The year was 2018, and I’d just published my book “Don’t 86 Your Restaurant Sales.”  It was pretty easy to gain your customers’ data by engaging them in a conversation and using an irresistible offer to drive the first visit. After that, you use their data correctly and build relationships through email, text, messenger, Grassroots, and social media marketing.  

Turns out I was wrong.  

I had no clue how hard it would be to convince you, restaurant owners, what marketing had become in 2018. 

I’ll be honest: In 2018, I was naive. 

I’d been watching the transition of marketing happen since 2002. Since 2008, I’ve had a front-row seat, building my marketing company and watching consumers’ attention shift from mass media to smartphones.  

My marketing career started in 1998 as the internet was beginning to blossom.  

In 1998, you watched a Bengals game and sat through the commercials.  

By 2008, you were on your phone typing things like “is watching the Bengals beat the Steelers” during a timeout. 

By the time this book came out in 2018, you and your Facebook friends had become the media. Your Facebook posts and tweets had become the actual news. You posted video clips of plays and broke down what did or didn’t happen.

 Now, let’s take this a step further.  This is just covering social media.

In 1998, restaurants had limited access to and knowledge of how to market independently.  So I can understand why you were not doing it back then.  But by 2018, you all had access to email, texting, a website, social media, video marketing, and better grassroots marketing tools than ever before.  

By 2018, you could film a video on your phone, post it to numerous sites, and become a reality show FOR FREE.

By 2018, you could gain customer data as simply as someone commenting on a Facebook post and triggering a conversation in Messenger to acquire their contact information.  

By 2018, you could run a targeted Facebook ad ONLY reaching consumers near your restaurant on their birthday.

By 2018, you could go to the local high school football game, livestream a play, and put a call to action in the video for someone at the game to comment. You’d bring them a gift card to their seat at the game. 

By 2018, you could go door to door in your community, signing small businesses up to win a catered lunch for their employees.  You could have them enter the contest by scanning a QR code and answering a few questions.  This would also trigger a sequence that would email the person who entered with an offer they could forward to all of the employees.  

All of this and MUCH MORE were available in 2018, and here we are in 2024, and 99% of you still need to do it.  

What I thought would be revolutionary in 2018 turned out to be noise.  Noise that restaurants couldn’t grasp or didn’t want to.  I still don’t know why most of you have not taken the “bull by the horns” and dominated your marketing in 2024 like you could.  

So, as I type them, I’m still screaming from the rooftops how easy restaurant marketing is in 2024.  It’s not rocket science, but you’ve got to be willing to invest your time and money into technology, relationships, and marketing.  

In tomorrow’s blog, I will outline what I think is a low-hanging fruit opportunity in restaurant marketing, one that you all should be using as a part of your restaurant marketing mix.