Day 57 – The Puzzle – Restaurant Customers Lifetime Values…A Missing Puzzle Piece

It’s not always what you expect.

Late last night David, Peter and myself flew to Virginia Beach to film episode 4 of The Heroes Of Hospitality, link below.

I had a picture in my mind how the 2 days of filming would go.

To me it was a pretty simple task, sit down and have a conversation with a client of 4 years about where this marketing relationship started in June 2020, where we are now in June 2024 and where we MUST get to for all future Junes 🙂

Dean is by far one of our most analytical clients.

You see, a few years ago Dean was the subject of a VERY in depth team meeting. He’d made some observations about the marketing we were doing together that some of us didn’t agree with.

Had this been a few years earlier I would have thought “WHAT, how does he not see what we are doing. Why’s he questioning these results.”

But I’d evolved as a marketer, entrepreneur and CEO. “This Matt” said AWESOME, this is exactly what we need. We need clients questioning our results, our theories and ideas. We need clients to push us to new limits and ones to FORCE us to make constant improvement.”

Flash forward to 2024 and we’re in a meeting planning out the Docu Series and the ideal clients to use as case studies for each side of the company. Dean was #1 on my list!

WHY?

You see, one of Dean’s major questions of us has always been “what’s the LTV of these customers? I’m sure many of them are coming back, but how often and what are the sales..”

For 4 years we’ve helped Dean drive $408,538 in sales through our restaurant customer acquisition marketing program. This program has accumulated over 3,000,000 (YES MILLION ) Facebook impressions that have lead to 43,006 post engagements.

But more importantly those engagements have built a database of 13,113 for his restaurant.

AND those customers are the ones who drove the $408,538 from 7,723 visits.

So yes AWESOME results, but WHAT ABOUT after those first visits?

Think about it, those 7,723 visits could have generated 1 visit more in 4 years or 70,000 visits?

That was the issue Dean had, HE DID NOT KNOW!

And this my friends is why we acquired Repeat Returns, a restaurant marketing software that follows your customers AFTER those initial visits (which is what we specialize in).

NOW WE CAN ANSWER THAT and that’s why we flew to Virginia Beach, to meet with Dean and see how his first two months on the Repeat Returns software was going and if it was answering his questions.

What he did next BLEW ME AWAY and it’s in this video,CLICK HERE to watch!

Day 56 – The Puzzle – How A Local TV Station Got DOMINATED By A Mom & Pop Restaurant

Local 12, the CBS TV station in Cincinnati has 746,000 followers.  Biggins Diggins a one location independent restaurant in Massachusetts has 5,200 followers.

So how did this small Mom & Pop restaurant with following 143 X smaller kick their ass on the posts below?

Well it’s actually quite simple, but let’s break down why I think this happened with my top 5 reasons…

1st – TV is DEAD!  Channel 12 may be a big bad media company backed with big bucks, but their time is past them.  

2nd – Channel 12 and other new channels are not the primary news source online for consumers.  They get some attention, but much.  While big media companies were busy ignoring the internet in the 2000’s, consumers and online media outlets became the leader in supplying news.

3rd – The story they posted is about a cable show.  First I’ve gotta say, I love Guy Fieri, the show and what he’s done for the restaurant industry, but CABLE was dead 5 years ago.  Triple D is a badass show, but it’s on a medium that people simply don’t watch anymore and with each day that passes they become more and more irrelevant.

4th – Consumers now have direct access to the news source.  Like I mentioned in point #2 above, WE have become today’s news outlet.  You and I, our business pages and online companies like America’s Best Restaurants.  We have more of an influence over people that TV and Cable TV.

5th – The source.  People LOVE other people and they want to see you win.  The video by Biggins Diggins shows 2 people that are a part of that community and they will get behind that more than they will posts like Channel 12 made.

 

Now let’s examine one big factor that many restaurants don’t seem to take into account.

It’s 2024, what you have in your MIND of what a “TV” station is, IS NO MORE!

TV and Cable are dead, and this thing called Social Media is the new TV station. 

Let me give you an example.  There’s a friend of mine that is for some reason fixated with being featured on Triple D.  He’s always talking about it in videos and making posts about getting people to tag Guy so he can get on the show. The funny thing is, his videos about Guy will get more local views that being on DDD 🙂

Is DDD a badass show, yes.  

Is Guy THE MAN, yes.

Is one of my goals to get Guy as a spokesperson for the ABR Roadshow and America’s Best Restaurants, YES!

But, that doesn’t take away from the facts.  

WE DON’T WATCH CABLE TV ANY LONGER!

Now will being on DDD hurt this restaurant, of course not, there will be a lot of benefits, but NO WHERE close to what he thinks.

Show’s like DDD are easy, really easy to beat at a local level with viewers that are LOCAL!  A show like DDD might have big nationwide #’s, but when you break it down it’s literally a few hundred around your restaurant. 

Now take a video like the one below from Biggins Diggins, that sits with 13,000 plays in less than 24 hours.  Videos like that get 75-85% local views, meaning the reach of this 1 live Facebook video on the restaurants Facebook page will reach 10x+ more than if the appeared on a national televised TV show.  

And the video doesn’t go away, in fact it can and will get better.  

A TV episode only gets seen when it airs, which might be 1-2 times per year.  A video on your restaurants Facebook page doesn’t go away.  It has what we call in the marketing world “evergreen” opportunity.  A video like this on Facebook will gain viewers over a few weeks, Instagram over a few months and YouTube over years.  Plus, you can and SHOULD put a small advertising budget behind it and make it stick around longer. 

And if I didn’t make a big enough point there, let me give you my experience.  

On March 5th 2023 at 9pm I was a guest on one of my favorite all time shows on the History Channel, The Food That Built America.  I was featured in the show 21 times I believe and got a TON of camera time. I was IMPOSSIBLE to miss.  It was a blast and an honor.  They replay the prior weeks episodes every Sunday, so for 6 months on Sundays my episode aired with all the others. 

This was a big honor to be invovled in a show like this.  I was in the company of rockstars like Adam Richmond, who wouldn’t be proud.  

But I quietly wondered if it would do anything or our business.  My team and I were curious how much this national exposure benefit for our company.

It’s been 15 months since the show aired and it’s aired no less than 50 times on the History Channel and it’s done NOTHING for us 🙁

I’m being dead serious when I say nothing.  I’ve had aprox 20 people text or tag me on Social Medai regarding the show.  I get an occasional text with a picture of me on the TV and a friend saying “I know Matt Plapp”.  

And all of this makes complete sense, the show airs on Cable TV and NOBODY WATCHES CABLE TV!

Now let’s take the fight ONLINE vs on TV, since we’ve already established we no longer watch TV.

As you can see above, this HUGE well funded media company can’t beat out the local restaurants video :). Heck, even on their video in the bottom middle with is a PAID feature, they only have 1,600 video views 🙂

They have a Facebook audience that’s 143X larger and a TV presence EVERY DAY hyping their socials.  Yet a local restaurant with an audience a fraction of their size is DOMINATING THEM!

My friends, you have to update your thinking.  You have to think about where we are TODAY.  We are not on sofas watching tv.  When we are on a sofa it’s on a streaming service and our phones.  And the vast majority of the content we consume now is on our phone and away from the home.  

I’ll leave you with this.  

As I mentioned in episode 622 of my podcast, you can get MASSIVE attention, when you mix in some excitement.  And in the video that sparked this conversation, linked below, they are announcing something exciting to their fans.  The owners are giving great news to the people that support them the most and more importantly THEY control the story and get all of the engagement on their platform.

If they can beat the TV and Cable stations, so can you!

 

Day 55 – The Puzzle – Why Does Your Restaurants Marketing Suck?

This is the “STAT” line from a Facebook post made 24 hours ago by a LEGACY awesome restaurant in Cincinnati & Northern Kentucky.

They have 23,000 fans and yet only 6 engaged.

That’s .00026% of their fan base.  

Not 1%

Not a tenth of .1%

Not a tenth of a tenth .01%

Heck not event a tenth of a tenth of a tenth .001%

Now, I don’t claim to know math but I think what I typed above is correct, and if not I think you get the point.  

Basically NO BODY engaged with this post.  

And the bigger reason for that is due to more than likely NO BODY seeing the post.

And the major faction in that, is they’ve not only lost the attention of their fan base on Facebook, but they’ve lost the algorithm. 

In Episode 622 of my podcast Restaurant Marketing Secrets I talk about this and how a local restaurant uncovered PART of the secret sauce, CLICK HERE to listen.

Now Facebook is simply one part of the equation and just because you suck at Facebook doesn’t mean you suck at marketing, BUT it’s a very telling peak into how you market.  

So back to the question, “Why does your restaurants marketing suck?”

In my opinion the answer is found in education and implementation.  

Think about it.  

Why is someone massively overweight?  They’ve not educated themselves on nutrition and exercise.  And over and above that, if they have, then they have failed to take the proper action.  

Why is someone broke, AKA has NO MONEY?  It’s the exact thing, they’ve not taken the time to either figure out why and how, or taken the steps to get UN…BROKE.

People who know and don’t take action, that’s beyond me. I simply don’t understand that, but that’s for another blog post.

So with regards to your restaurants marketing, I simply think you don’t know.  

Restaurant owners are some of the hardest working people I’ve seen in my entire life. I think the root of the problem is that many of you still think of marketing from the 1990’s as marketing.  Back then you bought commercial space from a media company.  And then they helped you design an advertisement. 

That’s not how it works today.  Todays platforms like Facebook are not advertising companies first, they are social platforms first.  Email marketing was not built for you to sell shit, it was built for you to COMMUNICATE.

I could go on and on, but the core issues is that you think every place you can put your message is a radio station or newspaper and IT”S NOT!  

Marketing in 2024 is night and day from 1994.  Back most of what you did within your “marketing plan” was paid advertising and YES that’s how you should have used those platforms.  

But in 2024 your marketing can’t always be advertising, that’s just not how the world works now. And you, as a restaurant owner have to pick up books like the one below and RETRAIN your brain.

Day 54 – The Puzzle – You Must Demand THIS From Your Restaurants Marketing Plan

Marketing isn’t just making a Facebook post every day.

It’s not just sending an email to send an email.

It’s not waking up on February 10th and saying “what are we doing for Valentine’s Day this year, how about this?”

And more importantly it’s not something you do and don’t have expectations, DEMANDS actually. 

I’m of the opinion that anything worth doing, is worth measuring and when I see the state of restaurant marketing today it’s apparent I don’t share that mindset with most restauants.

First, you must have a goal for your business.  Next you must have a marketing plan to help with that goal.  And finally you must have some DEMANDS from that marketing plan

As an example, one of those demands should be a trackable path, AKA restaurant marketing funnel, for the marketing efforts.

I went down a rabbit hole the other day of looking at what restaurants do on Facebook on VERY EASY “marketing holidays” to get attention.  But more importantly I wanted to know what their FUNNEL was. 

As I suspected, most just make a post with a weak call to action.  No tools to take advantage of engagement and no way to measure if it was effective.  In fact the only measuring stick they have is seeing it got NO engagement.  

AND GOD FORBID they have a funnel that leads to trackable sales.

THEN I looked at another marketing campaign that was planned, executed at a high level and measured.

It was a restaurants post for “National Pet Day” on April 11th.  The post was made on April 8th, but planned well in advance.  Planning this allowed for amazing graphics to be created, a solid CTA and a traffic driving strategy to be put in place. 

Over the next week I’m going to talk about my “Restaurant Marketing Demands” and today we’ll start with my FIRST DEMAND…

MEASUREMENT OF SUCCESS!

Let’s talk about what you should DEMAND from a simple 1 off marketing campaign like this and what happened.

#1 – You should demand it get attention, eyeballs!

#2 – You should demand it get’s engagement!

#3 – You should demand a path where that engagement equals customers opting into your restaurants marketing program

#4 – You should demand your restaurants marketing program have trackable systems in place to know who’s in your funnel, when they visit, when they don’t visit, etc. (more on that on the next blog).

SOOOOOO, what happened with this campaign?

But first, here’s how we build our campaigns

We make an organic Facebook post, then we put a $25 ad behind it targeting one of their custom audiences.  Next we send either a text, email or messenger campaign.  In this one we used Facebook Messenger.

No onto the stats (some images below.

#1 – EYEBALLS = It had 3,753 impressions and 2,605 people reached on the post.  It was aprox a 50/50 split between organic and paid traffic.  Now keep in mind, 2,605 LOCAL CUSTOMERS is a solid solid number.  Too many times we think posts need a HUGE audience, but I think you’d all welcome 2,605 customers walking through your doors soon :). The Messenger broadcast (pictured below) had a 76% open rate and reached 2,034 people.  We don’t have anyway to cross reference the audience from each, so I can’t even guess what the duplication would be.

#2 – FINGERS…AKA clicks, comments, shares AKA ENGAGEMENTS = 521 Facebook post engagements including 218 comments and 226 clicks.  The messenger broadcast had a 7% click through rate, which is HUGE.  Emails commonly get under a 1% click through rate.  This one had 191 clicks!!!

#3 – DATA = Aprox 53 people joined their restaurants customer marketing program through these engagements.  Now a single social media campaign takes some WORK to drill down to sales in our system right now.  WHY?  Because many of these campaigns are bulked together since they are all part of a bigger picture.  We are working on a better tracking solution for our new platform, so stay tuned.  BUT as I’m typing this I did a little leg work to simply grab a little data for you, plus it’s LATE at night and I’m tired.  In the week around the promo aprox 15 NEW customers walked into restaurant as a result of this post and spent around $525.  

$500 FREAKING DOLLARS IN SALES FROM A PET CAMPAIGN!

DEMAND RESULTS!

A simple 1-off campaign reached a few thousand people, got around 800 people to engage and drove 15 BRAND NEW customers in to spend $525.  

HMMMMM, what if they did that EVERY WEEK?

But more importantly, what if they are like many of you and don’t have a plan set up to KNOW that happened, then they’d never know if they should do these more often.

Day 53 – The Puzzle – What If You Had A Marketing Platform For Your Restaurant That Did THIS!

As I sit in downtown Cincinnati enjoying a cup of coffee as I work for 3 hours with jazz music in my ears, away from the hustle and bustle of our office, I can’t help but ponder, ponder WHAT IF ?!

Now, really fast on that “hustle and bustle” comment above.  The office I avoid 3 mornings per week, so I can get some DEEP work done, was Me, Doug and Austin this time 3 years ago and now typically 30 people work out of that office daily.  When I’m there is really tough to dig deep into work due to my teams needs, my own distractions and of course ping pong 🙂 WOW, just WOW how things have changed.  When I bought that building in January 2021 It was to create a place I would love to be at every day (which I do), but also to challenge myself to build the company I knew I was capable of.

Ok, now back to the WHAT IF!

As we prepare to launch our new restaurant marketing platform this summer that will be a MASSIVE sales dryver, I constantly ask myself “WHAT IF” it did THIS!

And those “what if’s” are powered by the frustrations I’ve heard over the past 16 years of dealing with restaurant owners, from frustrations I’ve had with seeing how they use their marketing tools incorrectly and most importantly by the HUGE GAPS in every marketing softwar/ service that exists.

The UI, or user interface as you may know it will be so damn intuitive and easy to understand it will make you want to cry tears of joy:)  That’s what I’m sketching out daily on this notepad, ideas and flows of how it will look and function when you as a restaurant owner log into create or analyze a marketing campaign.  I want you to imagine this, 4 main funnels at the top of the screen: New Customers, Frequent Customers, Lost Customers & Loyalty Customers.  Now each of those funnels is telling you how many customers entered that funnel the past month, how many spent money that month and what your ROI is.  But more importantly, based on the sales goals you’ve input into the platform, how many customers SHORT that funnel is.  Meaning, if you want to hit that #, how many people we have to acquire into each funnel through your marketing.  And behind these 4 main funnels will be other funnels that customers are in, like your Birthday and Catering marketing funnels. 

Ok, now back to my ACTUAL what if conversation I had planned for this blog…

WHAT IF you could log into a marketing platform and create a campaign for a VERY specific segment of your database and NOT bother people who are already in a funnel?  Meaning if Matt Plapp is a loyalty customer who’s going to get a Smart Offer promotion that week, he does not need to be in your new “one-off” campaign you’re creating today. 

Let’s examine where this idea comes from for me and hopefully you’ll share my excitement for this restaurant marketing WHAT IF!

Every week I get emails that don’t relate to me.  And in many instances I get multiple emails and texts from the same restaurant.  Now I’m all for marketing to your list, but you MUST protect your list (insert Under Armor Commercial… WE MUST PROTECT THIS HOUSE).

You must treat it with care and not abuse it.  Let’s be honest with each other, as much as we each love sending our stuff, customers don’t give a shit often.  So when you over market to people they go away, and you lose their attention.  

On top of that, everyone doesn’t need to know everything about your restaurant and they really only need to hear from you about 20-30 times per year.  So if we have these funnels created to cover our core 4 main customers (new, lost, frequent and loyalty) and our other lower level funnels, that means that aprox half of your list should already be in a marketing funnel every other week. In fact my personal goal for our new platform is for 3.5% of the database to be in a marketing funnel EVERY DAY. That means that as a customer in a restaurants database I’d get a pre-determined marketing campaign 100% based off of my journey with your restaurant.  If a restaurant has a 10,000 customer database (which is the MINIMUM you all should have after 2 years in business), then 350 customers are getting a message each day and you’re touching the entire database monthly.  

That means when you log in weekly to do something “one off” you can talk to the others.  This is my BIG WHAT IF.  I want our platform to have a filter set up that excludes anyone in the database that’s already in a funnel campaign inside of a 7 day window.  Meaning if Matt Plapp is getting a WIN BACK email in 4 days because I’ve went MIA the past 2 weeks, then I won’t get your Father’s Day Campaign.  

This will PROTECT YOUR LIST!  WATCH THIS is you don’t know the UA reference

The great part is, a lot of this work is already done!  You see, my good friends Kamron Karington and Joe Gratz had these same thoughts MANY years ago while creating Repeat Returns.  This is what made it so easy to acquire Repeat Returns, it had many of my wish list items in it.  

As an example, below is the current version of the daily marketing calendar that’s FED by the existing marketing funnels.  In this example about 5% of the restaurants database of 2,500 are getting a message today BASED 100% on their journey.

 

The next part of the journey for this Marketing Calendar is to tie in a few new funnels, tweak a few of their funnels and then build a more robust filtering system.  

As you can see below, we can filter based off of MANY customer tags now.  My goal is to for restaurant owners to have more choices here and then to be able to choose a few of these tags to create a very specific audience for a marketing campaign while NOT interrupting the customers who will get a message already.  

As an example, National Dog Day .  Let’s say a restaurant is doing a contest where customers comment on a Facebook Post with picture of their dog in the comment LIKE THIS ONE CLICK HERE.

So on top of making that Facebook post you want to email or text some customers.  But of course I don’t want to send it to everyone (and the system won’t let me either), but I want to drive some solid traffic to it.  So I could log into the platform, choose create a marketing campaign.  Choose my mediums, email, text and messenger.  Then choose my audience, say customers who’ve visited in the past month who are also in my top 25% of spenders lifetime.  This gives me a very good audience and that’s who’s likely to interact with such a targeted post. Then it’s as simple as taking my image I created for Facebook and popping it into the template, adding 1 line of text like ” Do you have a dog?  If so, we’re having a contest, click below to go to Facebook and comment for a chance to win.”

My goal of this audience would be to give you 300-500 customers to choose from every time.  That way you have a large enough audience to choose from, while not bugging your entire potential audience every time you do a 1-off promo like this. 

That my friends is ONE of my many WHAT IFs

Stay tuned, an announcement and CONTEST is coming soon for our new restaurant marketing platform that’s going to become your #1 dryver of sales!

Day 45- The Puzzle – My Biggest Puzzle Piece EVER, Employee #1 Ashley

12 years and 11 months ago the plan CHANGED!

In 2008 when I decided to start this company I was adamant on being a “one man show” and have NO EMPLOYEES!  At our boat dealership the prior 9 years I’d seen first hand how hard it was to manage people and more than that, how bad I was at hiring the right people.  So when I started the goal was simple, just me.

WELLLL within 2 years I could see how that was a terrible idea.  I could start to see the cracks forming, the work piling up and wall that I was about to hit.  So in early 2011 I decided Batman needed a Robin.  I knew that in order to over deliver to clients and help more small business owners that I needed someone by my side, someone that could keep up with me and honestly, PUT UP WITH ME 🙂

One of the big reasons I dreaded hiring an employee was from my prior bad experiences of hiring at our Boat Dealership.  Everyone I’d ever hired, basically got FIRED…literally.  I don’t know what it was about my past of hiring, but I seemed to not be too good at it.

That was until NOW!  

Or maybe I got damn lucky.

In the Spring of 2011 I stood up at weekly BNI meeting at asked for what would become the MOST VALUABLE REFERRAL EVER!  The ask was simple “I’m looking for someone who’s computer savy, understands Facebook, learns fast and who would like to work 5-10 hours per week starting off and work towards full-time.”

As luck would have it Peggy Sparks, who was one of the top members in our group and a rockstar referrer said “I’ve got a referral for you, it’s my daughter Ashley.”

And like that, I had a lead.  I had someone who might end up being my Robin, but could she keep up and handle my interesting nuances 🙂

The meeting was set, Tuesday May 31st, Panera Bread in Crestview Hills Town Center. 

The meeting was simple, she was actually on her way to the pool to relax for the day and the meeting went great.  I wasn’t concerned with resumes or past experience, the proof would be in the pudding as they say.  I emailed Ashley logins for a few clients Constant Contact email accounts and instructed her to look at what I’d created in the past and give it her best shot.  

I figured it would take a few days and didn’t expect a lot, to be quite honest I wasn’t really sure what I was going to get back from her.  Up to that point I controlled everything and delegating the marketing of our clients seemed like an impossible task. Then a few short hours later BAM, an email arrives and DAMN is it good.  Actually, it was AMAZING!

It was better than anything I would have done and I DIDN’T have to do the work!  

And with that, Ashley was hired!

She started off at 5-10 hours, then quickly moved to 20-30 hours and by the end of the year she was FULL TIME!  

How I got so lucky with my first ever hire for this company is beyond me, but I’m damn glad I did.  As I sit here today, 12 years and 11 months after she started June 22nd 20211 I am beyond thankful for what she’s done for me, this company, our clients and her co-workers.

To say Ashley is a ROCK STAR would be an understatement.  What she’s become within our company is what building a business is all about.  

And she did this without much direction from me. I’ve never been an overbearing micro manager, I’m quite the opposite.  Which, ironically has caused our only two flare ups in 13 years.  

As I was typing yesterdays blog about what’s happened since the NRA show in 2015 to now, I can’t help but think NONE OF IT would have been possible without Ashley. 

I can still remember my excitement in 2016 when I figured out the ROI Engine and Ashley and I met at the gym office to review it.  I sat down with her to show her the marketing automation I’d built in Zapier and what the future was going to be for our company.  She would later tell me on her drive home she called her husband crying that scared she’d be fired because what I just showed her was not something she understood. 

Well, that was short lived.  Within weeks she was crushing it and that allowed me to put my energy in other places.  And ever since that day, that’s how it’s been.  Matt creates something, Ashley makes it happen and Matt moves onto the next idea.  

Today Ashley leads the entire marketing company and software.  She’s the driving force behind what will become the ultimate restaurant marketing platform.  One that drives sales to restaurants where they need it the most.  

Peggy (Ashley’s mom) THANK YOU.  Your referral that day in BNI is easily the most valuable referral EVER in the history of BNI.

Ashley, THANK YOU. 

Thank you for being a rock star.

Thank you for putting up with my lack of leadership and directions.

Thank you for staying by my side as we’ve navigated rocky waters the past few years.

And thank you for always being willing to learn something new and run full steam ahead.

 

Day 44 – The Puzzle – My Dream For Restaurant Marketing And What We Are Building

The journey of building this company and the services we offer to restaurants has been quite a journey.

Back in 2015 when I realized I’d created something unique for restaurant marketing, I thought “what if I had a brewery in every state using my system.”  You see, back then I had 9 restaurants as clients, 3 breweries and 6 others.  We had 1 deli style restaurant, a 4 casual dining restaurants, 3 breweries and 1 fast casual concept that we were helping to market.  I was their “at large marketing director” and Ashley was my team member who helped me carry out their ENTIRE marketing plan (my 1st employee and only one then).  I bought their mass media, spending North of $1.3 million annually for them, I created the marketing strategy, I kept them ahead of the technology curve, we did their graphic design, sent their emails, managed their social media and at the end of the day IMPLEMENTED EVERYTHING!

You could say that Ashley and I were their marketing department, and we loved it.  

When I say we did EVERYTHING for these restaurants that would be an understatement.  

CLICK BELOW to check out a Facebook Live in did for them in March 2014, yes we were doing LIVES and video 10 years ago for restaurants:)

 I would do every month for each of the 3 Hobrauhaus Breweries we worked with.  I knew the importance of video marketing back then (you know the stuff most restaurants STILL are not doing) and I also saw the power of using Facebook Live to own our own “media outlet.  So every opportunity I had, I did live and recorded videos for our 9 restaurant clients.  This was the Newport location who had a Keg Tapping the last Wednesday of every month.  I would show up and broadcast it live on their Facebook page from my iPad and then download the file and make a quick video in the restaurant that night to post the next day to hype of the new beer and use as the post for a paid ad that month.   And yes it’s grainy, nowhere close to perfect and it’s really poor editing by todays standards.  BUT we were the only ones doing it and these videos would DRIVE sales and customer traffic.

And on April 26th 2015 all of that changed. 

It all changed with one promotion.

That day was national pretzel day and up until that point I’d never had a promotion that gained such TRACKABLE traction.  Meaning, we could 100% see that it drove traffic and sales.  We saw $18,000 in incresed sales only from that lame “show this Facebook post or email” to get this offer promo.

When I saw how well it did and realized “what if I knew who all of those 500 or customers were?”  

Meaning:

– what if I knew their name

– how often they visited

– when they were 1st time customers

– when they went missing AKA stopped coming to the restaurant

– when were their birthdays

– why they came to the restaurant (bier, music, food, etc)

– And WHAT IF I could use social media to gain the customer data needed to build this program….

The ideas started to flood in.  And I wondered HOW could I take this promo to the next level with all of our restaurant clients.  But more importantly I also realized that much of what worked for my restaurant clients was due to massive insights we were gaining every week by having 9 total.  You see, at this time I was a local marketing firm with 34 clients who had 200 or so locations across 31 industries.  So many times, we were re-creating the wheel for each client every new promotion since what worked for a restaurant did not necessarily work for a car dealership.

But when I did something for 1 of the restaurants, it typically worked for all 9 of them.  

So with this idea I figured there was only one place to go to find the solution I needed, the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago in mid May, just a few weeks away.  I thought that a show dedicated to the restaurant business boasting 4,000 exhibitors and close to 400 marketing/technology booths surely the software I needed build this marketing program.

Below is a picture of my very first NRA show on my Birthday in 2015!

As I walked the show floor I was AMAZED!  

The marketing companies and marketing technology were so far behind.  I had booths bragging to me about their direct mail strategies, ones we were doing 7 years earlier when I started my company.  

There was NO ONE there for Social Media! 

NO ONE talking about customer engagement online!

NO ONE talking about how to gain customer data!

 NO ONE talking about customer acquisition and ROI.

In fact when I mentioned marketing ROI they looked a me like a dog when it turns it’s head sideways. 

I’ll never forget the conversation I had with the only loyalty and technology booth that impressed me.  I told him I was looking for software that could be triggered through a comment on Facebook, which took the customer to SOMEWHERE and we would get them to give us their name, phone number, birthday and email address.  Then we would put them into an email and text marketing campaign that had trackable promotions they could redeem.  Then I could segment the database and funnel the best customers into a loyalty program and the others would be in a marketing funnel based on their frequency.  The guy looked at me like I was on drugs and said “that doesn’t exist and it’s not possible.”  In fact most of the marketers I spoke with at the show could not figure out why I’d want to have a program that showed the sales that came from the marketing campaigns.  They were honestly scared to have their clients understand the ROI.  

I guess the big difference between me and them was the fact that I looked at marketing success and failure the same.  If we were not getting the ROI we needed on a campaign, we optimized it.  They looked at it as “oh shit, this client is going to fire us.”  And now 9 years later I get it, I understand why they were scared to have that level of marketing transparency with their restaurant clients. Restaurants simply did not understand marketing at this level.

So as I headed home to NKY from Chicago I called everyone I knew in the business, excited and bummed by what I’d found out.  First I was bummed since what I went to the show for apparently did not exist. But next I was excited to prove these people wrong and create what I knew could exist.  

It took me 2 years to create it and I called it the ROI Engine. The ROI Engine was a one of kind restaurant marketing customer acquisition took leveraging Facebook and Instagram to build a customer database and then drive them into the restaurant with trackable marketing promotions.  The idea was simple, we’ll leverage the front-end advertising restaurants should be doing anyways (like Facebook ads) to “double dip” and gain customers contact information.  Then we’ll use that to email and text them one off promotions to gain the sales needed on the frontend to recoup our advertising spend and second to prove we had the right customers on our email and text list.  

In fact, my first book, Don’t 86 Your Restaurant Sales, was based on the entire program.  I spent 1st Quarter of 2018 writing the book, 2nd Quarter proofing and tweaking and then it was launched in August of 2018. 

By the time the book was published we had restaurant clients from all over the USA.  From 2015 to 2018 I spent 3 years building a new company 100% dedicated to helping restaurants and winding down my highly successful local marketing firm. It was a crazy tough decision.  I’d become such good friends with my local clients like Evans Auto Care and Jeff Wyler Automotive Group that I didn’t know how to end these relationships and walk away.  Slowly but surely we did it and It was nerve racking. 

And the crazy part was, I found out along the way why all the marketing and tech firms from the 2015 NRA show wanted NOTHING to do with showing proof.  

Since 2008 every local client we helped with marketing viewed us much differently than the restaurants who hired us for the “ROI Engine Program.”  Our local clients viewed us as their marketing partner.  The bad results were not a reflection on us, just the result of trial and error.  And we used good and bad to optimize the marketing plan.  We were a part of their teams and we NEVER LOST A CLIENT!  Firing Matt Plapp wasn’t an option, we were too valuable. 

But that was the exact opposite with our nationwide restaurant marketing program.  You see, these restaurants only viewed us as a vendor, not a partner.  And if there was a bump in the road, YOU’RE FIRED!  In fact we lost all 19 of our first 19 restaurant clients within 6 months.  And what was even crazier about that was their results were great.  

The issue was, restaurant owners did not understand the type of marketing we were doing.  They were so accustomed to either seeing no form of tracking with their marketing or massive shot in the arm results like Groupon.  They were only comfortable with knowing nothing, or seeing crazy results from one of marketing campaigns like Groupon that did not help the restaurant long term, but drove cash in today.  

It was scary as shit for me.  To think that I’d just stopped working with 30 clients that understood our vision and goals to go all in with restaurants that didn’t grasp what it takes to drive sales long term with their marketing.  

In 2020 I got smacked in the face with this harder than ever.  I had a client in Washington who was spending $6,000 per month on radio ads for their multi location pizza chain with zero proof it was working, yet when we showed them how the $30,000 they spent with us and Facebook in prior 12 months turned into $400,000 in sales THEY FIRED US!

Have a look for yourself below at their customer acquisition dashboard.  1 MILLION social media impressions in a year that gained a database of 17,000 and drove 11,000 visits and $400,000 in sales, and that was ONLY THE FRONT END!  I was blown away…sorry the image is kind of dull, it was a screenshot from when the client did a testimonial video on our marketing program while we were in Washington meeting with them after working together for 12 months.  A month after this video they cancelled and my mind WAS BLOWN!  

To be 100% honest with you, it was the biggest gut punch ever.  But not because we lost them as a client. It was tough because I could not grasp how someone would see these results and not think the glass is HALF EMPTY.

The sales we’d driven while also growing a massive database AND getting them the most social media exposure they’d ever had.  CLICK HERE to watch a case study video on their program, it’s WILD.  But like all failures, this was a learning lesson.  This showed me that no matter how awesome our front-end marketing was, we had to be able to show the ENTIRE story, which is why we acquired Repeat Returns in November 2023.  We had to be able to show the customers lifetime journey. 

This was when I truly understood what was wrong with restaurant owners and the industry.  They were so scorn from marketing of the past, so behind the times and so committed to todays results, that they could not understand how to create a long term marketing relationship with a vendor like us.  

Now, here we are in 2024 and my company has grown from Ashley and myself to 64 team members.  And I once again find myself at the NRA Show in Chicago.  It’s 9 years late and the same is true, the marketing companies here DO NOT GET IT!

Yes, there are some badass loyalty programs here.  

There are some POS companies that are highly advanced.  

And yet, no one is talking about customer acquisition.  No one is talking about customer ATTENTION retention, you know NOT being forgotten.  No one is talking about how to leverage social media, email, text and messenger marketing.  

Then it hit me, we are just that far ahead and what comes next from our company will SHOCK the industry.  But honestly they won’t truly even understand that for another 9 years.  

In July we are going to roll out our new company, new brand and crazy new platform.  It will be the product of merging Repeat Returns restaurant marketing software with our marketing services firm Restaurant Marketing That Works. 

We will create an industry first restaurant marketing platform that gives restaurant owners predictable marketing funnels that drive sales EVERY DAY.  They will wake up every morning and have a daily marketing plan built for them that takes customers on a journey to visit more often, spend more when they visit and COME BACK when they forget about the restaurant. 

And maybe in 9 more years in 2033 when I visit the National Restaurant Association Show there will be 10 booths knocking of what we’ve built and restaurants will FNALLY understand what I figured out in 2015.

Day 43 – The Puzzle – This F1 Red Bull Car Is Out Of Gas, Just Like Your Marketing Programs

As we walked the aisles of the National Restaurant Show we couldn’t help but notice a GLARING problem with every marketing and point of sales booth. 

The issue they had was the same as the Red Bull F1 car above, NO GAS!

Literally, this car has no gas in it and every marketing opportunity being pushed on restaurants at the NRA show shared that.  There was ZERO focus on customer acquisition AKA gas to your marketing programs.  

As an example, there were COUNTLESS Loyalty programs and restaurant point of sale companies touting loyalty.  But they never talk about HOW you’re going to get members for said loyalty program. You know, your loyalty members.  Because I can tell you this, after the 3 month honeymoon period is over and your hard core guests are all members and your staff has quit or forgot, YOU PROGRAM IS DEAD!

Whether it’s your loyalty program, new customer program or birthday program, they all need traffic.  They need new people coming into that world every day and somehow that’s a topic that companies in restaurant marketing never want to talk about.  

You might say “Matt, why is that?”

Part of me says, damn I don’t get it.  But the other part, the majority, knows why.  They don’t understand customer acquisition and it’s hard to do.  It’s much easier to build a software and sit back and let it do it’s magic vs go out and build a team of experts that help restaurants find new customers every day through Facebook, Instagram, Google, Your Website and inside your 4-walls.  

My point being, they don’t want to spend the time or money to figure it out and it’s not scalable to them.  Which excites the HECK out of me, because we know how to do it and we are going to take the industry by storm over the next few years with our restaurant funnel programs that drive customers into the every single day on auto pilot. 

Day 41 – The Puzzle – How To Work With Charities To Drive Sales & Their Donations

The days of the traditional Dine-To-Donates are DONE!  They don’t work for either party, the restaurant or the charity.  In 2014 these were a novel event that would drive massive traffic to a restaurant through the charity, but that’s when very few restaurants and charities were doing them.  Now, every restaurant in town has one every night and charities are doign them all the time as well.  

So what’s the solution, to me it’s a LONG TERM donation campaign that helps restaurants gain new customers and drive repeat visits from those customers, not one that donated to a charity just because their regulars come in for their normal visits.  And for the charity, they should be rewarded to introducing new customers to the restaurant and they should also benefit from the future sales of those customers. 

In November 2023 we purchased Repeat Returns, known in the industry as a Restaurant Loyalty Program.  But what we found over the next few months was that Repeat Returns was WAY MORE than that.  One program I saw that wasn’t being used by enough restaurants was their Community Connections program.  This was a charitable marketing platform built 100% for restaurants and WOW the results were insane for the restaurants using it.  

The image above are the results for one year from April 2023 through April 2024.  This shows the 19 charities that had signed up for the program and their results.  These 20 charities drove 7,694 new members to the restaurants loyalty program.  Those new loyalty members would visit 14,198 and spend $283,687 in sales to the restaurant all while donating back $8,500 to the non-profits.  

FIRST lets discuss some of my issues I’ve had with charitable programs restaurants have done in the past.

1st – Charities do too many fundraisers per month and don’t OWN many of them. If they are doing 5 dine-to-donates per month, they are looking at the global results, not your restaurants results. So many times very few people show up.  Which doesn’t really hurt your restaurant since you were already open, but it’s certainly disappointing to see a night you’d hope would do we, flop. 

2nd – Telling people what night they have to visit a restaurant is tough.  I know this from being a parent of athletes.  I missed 75% of the dine-2-donates due to having prior obligations.

3rd – We’ve found charities standing out front of the restaurant and passing out their flier to every customer that walks into the restaurant.  So now they are getting credit for all of my customers, and that’s not fair. 

These 3 reasons are why I really like the Community Connection program offered by Repeat Returns.  The program gives the charity a unique link for their supporters to use to join the loyalty program.  If they are already a member, it doesn’t count, but if they are new, BINGO!  Then you set the parameters.  The example shown here allows them to earn 3% from every dollar spent from these members and they don’t put a timeline on it.  The donations added up when these new members spend money.  Now you can change the % donated and you can alter dates, it’s all up to the restaurant.  

One thing to keep in mind, not every non-profit is created equal.  As you’ll see below, the results will vary.  Some drive a lot of new members, some very few.  Some drive a lot of repeat visits, some very few.  The image below are the stats for the past 12 months. 

 

Another thing to keep in mind is that not all “new members” are going to come in and come in often, just like any customer acquisition funnel your restaurant has.  In the example below there are 320 new loyalty club members for this restaurant from one charity.  But only about 150 of those customers are repeat visitors and under 100 were hardcore loyal customers.  But the results speak for themselves.  828 new customer visits and $17,082 in sales.  That’s HUGE and when you find 20-30 non-profits to help like this restaurant did, then you’ve struck gold!

The final point today is to supply these non-profits with the right assets.  If I was you, I’d create custom graphics with them and help them understand how to market this partnership.  And I’d also have a page on my website dedicated to the overall program and each non-profit.  You should even do this inside your restaurant and frequently share the posts the non-profit makes, but not only the ones about your program.  Actually share their normal posts about the great work they are doing. 

I also cover this topic on my daily podcast, Restaurant Marketing Secrets, in episode 607…have a listen CLICK HERE!

Day 40 – The Puzzle – What’s This Blog About & How Will It Help Restaurants With Their Marketing?

This week I was in Las Vegas speaking to a room of 100 professionals in the restaurant business.  Owners, GM’s, Kitchen Managers and Marketing Directors.  were in the room and many had questions.  So I decided to change it up a little.  I sent them a survey to find out what was on their mind and after getting rid of the duplicates we listed out the 14 questions and tackled every one of them.

The 14 questions are WHY I’m doing this blog and my podcast every day.  These questions are the PUZZLE pieces that you need to systematically grow your restaurants sales and FIND the promised land.   My goal with my content is to help you build your PUZZLE as it relates to marketing your restaurant. 

FYI, here are the 14 questions:

1.  What are the first steps in marketing for a new business?

2.  How do we create offers for new customers without discounting the product?

3.  How can we incentivize returning customers to buy more, without skewing our costs too much?

4.  How can we better track customer metrics and target them based on their actions?

5.  What are the efficient ways of capturing data from customers who’ve never eaten at our establishment?

6.  How to create authentic and engaging content, especially on social media platforms like Instagram?

7.  How do we avoid over-emailing & posting on social media to the point where customers ignore us?

8.  Where will AI fit into our marketing strategies?

9.  Is Facebook only viable for older marketing demographics now?

10.  With limited resources, where should I focus my time and money?

11.  How can we track the results of our marketing strategies?

12.  What is the best way to promote a small town local business?

13.  How to market special events like wine dinners and catering effectively?

14.  Can we automatically text people once they give us their number from a reservation, or do we have to legally ask them permission1.  ?