Day 36 – The Puzzle – How To Grow Your Restaurants Catering, Loyalty, Charitable and Special Events Marketing

Today we’re going to talk about how to grow your catering sales, build your loyalty program, drive traffic to special promotions and have massive success with your restaurants charitable efforts. It all starts with having the marketing funnels built for each of these efforts, but MORE IMPORTANTLY having traffic to them.  And that traffic is likely going to come from your best customers, you know the frequent ones. 

For years I have railed on the ineffectiveness of Restaurant Loyalty programs due to the lack of consistent traffic after the initial launch.  Loyalty marketing companies make restaurant owners think their problems will be solved by having an app or loyalty program and that couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Loyalty programs are like having a Ferarri with a quarter tank of gas, you’ll only get so far.  BUT if you could have a full tank all the time, why not?

Well, the same goes for Catering sales, special events and charitable efforts.  You need to have a steady flow of new customers into that marketing funnel every month and you must have a solid nurturing program to make the magic happen. 

GROWLER SALES – Let me give you a really good example, back around 2015 one of our clients, Hofbrauhaus Newport, wanted to start selling Growlers and Crowlers.  So they did what everyone does, they put up some in-store signage and trained the staff on how to sell them to customers.  And guess what happened, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!  They did not sell. 

So they turned to Matt Plapp 🙂 In our marketing meeting I rolled out MY digital plan.  I had compiled a list of our top customers who were in the Stein Master Program, our newly created Loyalty Program and customers who engaged with our email marketing the most.  I did made them an offer they could’t refused and put them into a marketing funnel that included email, text and Facebook retargeting ads.  The result, over 2,500 growlers gone in a few days.  

CATERING SALES – Next let’s talk about the text above that I got from a client of Restaurant Marketing That Works & Repeat Returns.  Now I want to talk about a few items before we go any further. 

Marketing customer acquisition is made SO MUCH EASIER when you have a great brand.  People often blame the lack of success of advertising on the ads, the platform (like Facebook) or the company doing the work, but many times it’s the lack of momentum their restaurant has in their marketing.  PLUS there are many times marketing companies like mine take credit for success that is as much a product of a strong brand as their ads.  

This text message is a product of a great combination.  Yes, our ads are working amazing and this restaurant owner got 650 catering leads in 30 days.  But the reason our catering marketing worked that well was due to the hard work this restaurant owner has put into community marketing over the years.  

The next part of the success here is the fact that his catering sales, from these leads, has skyrocketed.  That my friends is a product of the catering marketing funnel.  We have emails, ads, texts and in this case a client willing to make the phone calls. And these phone calls are not all about selling the his next catering gig, it’s to build a relationship.  

This program and the other funnels mentioned above, like charitable marketing, are all a product of the frequent customers and brand ambassadors that you’ve already developed over the years.

See you tomorrow,l

Matt  

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