Day 108 – The Puzzle – Two Restaurants Are Running Facebook Ads & Here’s What I Found Out

Not all Restaurant Facebook ads are created equal. 

As you know, I always talk about the power of Facebook ads and how restaurants are CRAZY for not using them to drive sales. This week, I had Zoom meetings with two restaurant owners running Facebook ads, and I was excited. But once we got talking, that excitement turned to concern. I’m sure you can relate to the feeling when you see a fully utilized potential.  

On one hand, it’s great that they see the value and have pulled the trigger.  But on the other hand, they have hired companies that aren’t doing it right. Choosing the right companies to run your Facebook ads is crucial, as it’s only a matter of time before these owners think Facebook ads don’t work versus this company’s broken strategy.  

Both companies run generic video ads directing traffic to the restaurant’s website or online ordering platform.  However, a critical flaw in each instance is the absence of tracking systems to monitor the success of the campaigns.  They cannot identify the visitors to the website or whether they are making a purchase.  They aren’t even attempting to gain customer information.  This is like running a radio ad and hoping someone hears it and takes action.  The MASSIVE value of Facebook ads is the ability to take customers on a journey.  

That journey for me is ABR, a strategy I’ll delve into below. I believe it could be a game-changer for these businesses. 

In addition, the agency’s sales pitch is that the ads are “getting engagements.”  For these owners, that seemed like a minor win, but it’s not. Facebook video views count as engagements, the same way a comment does. Video views are incredible when that’s what you’re trying to get. However, in these instances, the owners hope customers can land on their website and place an order.  

The picture at the top of this page exemplifies how you can be tricked into thinking an ad is working.  The orange box shows you 602 post engagements, which can sound incredible.  WOW, 602 engagements with my ad.  But when you find that 587 were 3-second plays, you realize it’s not all it’s made out to be. While there’s value in a 3-second video view like there is any advertising impression, it’s not the engagement that matters for this ad.  This ad was built for CLICKS, and only 13 of the 602 engagements are CLICKS!

 

As you’ll see in the picture below, the other ads tell a different story.  

 

On the 2nd line, the ad labeled “Opt-In (Message) is an ad meant to get people to click a button that messages the page; the ONLY goal of that ad is to gain new messaging connections.  These message connections get the customers to opt into your marketing program, which takes them on a journey to spend money in your restaurant.  

In this ad, there were 256 engagements, 185 of which were link clicks, the goal of the ad.  Of those 185 link clicks, 55 gave the restaurant their information. Now, this is where the NEXT LEVEL comes into play.  Because we are putting these customers into our DRYVER software, I can see that 14 went into the restaurant immediately and spent $962.   

As you can see, not all “Facebook engagements” are created equal.  

Now, let’s delve into our unique ABR STRATEGY. This strategy, which stands for Attract, Build, Retain, is designed to not just engage customers, but to guide them through a journey that culminates in spending at your restaurant.

A = Attract

B = Build

R = Retain

In my 2nd example, it went like this

A = We spent $242 to ATTRACT the attention of potential customers.

B = We BUILT a database of 55 customers from the 256 post engagements

R = We RETAINED their attention after the ad with emails and texts from our marketing campaign that drove approximately $962 in sales.

And now the fun starts since you have 55 new customers in your database, of which 14 have already spent money.  Those customers will be worth $10,000+ in future sales with no cost associated with them again.

 

In episode 676 of Restaurant Marketing Secrets we talk about this topic, CLICK HERE to listen to this 5-minute impactful podcast. 

Day 107 – The Puzzle – You Can Do It To, Our Journey From Start-Up To $8 Million

From $0 to $8 Million

This past week at the 7FA Mastermind event I was awarded the $8 Million Agency award. I wasn’t really prepared to speak about what it meant, or how I got there.

After the session, I had great conversations with people who appreciated my words. As we talked I was recounting the years it took to build this company and after I spoke with each person I was like “Oh, I wish I’d told them this.”

So on the flight home, I decided to chronicle my entire journey. I wanted to do this because I recall how lonely this journey was from 2008-2016. And even since 2016, it’s been lonely. Let’s face it, it’s tough to talk to others about your trials and tribualations.

SIDEBAR FOR MY RESTAURANT OWNERS

What you’re about to read is my journey as a marketing company, so while it might not seem relevant, it is. The struggles, lessons, and hustle are all the same. To put things in perspective most marketing companies have annual revenue of $200-300,000 and are striving to hit seven figures, like I was in 2016. It’s like a restaurant doing $500,000 aiming for $1.5 million.

Originally I was only writing this for a private Facebook group of the members of 7FA. The reason I decided to edit it and publish it on my blog was simple. I wanted to challenge a good friend of mine, Avery Ward, to write the same post but for his restaurant. WHY? Because he took over a family pizza joint doing $500K 7 years ago and has grown it to over $5 million!

Now that you have some backstory, he’s the goal for our company. As you can tell from the title of this blog, we are an $8 million marketing company at this point, and as you’ll see below that number has been going up every year since 2016 when we decided to make the shift from Me & Ashley, to what you see today.

We are on pace to hit $30 million by mid-2027. My BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) is $100 million by 2030. To put that crazy $100M # in perspective, that means that our marketing firm will be like a national restaurant franchise with a few hundred locations.

NOW BACK TO THE STORY

As I started to write I visualized that moment when I had the microphone in front of all of you on Wednesday, I thought “What would Matt Plapp from 2017 want to hear during that speech?”

I also thought about what I’d think about what someone in that position would say, and how it would relate to me.

Would I believe I could do that?

Would I think it was achievable for me?

Would I have the self-belief that “I was that guy?”

I thought back to my first marketing agency intensive with Billy Gene in the Fall of 2016. How at that moment we did $20-30K each month and what I would take from someone doing 20x that.

Could I relate?

Over the past five days I’ve thought a lot about what I should have said, could have said and now WANT to say.

Most importantly I want all of you to know that you 100% can hit $8 million. It’s simply a number. Think about it this way.
You’ve all done $80,000 in 1 year right? Well, $800,000 is you simply doing that ten times.
And $8 million is you doing what you did to hit $800,000 ten times.

Math, right 🙂

The first time I heard this example it made me say “he’s right, I can do 10x this” and then I scared the shit out of myself because I now saw on paper that $100 million could be done. $100 Million Matt, have you mixed too much coffee and Red Bull Matt?

So I’m going to take you on a journey, if you’ve made it this far, you’ll really enjoy the rest.

This $8 million award isn’t the product of the past 12 months, 36 months, heck it’s not a product of the past 60 months.

It’s the product of the past 25 years.

On March 13th, 1999, I started selling radio advertising at WGRR. This career would last 4 years, and I’d make a lot of money. But more importantly, I’d be shaping the mindset that I’d use 9 years later to launch my agency in 2008.

And if having a full-time job wasn’t enough, in July 1999 I bought a book on web design and built a website for an idea my dad had, an online boat and RV dealership. I knew absolutely nothing about the internet except it seemed like it had a bright future. To put that in layman’s terms, I was not a techie. In fact I made fun of my wife for using this thing called EMAIL 🙂

From July 1999 until March 2003 I would do both of these jobs at 100% of my ability 7 days per week.

In radio, I became one of the top sales reps for our four radio stations and one of the top in all of Cincinnati. But that wasn’t because I knew how to sell, it was because of my Dad. My father is the Michael Jordan of sales and he took me under his wing when I got the radio job, putting me through his own “sales school.” The biggest thing I learned from him was to be a “consultive seller.” He always told me “Don’t sell something they don’t need, listen and only sell what helps solve their problems.” As I matured as a radio sales rep I took this to heart, commonly walking away from deals because I knew they didn’t need what I had. I choose long-term relationships and trust over a paycheck.

In March 2003 I resigned from my job at the radio station to focus on our dealership. What had started as a website was now a 2 location dealership doing $5 million. Over the next 5 years, we would grow to $15 million and one of the top fishing boat dealerships in the country. We dominated the internet and were the top search result on this website called GOOGLE for all things fishing boat-related. I accidentally learned this thing I’d later learn was called “SEO.”

Flash forward to 2006 and my former radio clients were asking me for advice on how to build websites and market their companies on the internet. I had accidentally become a legend in the boat business nationwide with our online presence. And with “fame” came many articles published in industry magazines and local papers about how this small boat dealership was using the internet to sell boats. If you come to our HQ in Florence KY you’ll see many of these articles hanging in our hallways. I’m not sure what caused me to hang onto them many years ago, but I’m glad I did.

As I started to help former radio clients with their websites and SEO I realized how much I loved helping others. And in late 2007 my brother, father, and I all realized we hated the boat business. We’d grown the business on the backs of the banks and the stress was unbearable. Plus, none of us enjoyed managing 40 employees. So in January 2008, we put in place a plan to exit the business by year’s end.

I started working on my agency and I also ended up taking a gig back in radio with the Cincinnati Reds and Bengals radio network. As we wound down the dealership, I was also back to two full-time jobs and running the dealership on nights and weekends. But, I figured I could weather the storm of 3 jobs for a year or two.

Well, one of those jobs went away faster than expected. As you all know the economy collapsed in the Summer of 2008 and so did our dealership.

Our boat dealership went from doing $1.4 million in July 2007 to $48,000 in July 2008. We lost MILLIONS that summer trying to save it, but in the end, we closed up shop sooner than we thought and without the 7-figure exit we had planned 🙁

But with all bad comes good.

At the end of the day, it was a blessing in disguise. It forced me to step up my game on both fronts, the agency and radio gig. I had no choice but to get uncomfortable and put my foot on the gas.

I’m telling you all this to frame the lessons I learned from 1999 to 2008 that made my success as an agency owner a little easier. So now onto the good stuff.

1st – I had no choice. Losing wasn’t an option. This forced me to get really uncomfortable and run harder than ever. You know the old saying “burn the ships”, well I didn’t have to burn my ships, the economy handled that for me. (As I’m proofing this it hit me the irony of that, being we were a boat dealership)

2nd – During my time in radio I learned what would end up being my calling card, ROI. The question I hated asking my radio clients was “How are the spots working?” Clients had no clue, and neither did I. As I learned about internet marketing through our boat dealerships online success from 2003-2008 I came to love it. I could see when a customer got an email, responded with a question, walked into the dealership a week later, and BOUGHT a boat. I could finally answer the age-old question “How are the ads working.”

3rd – I learned what it was like to buy advertising and marketing and not see results. I learned the pain of money leaving the bank account and nothing coming back from those efforts. I think that’s something many marketing people don’t have experience with. In my opinion, It’s much easier to appreciate the need for results when you have felt the pain of writing the check.

4th – I learned to see the pain in a business owner’s eyes. I learned this through my own experience. I recall nights I had to sleep on the sofa with the TV on just so I could fall asleep. Those were the nights before payroll was hitting and I didn’t know if the money would be in the account the next day. On my second stint in radio, I recall a conversation with a guy who owned a transmission company and was a client. I could see it in his eyes, he was in a bad place, and so I asked him “How can I help, you’re not doing well are you?” I was right and I helped him buy marketing from someone else, who I thought had a product better suited for his needs.

5th – I learned the importance of a well-rounded marketing plan executed over a long period. You see, all advertising works. Once you have the right target, it’s simply a matter of putting together a plan to stay in front of them for a LONG TIME! In our boat dealership, I had a plan that covered every possible angle and I had no intentions of giving up on it. That’s why from 2002 – 2005 we dominated every fishing boat dealership in the country. They were focused on marketing that works NOW, while I was working on a plan that would work forever …minus the economy crashing 🙂

I’ve also proved #5 with my agency. If you know me, then you know that we’ve been doing the same thing for many years. From my orange branding, content, ads, and emails, we’ve not stopped and we won’t!

OK, so now onto what my journey looked like from 2008 to today.

I’m going to give you a rundown of our growth year by year and some notes on what I learned or changed along the way. I’ll put next to each year what I recall my mindset was at that time and what our average monthly revenue was that year.

2008 = “What Would You Do If You Were Me”

2008 Average MRR -$2,500-5,000

How I started my agency was pure and quite simple. I reached out to the network I had developed over the years and said “Here’s my idea on starting a marketing agency, what do you think? What would you do if you were me and how would you charge people?” The funny thing was, 4 out of the first 5 people I asked that question said “shit, figure it out and you’re hired.” They were friends and my first 4 clients. I used what they told me they needed and built from there.

2009 = “Paid With $4,000 In A Brown Bag”

2009 Average MRR – $5-7,500

This was a crazy year since I was in radio full-time and building the agency. I wasn’t hitting every radio client with my agency pitch, but many found out and a few became clients. Ironically I was also buying media on my station and every other one in Cincinnati, for my agency clients. This made for some interesting conversations with the radio accounting department, as they’d never had a sales rep paying client bills 🙂

As I thought back on this time a funny, and strange memory came up. I recalled the time a client paid me monthly with $4,000 cash in a brown bag. This has a SIZABLE company in Cincinnati that if I mentioned their name, everyone here would know who they are. I still to this day have no idea why I wasn’t paid through traditional methods. My assumption was the marketing director didn’t want his bosses to know I was the one doing the work, out of concern for his job, but that is just speculation. But I took my money, reported it like all other income, and went on my way.

2010 = “This Better Work Matt”

2010 Average MRR $8,500
In the Fall of 2009, I left the radio job and decided to focus 100% on the agency. During that year of doing both, I had an illusion that I could do that for a while. When I left I was making around $160,000 in radio and I had the agency hovering around $100K. My last radio commission check in November 2009 was around $25,000, so heading into 2010 I had a big ass hole to fill and I turned it up a few notches.

2011 = “I Need Help”

2011 Average MRR $16,000
June 2011 was a HUGE month for me. It’s when I put my fears aside and hired my first employee. I had thought I could do this alone, but I found out quickly that I was not a business owner, I was employee #1! I had bought myself a job, a damn busy one at that. So I sucked it up and realized I could not do this alone. I stood up at a BNI meeting in April and asked for a referral to someone who understood the internet, knew how to use a smartphone, understood social media and only needed 5-10 hours per week. Peggy Sparks referred her 22-year-old daughter to me, and it forever changed the trajectory of this company. Thinking back, I can’t help but think how freaking lucky I was to find someone as solid as Ashley on my first hire. Ashley is still by my side and is in charge of DRYVER, our restaurant marketing software company.

2012-2014 = “Run & Gun”

2012 Average MRR $16,862
2103 Average MRR $15,208
2014 Average MRR $17,137

In these 3 years, it was exactly what it says above, RUN & GUN! I was doing seminars every month, BNI every week and networking like my life depended on it. One thing that helped during these 3 years was the fact I only took on specific clients and knew how to tell others no. This is why we only lost one client from 2008 to 2018, our churn was basically zero. One thing that also sticks out to me is how I was ultra-focused on delivering an amazing product/service and not growing revenue. I think a lot of times we try to scale something without actually knowing that we have an amazing product. I see this in the restaurant business all the time. People open one location and a year later are already opening stores two and three, even though the first one hasn’t made money and reviews are average. I wish I could say not growing these three years was on purpose, but it wasn’t. I simply did not have enough time to perform at a high level for any more clients, so this is where we landed. Plus, I wasn’t worried about making a lot of money, I simply wanted to do something that I enjoyed and pay the bills.

2015 “Shit’s About To Get Real!”

2015 Average MRR $19,000
At this time we had 34 clients from 31 industries. I had no clue that a company like ours should “niche down.” I didn’t know you could focus on one industry and go all in like that, but I soon found out. Everything that we did for clients was a one-off campaign and with clients from all types of industries, it meant that we had very little that we could replicate between clients.

Then, in April 2015 I found what I’d been looking for. A repeatable and duplicatable campaign that worked across multiple clients. The one industry we did have multiple clients in, was the restaurant business. We had 9 restaurants at the time, and when I figured out how to create marketing funnels and campaigns that I could use across all six I was in love. By the end of 2015, I realized I had something here, but I didn’t know what the next step was.

2016-2017 “Build What You Need”

2016 Average MRR $21,000
2017 Average MRR $26,000

The irony of how success found me this year is, well ironic. I was in the midst of building a product that I needed for my restaurant clients. Ashley and I had become really good at gaining Facebook engagements and getting people to take us up on our offers, but something was missing. I needed a tool that would connect to our marketing campaigns that allowed me to gain customer data and deliver to them a trackable offer. The problem was, I had NO CLUE how to do it. In fact, the prior year I’d gone to the National Restaurant Show with hopes of finding this product, and all that I found there were marketing tactics from the 1980s.

Since that time I’ve read many books about major companies we all buy from every day and how their products were a product of a problem someone had. As I look back on this, I smile because all I wanted was to find a way to show my clients how the marketing was working and to drive sales. I didn’t have some evil plan to build a product to sell and take over the world, I just wanted to help and prove what I knew was working once and for all.

This is where IRONY, or maybe the universe strikes. It was June 2016 and I saw a Facebook ad from this crazy guy named “Billy Gene” of Billy Gene Is Marketing. The ad spoke to me. It promised me a flash drive of exactly what I needed in exchange for, wait for it… my contact info:) I could get a free download for my name, email, and phone number. Or I could upgrade for $25 and have a flash drive mailed to me with everything on it. And there was a free webinar that weekend just for agency owners. Long story short, I bought the flash drive, paid for an appointment, and bought EVERY DAMN THING Billy had to sell for the next three years.

As I type this out I am smiling ear to ear. At the time I had no idea what he was doing to me, exactly what I wanted to do for my restaurant clients.

Billy’s programs also introduced me to some great entry-level tech that I could use to build my own system. In 2017 I launched what I called the “ROI Engine” and it worked AMAZING! So with that, I launched my agency nationwide and gained 19 clients. All of which we lost in under six months. Yep, I’d gone from an agency that NEVER lost a client to one that lost them all, over and over again.

So as I sat in the 7FA event last week and heard people talk about their disappointing results. Agency owners one to three years into their journey with 10-20% churn rate and I laughed knowing that I had 100% churn early on as we scaled.

What I’d like to pass onto other agency owners is this. Many of you are trying to do in a few years what took me MANY YEARS. So give yourself a break and realize hard shit is, well HARD. And it takes time.

2018 – 2020 “Stay Focused, We Know What Works”

2018 Average MRR $44,000
2019 Average MRR $73,000
2020 Average MRR $76,000

These 3 years were tough. First, it was avoiding the “shiny object” syndrome, and second “Covid.” 2017 was my introduction to business masterminding. I now had hundreds of friends around the world in the exact business as me. This was great on one hand, and terrible on the other. Masterminding is the ultimate cheat code, it’s what has helped me build what we have today. I can learn from friends who are on the same path as me, some behind and some ahead of me. It’s a great way to find out what potholes to avoid and how to optimize what we are doing.

But there’s also the temptation to fall for a new shiny THING! You see a friend cruising it on this thing called “Bitcoin” and you have to remind yourself that you can’t do everything. I was pretty fortunate that I didn’t fall for many of those items, but I did have one big hiccup. In 2018 after I wrote my first book, Don’t 86 Your Restaurant Sales, I launched a restaurant training to help us gain more clients. It attracted 100 customers in the first push, but 99 of those were marketing companies like mine. I didn’t know how to say no and thought “I can do this and run our restaurant agency. So with that from mid-2018 to the end of 2019, I ran an agency training program and my agency. And while this gave me a short-term victory with some cash, it hurt my long-term growth. My coach Billy Gene and a friend Mike Arce had both told me to pick a lane, but I knew better than them (at least I thought I did). By doing what I did I had split my attention and hurt our core business. So in late 2019 I closed down the program and told myself ONE LANE MATT! But as you’ll see in my next chapter, I don’t always listen to myself.

2021-2023 “Oops I Did It Again” (cue Brittney)

2021 Average MRR $120,000
2022 Average MRR $222,000
2023 Average MRR $406,000

I did it again, by accident. In 2020 my team and I discovered something massive. Everything we’d been doing for years was working, but for some clients, it was working much better than it was for others.

BUT WHY?

Well, it turns out your story and use of social media when you’re a mom-and-pop restaurant is much more important than anyone ever thought. During the pandemic, the big brands, the chains, used their war chest of money to advertise like crazy and drive their sales. Meanwhile, the independent restaurants were stuck getting their asses kicked. But not all of them were losing. The ones we saw winning had figured out that social media wasn’t just a replacement for “Money Mailer style marketing,” but a place to connect with their community. They were using Facebook Lives to tell stories and gain engagement.

That was all I needed to push me over the edge with an idea I’d created a few years earlier, America’s Best Restaurants, a media company for small local restaurants. What started as a marketing idea for our restaurant marketing agency quickly grew to its separate company with 29 employees and an overhead of $4 million…HOLY SHIT!

My goal with America’s Best Restaurants when I thought of the idea way back in 2018 was two prong.

First, I wanted to create a social media first media company focused on broadcasting the stories of independent restaurants. Second, I wanted to create a marketing brand that restaurant owners trusted and that would help elevate the badass marketing that we could do on their behalf.
What I didn’t plan on, was having 4 Mercedes Vans and 30 or so employees filming, editing, and marketing these episodes.

During this time my biggest regret is losing sight of our finances. I put so much money into our product and sales, that I forgot we should probably have an accounting team. Funny fact, up until November of 2024 Matt Plapp did every single thing in our company as it related to money, HR, and payroll. On top of my duties as our CEO and head of sales, I was also our bookkeeper and CFO 🙂 I logged every client payment, collected past-due balances, and ran payroll. Part of that was due to fear of someone stealing from me, but most of it was being thick-headed and thinking ONLY MATT CAN DO THIS! Looking back, had we hired a CFO 2 years prior we’d easily have seven figures in the bank and probably be twice the size we are now, but it is what it is. You live and you learn. Our new CFO Bruce, starts in two weeks!!!

One last thing from these years. With ABR Growing how it did from a marketing initiative to its own company, it did exactly what my agency training program did in 2018, it split my attention. Up to early 2023, I was pretty bummed that I could not get both sides to grow how I wanted, but I eventually realized what we were doing was the ultimate long-term play, and it would help us grow when the time was right and at a level never seen before.

2024 – “The Hardest Part About Writing Your Story Is Knowing Your Worth The Ink”

Average MRR $600,000 (aiming to end 2024 around $850,000 MRR)

Now that you’re up to date, let’s talk about the final piece to the puzzle that we put in place at the end of 2023. I’ve not talked about this yet, but in 2021 our team made our first Vivid Vision. An eight-page document that laid out what we wanted to become by December 31st, 2023. One of the visions was to create a restaurant-exclusive software, Database Dynamite. A software that took everything we did with new customer acquisition through social media and combined it with restaurant loyalty, rewards, and customer communication (email, text, messenger, direct mail).

The reason I felt this software was needed was so we could complete the marketing puzzle and show our restaurant clients the lifetime value of the database we were helping them build. Up to that point, we’d only been able to show them the front-end results of our marketing programs and “hoped” they understood the value of the database and its long-term implications.

But, as we all figure out over time, we as marketers appreciate customer data and the attention you can gain from it WAYYYYYY more than the clients. Clients simply want to drive sales. They want to see results today for what they paid for yesterday. And while I don’t always agree with that, I realize that we have to be able to deliver what they need now, while helping to build the future. This is why we acquired Repeat Returns on November 3rd, 2023, and have spent the past 7 months combining it with our marketing services agency to create our new company, DRYVER!

DRYVER – Helping Restaurants DRIVE sales.

—

So, kids, that’s my story. We’ve got a long way to go before I declare success, but I am damn proud of what we’ve done up to this point.

Stay tuned…

Running Your Restaurant: Adapting to Change and Ensuring Success #restaurantindustry

Employees might not always like their tasks, but they still need to complete them. The success of your business relies on everyone being on the same page and you, as the owner, ensuring expectations are clear and well-communicated.

Ready to level up your restaurant? Check out the Restaurant Marketing Secrets podcast linked below:
https://www.youtube.com/@restaurantmarketingsecrets3580

#restaurantowner #restaurantindustry #shorts

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Day 106 – The Puzzle – Great Restaurant Marketing Idea “The Office Trivia Night”

I love THIS TOPIC!

I’m not going to be long winded, but I think this is a GOLDEN strategy for hyping your events.  

CLICK here to listen to today’s podcast, episode 674.

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Ok, now that you took 5 minutes and listened, let’s get back to business.

The idea here is to gain social media comments for an upcoming promo.  In the podcast, I talk about using posts to illicit customers’ favorite office moments as an opportunity to hype The Office Trivia night.  

Well, after I recorded the podcast I was like “Matt, this can be used for ANYTHING!”

Sporting events = Ask who’s going to catch the most TD’s that Sunday, what’s the final score going to be, etc.

Trivia nights = Simple, as I said in the podcast create engagement posts to get comments around that topic.

Menu launches = Ask people to comment about new items you have coming out, make guesses, which is your favorite, etc.

The list could go on and on.  So I think I’ll sleep on this topic and do another blog post soon with a massive list of posts that could get comments to push something you need to drive sales too.


How to Drive Customers to Your Restaurant with Social Media—The Right Way! #restaurantindustry

When I say “Create engaging content!” this is what I’m talking about! LaRocca’s in Topeka crushed it with this one 👇

An entire post dedicated to the mural wall they have inside their restaurant and guess what?! The post did fantastic on Facebook! I guarantee this post dove visits to their restaurant. So my question for you is- What story could you tell about your restaurant? Drop a comment and let me know.

#independentrestaurant #smallbusiness #shorts

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Day 105 – The Puzzle – Are You Planning To Fail?

You’re busy, I get it, ME TOO!

The other day I was giving a restaurant owner friend some shit about how he’s slacked on his marketing and he fired back “You’ve got a team, it’s much easier for you.”

So, I fired right back at him “What is 56 people today, was me and Ashley for 10 years.  Everything that employees do for me now, I did on my own. So what I’m telling you isn’t from a person that’s not put in the work for many years just like you need to.”

“You’re right, my bad :)” he said.

It was a great conversation, it was me holding someone I look up to, accountable.  Because, at that time what I was seeing was someone who was putting in place marketing programs for THAT WEEKEND!  

If you’re planning this weekend’s promos today, then you’ve lost.  It’s called PLANNING TO FAIL! 

I get it, you have a crazy freaking job.  But I also know that many of your signed your name on the line of many loans and personal guarantees, so it’s time to buckle up!  Your sales today are not a product of this week or this month.  Your sales today are a product of many months and that’s why I’m such a stickler for having a well-thought-out marketing plan and working ahead.  

So go ahead and get caught up, but by August 1st I wan to see you ALL have 60 days planned out, delegate to your team, and a plan in place!

Day 104 – The Puzzle – Get Great Content For Your Restaurant From Here

Today’s post is quite simple, the comment section is your friend:)

I’m sure we’ve all seen posts highlighting sandwich boards like the one above, in my opinion, THEY ARE GOLD!

You can also find great content like this in the comment section on your Facebook and Instagram posts.  I see if every day, consumers being, well consumers, and throwing shade at you.  Well, USE IT!  Take those comments and have some fun with it.  Heck, just this weekend I had a guy saying my Instagram Post was bad, then I clicked his profile to see who I was about to fire back at and HE WAS A VEGAS STRIPPER!!!  You can’t make this shit up, I’ve got a dude that sells his body for money giving me marketing advice.  

In episode 673 of my podcast, Restaurant Marketing Secrets, I cover how you shouldn’t let these morons ruin your day, have a listen.

But this blog post is about how you should turn that “negative” into a positive like the sandwich board up top. 

Day 103 – The Puzzle – How To Raise Your Restaurants’ Online Review Scores

This morning I had coffee with a friend who owns many businesses and he had a question.

“What’s the best strategy to increase your Google, Yelp and Tripadvisor Rating?”

He’s buying a company that was at 4.4 stars earlier this year and over the past few months it’s taken a nose dive to 3.9 stars.  The owners decided to sell to him and I guess they’ve taken their eyes off the ball. (FYI, the image above is not for the business, I can already see someone pointing out this restaurant has a 4.1).

Here’s My Advise To Raise Your Online Review Scores

1st – You need to start sending “survey” requests to customers after their visit.  This would be an email that says something like “How was your visit to XYZ restaurant?  We’d really appreciate your help, can you answer 3 quick questions and give us your feedback?”  Then you take them to a quick 3-question survey that gives them an option of 1-5 for each question. 

–  If they give you below a 4 Star they should land on a page saying “Thank you for your feedback, it looks like we have some improvements to make.  The owner is going to reach out to you personally to find out how we can be better,” or something like that.  Then you have an alert that sends that to the owner right away.

– If they give you a 4 or 5-star review, send them to a landing page that ONLY has 1 link for them to click to leave a review. You should have a headline like “Thank you for your amazing review, we really appreciate it.  It would mean a lot to our team if you clicked the link above and left us an online review mentioning your server and what you had.  Thank you for your business.” 

2nd – Go back to your customer database and send out a mass email asking for feedback, use the same email idea above.

3rd – Have a QR code made about the size of a business card and give it to all of your staff.  When they ask “was your meal awesome today” and get a HECK YES back then WHIP OUT that QR Code and say “It would mean a lot to me if you scanned this an left an online review and mentioned me and your favorite item you ate today.”

When you put in place this 3-step approach above you will gain the positive reviews you need to lift your score.  Once you have the score where you want it, then change where you ask for review, go from Google to Yelp

Few Notes On WHY?

– Why only give them one place to leave a positive review?  Research shows that when people are given multiple choices they are less likely to leave a review.  You are making them think, aka choose, and their default is to simply close that window and move on.

– Why send a survey request vs just the link to leave a review?  Because you want to keep that info private. Many people simply want to be heard, and if you give them a way to tell you how you sucked they won’t go online and leave a negative public review.  

– Why ask for customers to mention the server’s name in the review?  It adds a personal touch and also shows love to your team.  AND you get some great content to print off to handout in shift meetings, which will put pressure on others to get more reviews.  

– Why ask for a specific menu item? Two reasons: #1 SEO value and #2 it will give people looking at reviews ideas on what to get when they visit. 

No one wants an unsolicited dish pic🍝🍆 #restaurantindustry #socialmedia

Red Bull doesn’t post pictures of their product, yet they sell over 11 BILLION cans a year. Their online fans don’t look to them to see pictures of their product- they want to be ENTERTAINED…

Do the fans of your restaurant need to see a picture of your food every time they get on Facebook, Instagram, etc? The answer is NO.

Subscribe to the Restaurant Marketing Secrets podcast to learn more about social media strategy. Link in bio.

#restaurantowner #restaurantmarketing #redbull #redbullmarketing #socialmediamarketing

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Day 102 – The Puzzle – To Get Big Victories You Have To Embrace The Small Ones

Let’s face it, we all want to win!

We all see what’s possible and want it NOW!  I struggle with this in a big way and over the past 5 years I’ve made a few big mistakes rushing to get there that have set my company back.  

Before we get to the point of this blog, let me tell you a story.   A story about my vision for America’s Best Restaurants and what’s happened since June 2021 when we decided to take the show on the road with the ABR Roadshow and our Mercedes vans.  

In the Spring of 2021, I thought about the vision I’d had for ABR and how I could make it happen.  The original goal in 2018 was for me to travel the country and film at 10,000 restaurants.  But when my wife pointed out the amount of travel that would take and the toll it would have on our family and life, I shelved it.  

Then when the pandemic hit I knew America’s Best Restaurants had to happen. After the shutdowns, we saw a big difference in the success or failure of restaurants based on their connection to the community.  Many restaurants who didn’t struggle with sales were amazing storytellers and used Facebook to broadcast their stories.  But the problem was MOST Independent restaurants weren’t telling their story AT ALL!  

They were ONLINE GHOSTS, Google Ninjas, with regards to their story.  And without your story, you look just like McDonalds and Outback Steakhouse minus the big ass advertising budget.  

So, with that, I came up with a crazy idea.  Let’s buy a Mercedes Sprinter van, wrap it, and drive nationwide to film at restaurants.  From June 2021 until December 2021 we filmed at around 400 restaurants from Florida to Michigan.  We did this FOR FREE!  We ate the cost, which was upwards of $1,000,000 because we were testing the idea and we honestly had no idea if it would work.   

WELL, it worked 🙂

In 2022 we regrouped and relaunched the ABR Roadshow. Now this is where shit gets real.  Up to June 2021, my marketing firm was profitable.  When I launched ABR I wasn’t sure what to expect.  The following 3 years would be a spending frenzy launching my company into unprofitability.  

I was telling some friends this story yesterday and estimated our spending at North of $5,000,000 to fund our agency and build ABR.  Then today I decided to go a little deeper and I gotta say, I wasn’t close. As I dug through spreadsheets my eyes kept getting bigger 🙂

From June 2021 to June 2024 we burned through $13,173,000.  If we were to have run $13 million through our company in the prior three years (2018-2021) we would have had $4 million in the bank based on the profit %’s from those years.  But with ABR we were in unchartered territory and doing it all on our own, without the help of venture capital or fundraising.

This past April was the first month in 3 years my company was profitable again.  We’ve been profitable ever since and we are not going backwards.

NOW BACK TO THE POINT OF THIS BLOG

As I was flying back from Miami this week I was bummed at the profit #s for this week.  We were profitable, but I’d hoped we’d be a tad higher.  But then I reflected on this week from 2023 and smiled.   
 
Then I recalled this graphic I’d made to illustrate the journey and how hard it is.  The image at the top of this page is our sales year over year for our restaurant marketing division since 2016.  This graph tells a pretty awesome journey, right?  Starting at $0 in 2016 and heading to $20 million by the end of next year, that’s HUGE!  

But the real story is the graphic below.  Because hidden in that growth are a lot of bad months. The graph below shows what 2 of those years look like when you zoom in and look at each month.  You see what we all see, a few steps forward and then one back.  In some cases many steps backward.  If I were to zoom in on this weekly you’d see an even bigger struggle. 

To get those steps forward you have to have the steps backward.  It’s just a part of growth.  

And that brings me to the title of this blog “To get the big victories you have to embrace the small ones.”

Yes, this week wasn’t exactly what I wanted to see, but it’s a step in that direction.  I know we will hit our goal of $30 million in annual sales by May 17th, 2027.  

But I want it now…right 🙂

So as I sat on there on the plane thinking about what success looked like for me, I thought to myself, “Matt, this was a great week.  We need weeks like this to get to the next level.” 

So if your restaurant is doing $15,000 weeks and you know it can do $25,000, don’t sweat it.  Take a calendar and work backward.  Figure out the minor wins you need over the next 156 weeks to get to that point and stop trying to get to $25K next week.  It’s not going to happen and you’re only going to be disappointed like I’ve been so many weeks the past 3 years. 

As they say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” so why should we expect our success to be come that fast?