Welcome to Reservations…Andrew has a piece of paper that he has found that he wants to talk about….if you’re curious like me, you should be here! To see what we do we have created a demo page.
Transcript of the Video: What’s in the Piece of Paper? Self-promotion!
Hey, welcome to old town La Quinta. We’re just over here in old town, next to the Tavern, the old town Tavern. I’m Jeff Harrison and I’m Andrew McCauley. Hey, if this is your first time to join us, this is called Reservations. Tell me a little bit about what we’re doing here Andrew and what the heck is the Reservations.
Well, Reservations is a little live video that we’re doing every single day for the hospitality industry. You know, we were talking about things that are happening in hospitality. Some tips, some ideas, especially about marketing. We’ve been involved in hospitality. I’ve been involved in hospitality for a very long time. I’ve been involved with marketing for a long time and we’ve learned a couple of things around the world that has given us some ideas just to share with people and as we go through and we’ve got a number of clients that we work within the hospitality industry.
We’re finding out some really cool things from really great things that are working for different venues, different types of venues. You know, whether it’s an ice cream shop, whether it’s a hamburger place, whether it’s a sit-down restaurant, a fine dining, the stuff that we’re discovering is pretty cool and we want to share it with everybody. So that’s what Reservations this is all about.
They’re still trying Old Methods
Yeah. You know, and just tag onto that is, you know, you shared a little bit of information yesterday. By the way, we do this daily, Monday-Friday, somewhere between 8:30 and 10. We give you that variation because sometimes we’re traveling, we’ve got an appointment in the morning, whatever, or I have something going on. Anyway, that’s between 8:30 and 10. But you mentioned something yesterday about a report or restaurant industry report that I thought was really important where it said 59% of the businesses, share with that.
Fifty-nine percent of the businesses now, we’re going to make sure this is a right figure and I want to dig back and we’ll circle around this in the next couple of episodes. But the ones that are working really well are focusing on Facebook and Instagram. They’re focusing on that sort of stuff. What was interesting is the ones that are not doing so well, they’re still trying these old methods, radio, TV, newspaper value pack all that sort of stuff, which is just not working as effective as, you know, online and social media these days.
On-Demand Culture
Yeah. You know, I think the biggest reason for that, Andrew, and I know you and I talked about offline, I think we might’ve discussed it here. There’s the huge difference between mass marketing today and targeted marketing. And with that, I think there has to be a little asterisk below that. It says the reason is that we’re an on-demand culture now. We want to watch this, we can go on demand. We want to go live, we can on demand go live, right?
So it’s not one of those things where we’re learning so much from the day where we’re a newspaper ad or TV advertising was so powerful or radio is when we were learning from that source. Right now we can just search Google and say, Hey, who’s the, who’s the best restaurant in the desert for this? Or who is the best restaurant near me that serves this? It’s on demand and if you’re not there, that’s working, get it can get crazy and you missed your opportunity.
In fact, I liked the way you bring up the best restaurant because. Was that a segway? That’s a great segway into what we’re talking about. So today I want to talk about self-promotion actually because the other night I went to a restaurant locally here in the desert. A very nice restaurant actually it was. I went there and one of the things that were on the table now checked up their website. I want it to check the menu and check the prices and they are open and so on. And so on. The Monday night, now over here in the desert, typically we’ve got a truck coming thru right now. Alright, it has moved on.
Self-promotion
So, it was a Monday night in the desert over here, we’re in a very hot area, you can say it’s a very seasonal place too and many restaurants close, which is sad. They close because there’s not enough business. Now, one of the things about closing over here in the desert, is a lot of people still that live here, still a lot of people that want to weed out and these restaurants because they are not busy and they probably haven’t done enough work. I would say in that in the on-season to make sure that we’ve got some off-seasons people. We’ve spoken about this a lot, the restaurants that are still open, still doing really well. So anyway, I went to this restaurant and cut long story short got there and on the table they had, wait a minute. I just wanted to recognize some people.
Well first of all Renee, thanks for joining this morning. Also, Matt Reed. I appreciate you joining us, always following us on that. Sean, Hey! Yeah, you’re right there’s always seems to be a truck in the shot. Albert, Hey, get out there and makes something happen today because you know about winners and losers. I’m not going to go too deep into that, but. Okay, go ahead.
So, anyway, I was at this restaurant and I was sitting down there and on the table at this table, which is great. A lot of self-promotion and they had this particular thing that you probably can’t read this because it’s backward because Facebook does it backward. But let me just quickly tell you what it does.
They’re preaching to the converted
Best of the best, we won. It says we won. You can see up there we won. Thank you for voting us. Now there are 11 sections that they’ve been voted the best team. That’s amazing. Best Al Fresco dining out America, best attraction, best barbecue, best caterer and so on. Alright, best Sports Bar, best live music, best wedding venue now. That’s a whole lot of things to be the best. Right now, I’m very, very encouraged by what they’re doing, but here’s the problem.
Firstly, at the bottom of it is in India, which is not really necessarily known for its restaurants, but hey, good on them for getting out and telling the world about this. Right? I’m applauding them. Here’s the thing, I only saw this inside the restaurant. Now they’re telling me they’re best already. I’m already converted. They’re preaching to the converted on sitting there. Wait. So you’re saying the only place you saw this was after you were already there. I was already there.
This didn’t drive me into the restaurant. I didn’t look around and go, I want to find the best sports bar and go there. I didn’t look for the best. Live isn’t the best Sunday brunch, the best caterer, the best craft cocktail. I didn’t look for any of that, I just happen to be going to the restaurant. Now as I’m sitting there, they’re telling me that the best now. That’s good. I encourage that, but here’s the thing. They’re not telling people who could. This could potentially sway their decision in going out that night.
Run the Ad
Okay, so as an example, let’s say for instance, okay, now we talked about old fashion and current, right? So how is this, I’m going to call it an advertising fail. Well, here’s the thing, you just spent some money on these brochures. Okay. It’s a nice color. Double sided. Wait for one once again, that tells you exactly what they did. Best of the best. So this is pretty cool. But what they’re not doing it, now let’s say that I was interested in a sports bar. I want to look for the best sports bar in town. Okay. They could easily run an ad to people that are looking for the best sports bar.
What would you type in if you were looking for, would you say I want to find them neat, most mediocre. The average sports bar? Yeah. I’m looking on below part substandard sports bar. What would you type in? It’s easy to stand out in sub-standard. But anyway, my point is you got, they could have done this. They could have done a number of things. There are 11 bests here. They could have done 11 different ads for different clienteles
I’m not in any way saying don’t try and cater for all these people. There is a large place, they do a great job, but go and extend this. Going to go and run an ad for the best Alfresco dining because if I’m a diner and I’m looking for Alfresco dining, I couldn’t care if you’re winning venues, I couldn’t care for your sports bar. I’m looking for al fresco dining. I want to sit outside. I want to be out in the lovely weather that you’ve got.
Take some notes
If I’m looking for a sports bar, maybe I don’t care about al fresco dining. I want to make sure you get the best TVs, the best sound you’ve got, all the channels, all that sort of stuff, right? There are different subsets of your audience. This is mass marketing in my opinion here. If you ran an ad and try to tell everyone that you’re everything to everybody, it’s going to fight well. It’s going to cost you a lot of money. So my point is good on them for getting these awards. Good on him for putting it out there. An extra step, go and tell people who aren’t there already, go and tell people that you’ve just won these awards. Eleven awards a lot to be excited and proud about.
Let’s take this a little granular. So if you’re taking notes, now’s a good time to write this down and you should have been taking notes all the time, but here’s what you can do is what Andrew’s saying is, take that best one of those best location, best items that they’ve won for. Create an ad for it specifically for that. They also put up some content. Create a little as an example, we were talking about this earlier, is we put an ad up there, hey, if you’re looking for the best Alfresco dining in the Coachella Valley, you know, we just won this award to find out more. Click the link below and then for learn more, what would you do?
Retargeting
We said, hey, why not put together a short little video that tells them how they won the award, why they’re known for whether it’s their Alfredo sauce or it’s their handmade a dough or whatever it is, or the double o flour that they’re using it, whatever that is to re-enforce that, and then those people who watched that video, there’s a process called retargeting or remarketing, so you can say, hey, people watch more than 50% of this video. We’re going to send them another market opportunity, but now it’s going to be some kind of coupons and trigger that so now can be automated, because I know this sounds complicated, but I don’t. We do this every day.
That’s right. That’s the cool thing about it. It doesn’t have to be complex. Set it up once and it can be over and over again achieved because it’s automated. You know, you can use things like chatbots and all that sort of stuff without getting too technical, but just know that the ability is there. Okay. All you need to know is the ability to say, if you need to know how to turn the light on and all you need to know is the light switch, don’t worry about how it works. Yeah, that’s what we’re here for.
Create a Content
So the point I think to make a great point is s talk about the stuff that you are in your known before you’ve been awarded for, here comes this truck now. While that’s happening, I just want to say it’s really cool that there’s a young lady on the line right now. She’s watching her name is Jucinda Thomas from Oregon. I just want to say welcome Jucinda, you are a rock star. She does similar work with us that we do out of Oregon. So Jucinda thank you for taking a moment and joining us on our show today.
Now, here’s the coolest part of that. We’ve talked about this. In fact, when we started Swing Point Media it was all about building content because we know content is the dominant factor. I don’t care if it was beginning in time or it’s going to be in the future because people always want to know more about you. In content is constantly building that bridge between, I’m thinking about this and I’m making a decision, so with what you’re saying at that particular restaurant couldn’t create 11 different, very powerful pieces of content. Would they also put that on their website is so that when I’m looking up in Google?
It’s going to be there all the time, not just for an ad, right? When you pay for an ad, it’s there while you’re paying for it, as soon as you stop paying for the ad that disappears. But if you’ve got it on Google as a piece of content on your website, Google will index that every single day of the of the year, which means that you’ve got the ability to be found through Google as well without having to pay for it.
Let people know what you are doing
That’s the biggest search engine on the planet bar none apparently. And if that’s not good enough, they’ll put you on YouTube, and that’s number two. So they own both of those, by the way. So what’s the biggest takeaway from today?
I think the biggest takeaway is that we’re going to a new game called guess the truck. Okay, so when you hear a truck, you’ve got a guess in the comments, what sort of truck it is, and we will give away a prize to the person gets the truck. Seriously, the biggest take away is good on you, self-promote. Let people know what you’re doing. Okay, good to do it in store, in a restaurant, but get out there and don’t preach to the converted. Let people know that you’ve done some great work. Let them know you’ve been voted by whoever is voted you win an award. We’ll let them know that if they’re searching for the best, whatever you’re it.
That’s right. And then one thing that you mentioned early on was the fact that not only write the article and put it on your website or make the video, put it on your website, put on Facebook, but also run some ads to it and believe it or not, you can do that very inexpensively. You can do a dollar in a campaign and drive traffic to that because you’re doing something locally if you’re a local restaurant or a local business owner. That can be very inexpensive.
We’re an On-Demand Society now.
I’ve been talking about chatbots before. Chatbots to just go crazy on it. If you want to see a demo of what we do with this, by the way. I think you might’ve put it, in the title, swingpointmedia.com/demo, check it out. We’ve got a little live bot for swing point burgers. We own our own restaurants. It’s a virtual restaurant. Hey, they could do that with and what was that thing called? Farmville. This is Swing Point Media Burgerville. It’s swingpointmedia.com/demo. Go and check it out. There’s little thing that we show you. Some graphs and stuff like that to this video and have a look at what we do. This is how it works. If you’re interested, if not, don’t go in there.
So today when you are, when you have something you want to do, I want to tell the world about your world, local or global, think about not doing it the old-fashioned way and mass marketing and also like Andrew had that page up there. Don’t stuff it like a burrito. Don’t put everything in there and the kitchen sink because what happens is when you’re trying to talk to everybody, nobody listens because we’re looking for very specific information because we’re an on-demand society now. So make sure when they say, Hey, I want to know the best place for live music near me, boom you pop up, that’s all I got. Okay, you guys have a great day. My name is Jeff Harrison and I’m Andrew McCauley,
We’re Swing Point Media and this you’ve been watching Reservations. Tell a friend. Hey, just invite people over to the house, somewhere between 8:30 and 10. Have a brunch, join us and get involved. Thanks for joining us guys too. See you later.
SwingPointMedia is a marketing company focused on using content marketing, such as written articles, video and podcasts, to attract their customers ideal audiences. This approach has proven to attract higher quality customers while simultaneously reducing the sales cycle by as much as 70%.
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