Attention all restaurant owners, you don’t need a website in 2024! Well, that may be a little bit of clickbait. Check out the latest video on my channel to find out what your restaurant’s website needs to drive sales
https://youtu.be/lOnKGhJbudI?si=zDEnxHA84_JiD5Tp
#shorts
Hope and pray.
You HOPE your customers had a great meal.
You HOPE your customers had a great experience.
You HOPE your customers enjoyed the atmosphere.
And then you PRAY for them to come back.
That’s different from how your restaurant’s marketing should operate.
Your marketing should be strategic and well thought out. Take a look at the marketing calendar above. You’ll see that every day, there’s a list of marketing campaigns to go out for this Burger joint. You can see 81 customers and 12 funnels on the day I’ve highlighted. This is the opposite of HOPE & PRAY. This is what I like to call ‘Aim & Expect’- a proactive approach where you aim for specific results and expect them to materialize.
Marketing is about targeting customers and creating action. You can automate your marketing efforts with the right tools, like our DRYVER platform. This restaurant, for instance, has 12 marketing campaigns that fire every day on auto-pilot. The rest of the customers are put into other banks, and our team will work with the restaurant owner to target them with ‘One-Off’ campaigns and promos.
As I type this, NKY is getting crushed by a rainstorm. And as I finish this blog post, a friend of mine company sent out a great email. Look at the message below from Mella. I’m a past customer, and our area will undoubtedly have its fair share of homes and businesses with damage that need Mella’s help (fingers crossed, not me). In this case, they took a targeted list of past customers and aimed at them with a message that’s sure to land with many.
And to take it a step further, when I clicked the Mella logo in the email to link it to this blog, it took me to a page on water damage needs!!!! Mella, you all rock!
Friends, let’s get out of the “Hope & Pray” business and start AIMING marketing campaigns for the right customers so we can expect a result.
It’s not often that I am impressed by a restaurant’s marketing and branding, but I was today on a visit to the headquarters of Cassano’s Pizza King.
Cassano’s is a heritage pizza restaurant in Dayton, Ohio, and a DRYVER client. This week, a few of the team headed North to dig into their delicious pizza and get to know them better. Upon entering their HQ, I was WOWED!
The attention to detail in not only preserving their brand’s story but also modernizing it is truly impressive. I’ve visited many restaurant corporate offices, and none have demonstrated this level of modernization.
Not enough remember to honor the past, and too many fail to update it.
Not Cassano’s.
From the lobby to the hallways to the conference room.: you never forgot where you were and where they’d been.
The personal touches their marketing team added throughout the building had a marketing guy like me smiling ear-to-ear.
Independent restaurant owners, are you ready to attract new customers who will spend more, and stay loyal for years?⬇️
Then it’s time to check out our POS-integrated Customer Relationship Manager, DRYVER!
With our marketing solution, we are revolutionizing the restaurant industry. With DRYVER all of your customer data is in one platform, allowing you to drive sales on autopilot and build loyalty with the click of a button.
Ready to learn more? Click the link below and have a call with the team at DRYVER today:
https://getdryver.com/
#shorts
I’ve always loved data, but more than that, I’ve always loved data that showed SUCCESS!
When we acquired Repeat Returns in 2023 and merged it with our marketing firm to join the DRYVER restaurant marketing platform, it gave me much more data. But I also had to learn where to look in this new software to find the gold nuggets. Now I know I pull three reports when trying to help a client: membership growth, member orders, and SALES!
So, whether you’re a client of ours or use a different restaurant loyalty program, here is what I’d look at if I were you.
The first place I start is GAS! What’s your car need to get from A to B, you guessed it, gas! Every loyalty program I’ve ever seen stumbles here. I recall a conversation in 2016 with a friend about his loyalty program. He was telling me how great it was performing. He then went on to tell me he had 1,400 members. I asked him, “You’ve built a 1,400-member program over 10 years? You’re telling me over the past 520 weeks, you’ve only managed to gain 1,400 customers for your loyalty program?”
His expression turned somber, and the weight of disappointment was palpable. “Yes,” he replied, his voice tinged with regret.
The stats for the restaurant above are what I covered in episode 737 of my podcast (CLICK HERE TO LISTEN). This restaurant only added 20-40 customers per month to their loyalty, 100% through their online orders: no in-store customer acquisition, no social media customer acquisition, and no external online customer acquisition.
This is always the first hurdle to overcome. With the right effort and training, any average restaurant can quickly gain 150 new customers monthly through in-store marketing. As seen in this chart, a significant spike in new member enrolments in August 2023 prompted me to delve deeper into the following two charts.
Orders are easy; I want to ensure it’s going up at the same rate as sales. If I look at sales second, I could be led down the wrong path if their sales are only up due to a price increase. This order stat is a way for me to ensure we are on the right path, a confirmation of sorts.
Last, I want to see if there’s a sale issue or trend. Which, in this case, was apparent. I showed the customer that by simply increasing his membership, he grew his sales by 32%! Look at the image below. He did that big upload in August and then kept adding 3x customers after that, and his sales stayed at a much higher level, an average monthly increase of $2,100 from his customer database. The dip shown in the past month is due to Summer being his worst month every year. When I pulled this report halfway through September, he was en route to an $8,000+ month once again. Again, that’s not his entire sales, only the sales from his loyalty program, typically around 15% of most restaurant sales.
I love highlighting restaurant owners who know what it means to entertain, and Corey Rowell from @Buffalobrosburgers is exactly that
Corey is a master at using fun, trendy marketing strategies— This is exactly what people want to see on social media! No one wants to be sold to 24/7 so why not get creative? His feed is packed with badass burgers, funny trends, and his community!
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Independent restaurant owners: Tired of battling big chains alone? Click the link below and see how Restaurant Marketing That Works can turn the tables in your favor!
https://americasbestrestaurants.com/get-featured
#shorts
This book really changed my perspective on running my business, but as I type this, it’s time to reread it.
Business owners are faced with problems every day. Take restaurants. A big issue most face is not having enough sales. I had a client in Pittsburgh and was tasked with solving a sales problem at the restaurant during lunch and 1st quarter.
Pretty simple, right? Find sales.
But for me, it was more than that. This was right around when Groupon launched, and we all thought that was a great way to attack Q1. They’d sell a bunch of gift cards to their users, we’d get the cash up front, and then we’d drive the traffic we need in 1st quarter. One thing we misunderstood about Groupon was we thought we’d get the customer list as well, so we could market to them after they used their discounted gift card.
Yes, we got a cash infusion and some sales. But it didn’t solve our problem. They drove the wrong type of customers who wouldn’t visit later at full price. Plus, we couldn’t get any customer data from Groupon, so the people who were an excellent fit for us could be marketed to for future visits.
The issue here is that we fell in love with the solution, which turned out to be a shot in the arm: a bandage.
FALL IN LOVE WITH THE PROBLEM
This experience taught me a valuable lesson-to delve into the root causes of our business challenges. Instead of focusing on how to drive lunch sales, I started to understand why we were struggling with lunch sales. This shift in perspective was enlightening and empowering.
The client was a large brewery on the south side of downtown Pittsburgh. Their food was solid, but they were known for beer and entertainment. They also did not have a parking lot, which required paying to park in a parking garage and walk a few hundred feet to the restaurant. And this was the 2010s; drinking at lunch wasn’t as popular for client lunches as it was many years ago.
Another issue I discovered was where our customers were coming from. Most evening and weekend crowds came from the suburbs or the three colleges up the street. First, students didn’t care about the food, so lunch was out for them. That meant the only primary traffic source we had was the office workers in downtown Pittsburgh. But, when you looked at the headache of leaving the office, getting your car out of the parking garage, driving to the restaurant only to park in another garage, walking to the restaurant, and FINALLY getting to eat. There just wasn’t enough time.
There were some local residents, but they didn’t fit our clientele for lunch, and the nearby hotels only drove a few people per day.
I broke down what I saw as the problems for bad lunch sales:
1st = Location, and no solid traffic source
2nd = Parking
3rd = Beer wasn’t big at lunch for 1-2-1 business lunches
This led me to think about how I could overcome these. I figured out quickly that driving consumers in for lunch would be futile. So I started to think about how we could overcome these issues.
Who does drink beer at lunch?
Who’s not going to have a time limit for lunch?
Who won’t care about the parking garage issue?
EVENTS!
I needed groups. I needed to find business events that drove in large crowds for an extended period and to an environment where social drinking is acceptable. From here, we identified two opportunities:
1st = Tour groups
2nd = Business events
Both of these groups would be fine with the issues that made it tough for us to get consumers, and our marketing spend was worth it to go after one group of 100 vs trying to drag 100 individual customers into the restaurant against their will.
As I recount that story and connect it with this book, I realize the need to pick up the book again. But more importantly, to write down all of our company’s problems and examine if we are too in love with the solution vs. the work we need to put in actually to tackle the problems.
Restaurant Owners: Make sure your QR codes direct customers to the right place! If your QR code is placed next to a catering call-to-action, it should lead to your catering page. QR codes should efficiently guide consumers to the information you want them to see.
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Independent restaurant owners: Tired of battling big chains alone? Click the link below and see how Restaurant Marketing That Works can turn the tables in your favor!
https://americasbestrestaurants.com/get-featured
#shorts
This one is short and sweet…
SHE’S ASKING!
Yesterday, on a call with an owner of a BBQ restaurant in North Carolina, I asked her where she was getting all of her customer loyalty and VIP program sign-ups from. I figured it was her website, but they are 100% coming from inside her 4-walls at checkout.
She said she tried three times.
Her first approach was straightforward, using persuasive language and the ‘assumptive sell’ to entice customers.
If they say no, “Are you sure? You’re going to lose out on all the points you’d get today and a free gift.” This time, she’s taking something away from them.
And then, if they still say no, with a laugh, “What, you don’t want your free item.”
What was exciting about this for me was that she was asking. The fact she’s smiling, having fun, and asking three times is insane, but I’m just stoked to meet a restaurant owner who is making an effort.
