic hooked up here that’s why the sound is so good. You don’t have to do that. But you know, now we have some space between our camera and us. Hove, thanks for asking that. I’m hooked up by the way. So anyway, thanks for joining us. We’ll be back again tomorrow from another city. I think we’re actually traveling tomorrow. I’m not sure. I think we’re actually possibly moving out of the desert because it is getting hot. My apple watch is getting hot and we’re going for cooler ground. But again, if somebody sends us a message and said, hey, come to the fixed across here on El Paseo or someplace down in Palm Springs we’re there and we’ll see you guys tomorrow.

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