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 52 – The Puzzle – Do You Want To Be The Songs Or The Commercial Break?

The irony of situations in life makes you smile.

This morning it took me changing the station 3 times to land on my 4th pick, 103.5 WGRR to find a song.  Why’s this ironic?  WGRR is where I started my career in marketing back in 1999.

Here’s why I’m telling you this.

While driving to the office today my blue tooth was off, so I reverted to good ole fashioned radio vs messing with hooking it up while driving. When I it the “band” button it started me off on 700 WLW.  That station was on commercial break, so I hit 550 WRKC, again commercial break.  Next I thought, let’s listen to some sports radio, maybe they’ll be talking about the Celtics game last night….COMMERCIAL.  Ok, maybe, just maybe WGRR is playing music.  

BINGO!  They’re playing Prince, turn it up and keep driving. 

BUT THEN IT HITS ME!

This is the problem with restaurants and how they use Social Media.  They are the commercial EVERY POST!

Let me ask you a question, how many likes, comments and shares do your Facebook posts get, basically NONE right?  Most restaurants get under 1% engagement on all of their Facebook posts.  WHY IS THAT?  

First, it’s because your customers tuned you out a while ago

Second, it’s because the algorithm saw that your customers tuned you out and did the same.

Meaning, by you treating every social media post like a radio commercial EVERY POST, you’ve effectively ruined the your Facebook following.

BUT there’s hope!!!!

You can easily reverse this, you just need to start using Social Media correctly and we teach exactly that in the ABR U RGA Guide.  This is a paid DIY course and 400 page guide that will help you learn how to take your social media, email and text marketing to a whole new level.

CLICK HERE to buy your guide today.

In episode 618 of my podcast, Restaurant Marketing Secrets, I talk about the journey in my car from my house to the office, HAVE A LISTEN, CLICK HERE!


Day 51 – The Puzzle – I Was Wrong About Building Your Brand…Kind Of

The fact is BRAND drives sales.  

Brand makes customer acquisition 1,000,000 times easier, but most of us never make it to the level of brand that we need for that. Especially local restaurants. 

Think about it this way.  When Apple announces a new iPhone there’s ZERO sales pitch and in many case no info, yet their customers FLOCK to buy it.  When Nike rolls out a new Air Jordan shoe, same thing.  People line-up to buy the shoes sight unseen.  When Tesla showcased an insane cybertruck to it’s fans, they had 1 million pre-orders in year one and 2 million by year two!  NONE of that happens without a BRAND that people love and support, and building a brand takes a LOT of marketing.

And I know what you’ll say along with that “Matt we are not Apple, Nike or Tesla”, we’re a small independent restaurant. I get that, but honestly you have it much easier.  You don’t need to sell people worldwide, you just need to dominate a few miles around your restaurant.  Y

S0 why aren’t customers rushing to try your new dish, your new trivia night, etc?  It’s because your brand is not big enough and you don’t command the level of respect you need to get those lines.   You’ve never consistently done the leg work on the streets, through digital marketing and in your store.  Yes, you’ve had spurts of hustle, but it can’t happen occasionally, it has to happen ALL THE TIME and when you see traction you go HARDER!  You never stop!

For years I’ve been preaching the reasons you need to build a brand and I’m here today with my tail between my legs to tell you I was wrong.  You don’t need to focus on building a brand, you need to focus on DRIVING SALES and then allow the marketing that drives sales to slowly build your brand.  What I know is possible for all of you, simply isn’t on your priority list and it took me 9 years to realize that. 

I’ve been wasting my time with so many restaurant owners, trying to get them to do what I want with regards to social media.  Every 10th client will listen and see massive results and that’s what I would always lean into.  But then one day I thought “Matt, that means 9 are not listening, or don’t give a shit.”

So that forced me to sit back and re-evaluate our company goals. It made me ask myself a deep question, WHY don’t restaurant owners care about building a brand.

The answer, you need sales now.  They need relief from the pressure of not having money to pay themselves and their bills.  The restaurants that have taken my advice to heart are in a much different financial position.  They have the room to breathe, and that gives them the patience to focus on building the brand.  

David Scott Peters always says in his seminars when asked what owners should focus on first, marketing or operations “BOTH.  It’s the chicken and the egg.  You have to do both.”  And as I sat in Las Vegas at his most recent Restaurant Transformation Seminar I thought about what he said and realized that when owners ask that question they are talking about marketing that drives sales NOW, not in 3-5 years like branding will do.  

So with that we changed our company tag line to “Drive Sales & Build Brand.”  We decided to go all in on creating a restaurant marketing platform that is focused 100% on driving sales. 

But the good news is, that when done right (how we’ll show you), you’ll also be slowly building your brand.  And my hope is that after a few years of consistent sales growth and a renewed belief in marketing that you’ll say “I get it, I have the time and breathing room and NOW I’m going on all in on my brand.”

See you tomorrow,

Matt

Day 50 – The Puzzle – Building A Platform That Drives Predictable Restaurant Sales

This was a note I made in my journal:

“We need your help to build a product that helps you drive predictable sales on demand while you accidently build a brand” … at least that’s what I meant to write 🙂

I made this note as the headline of the video I want to make for a survey to send to our restaurant clients.  The goal is to find out what they love, like, don’t like and hate about our services.  But it was to also give them a vision for the changes we want to make.  We are taking Repeat Returns Software and Restaurant Marketing That Works, my restaurant agency, and combining them into the Ultimate Restaurant Marketing Platform.

I want a platform that allows restaurants to plug in their current sales and their sales goal in 24-36 months and have numbers spit back at them of what it will take to get there.  As in “you need 3,546 more loyalty members to hit that number.” 

I want a platform where a restaurant can go in and create a campaign that will drive a predictable result every day, you know “I need $1,000 more in dinner sales today…CLICK.”

I want a platform that automatically creates a marketing plan every day for 50% of your database, so they are on a specific path based on their use of your restaurant.

I want a platform that is easy for you to see your ROI in every funnel.

I want. a platform that you trust, one that creates massive belief in your eyes for the power of marketing.

I want a platform that when the clock strikes MIDNIGHT your marketing dashboard creates a plan for the next day where 7% the customers in your database are in a funnel for that day.  That would leave 51% to be marketed to that week with a unique one off program and you’d have your bases covered 52 weeks per year FOR YOU!

I could go on and on about what I want, but at the end of the day I’ll need to merge that with what YOU WANT!  What restaurant owners want in order to get what they need, SALES!

Day 49 – The Puzzle – An Exciting Restaurant Promotion, The Money Bucket

Today I was reminded of a time 8 years ago when I was at a clients restaurant running what I call the MONEY BUCKET promo! 

I’ve been doing this promotion with clients and my own business for over 20 years and I can remember EXACTLY where I learned it from.

The year was 2000 and I was working two jobs.  One for WGRR as an advertising “account executive” AKA salesman and the other was my side hustle of building our boat dealership through online marketing.  Yes ONLINE MARKETING in 2000 🙂

The money bucket came from WGRR and our sales manager Kim Wiest.  We would have a sales event once per year called the One Day Sale where we would do our best to liquidate our first quarter inventory in November since radio sales was relatively soft after the holidays.  We’d spend a few weeks prepping our clients for this one day sale and then the day of DIAL FOR DOLLARS!  

In November of 2000 Kim broke out a paper bag and loaded it with CASH.  She would walk around the office and let you reach in when you closed a deal.  That was my first big one day sale and I dominated, I was #1 out of our 4 stations by a big margin and I got to reach into the money bag A LOT!  And that memory stuck with me.

So a few years later when I was looking for a way to spark the sales team at our boat dealership I turned to the money bucket. And then around 2010 when I was looking for a way to help some retail clients of my marketing agency, I did it again.

Since 2010 the Money Bucket promo has been a staple with my clients.

In episode 173 of my podcast, Restaurant Marketing Secrets, I did a deep dive into how we did the Money Bucket at Backyard Grill in Houston Texas, CLICK HERE to listen and get a tad more insight.

So WHAT IS THE MONEY BUCKET and how can it be used to increase my restaurants sales, because that’s what we all aim for.

WHAT IS IT ?

– You create a promotion

– You get some cash

– You get a bucket, bag or box

– You let customers or employees reach into the “money bucket” as your CTA, call to action.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS ?

– Drive traffic from your marketing

– Create excitement in the restaurant

– Incentivize and reward customers and employees.

Here are two examples of how you can do this.

First example, this is for your customers to drive enrollments in your VIP or loyalty program.  You create a marketing campaign and let your customers and following know that on a particular day and time when they visit and sign-up or PROVE they are a member they get to reach into the money bucket.  Ideally you create a video of you with the bucket and some cash and then use that on Facebook to get their attention.

A few notes:

– Pick a time and day when you’ll be busy, it’s a HUGE in-store excitement promo

– Don’t use big bills, I found that a $5 and $50 create the same amount of excitement at the table

– Have one person dedicated to this, no other job at that time

Ok, then you’re going to walk around to every table in the restaurant and let them know “we are letting current members or new signups reach into the money bucket for some free cash, are you game?”

Second example, this is for your employees.  Create an intenal contest like whoever sells a dessert today gets to reach into the money bucket every time one sells.  This is a great way to build excitement with your team and around the money bucket.  

Lastly, when you do this for your customers, make sure to post some pics and videos on Facebook to PROVE that you did this and excite people for the next time you do it.  I have done this across many concepts and it’s NEVER not worked.  Customers and staff, LOVE IT!

 

OH, and the YouTube video below is a VLOG we did around one of our trips to see a client where YOURS TRULY did the money bucket for the client, so scroll down and watch.