Restaurant Job Board Blog

Most restaurants these days have a website to try and drive more business,
but few have the strategy right.

The issue is clear.

Most restaurants get their websites built, not by internet marketers, but by web designers. The end result is that the strategies for driving more visitors to their websites are often not appropriate for businesses with a local client base. Many restaurants the allow their web presences to die since they only get a tiny trickle of visitors when they depend on google.

This is true because search volumes for locally based businesses are low. They are low because their customers already know where they are and often don’t need a search engine to find them. Search as the only strategy for locally based businesses is a recipe for web failure….but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Unfortunately, at web design school, web designers were not taught about marketing, and locally based businesses like restaurants suffer from this as a “one size fits all” web marketing strategy is applied to most web designers clients.

Restaurants need to change the focus of their websites from…telling people about how great their restaurant is…to capturing and following up with people who find their site either through inhouse promotions, current advertising campaigns, joint ventures or through search engines.

This single change in the purpose of the website enables a restaurant to build a customer database to which it can send its messages over and over again. What most restaurants need isn’t a “brochure” type website describing their business, but a “lead capture” type website which helps them to build their network and leverage the networks of their customers.

When restaurant owners build a database of their customers, they get several great benefits.

Here are the top 10:

1. They can communicate directly with their customers through email quickly, cheaply and frequently
2. They can better measure the effectiveness of other advertising methods
3. They build a growing asset for their business
4. Messages can be optimized over time as responses are completely see through, unlike newspapers
5. Market research on the fly becomes a breeze
6. It becomes easy to measure and split test offers
7. It becomes easy to turbo charge referrals using the web
8. They can easily get their messages into the electronic networks of their customers to take advantage of booming social media and information sharing trends
9. They move away from dying media like newspapers and onto new, booming media like mobile web, social networks and text messaging
10. Its more fun!

If you liked this, please stop by http://socialbuzz.co.uk and download the Maverick Marketing Mastery Report to take your business to the next level.

To a better future!

——————————————————————————————-

Barry Walls currently lives in Ireland and is a man with one mission. After marketing online for several years, he was shocked to find the quality of the web marketing strategies which local businesses had in place. His goal is to show businesses how to use the new emergent opportunities on the internet to boost profits. You can follow Barry on Twitter @Barry_Walls or at his website: http://socialbuzz.co.uk

I have a great pizza place by my office SpotPizza. Being from Philadelphia, I’m kind of a pizza snob, but Spot is pretty good, plus the owner is a really nice guy that remembers me when I come in and has the staff make white cheese pizza exactly the way that I like it. He has a huge fan in me.

What he doesn’t have, or it least as it appears to me when I’m there or walk by each night, is a lot of business. SpotPizza needs 1,000 fans of the place just like me. It is a shame, that with so many social networking companies being literally blocks away, that they aren’t taking advantage of some of these tools. Maybe they are, I just haven’t seen it.

The great part about social media is that you can build your local presence with only a little bit of elbow grease, not a huge marketing budget. More importantly, social media offers much more of a personal touch. If I ran a restaurant, especially in a hip area, here are some of the tools that I’d leverage in order to drive more traffic and sell more high margin products.

Search Marketing – When I was at Yahoo, I had a huge vision for local search marketing. When we announced that we would be able to target to a zip, I thought local restaurants would be crazy not to sign up for the service. It just seemed like the most no-brainer effort you could imagine. It’s lunch-time, someone does a search for ‘lunch 94089′, I want my restaurant to be at the top of the list. In fact, since you only pay per click, I’d want my name to come up every time a food related search is performed in the zip codes that are within a 10-mile radius of my restaurant.

I’d leverage cookies to identify how frequently a person hits my site from this search and serve up different offers. First time here, come on down for ‘kids eat free’. Second time ‘Bring this coupon for free appetizers’ and so on. I’d work to be so pervasive that the person wouldn’t think of anywhere else to go eat.

Facebook – Your town has a group in Facebook. It has to. The little town that I grew up in has a bunch of groups, so your town must have a group. Join it. Post to it. Post special offers just for people who are part of this Facebook group. The reason rock stars say things like “Nobody rocks harder than Springfield” is because people love to hear that stuff and they go crazy. Nobody gets a free desert except people who are part of the Facebook group. Wooooo, queue lighters.

Make sure that people know that they can be your fan on Facebook too. If someone within 5 miles of your place becomes your fan, you can easily get them to come to your restaurant once a month with a group of people and drop $20 each. $80 for a party of 4. Do that with 100 of your fans and you’ve made eight grand. Should be enough to at least cover your rent.

Neighborsville – My friend Ryan is about to launch a new social network called Neighborsville. This is going to be huge and restaurants are going to be all over it. In short, Neighborsville is the social network for your neighborhood. Who comes to your restaurant? People in your neighborhood. Get involved in your community, reach out to people, comment on issues. In general, make yourself well known to everyone within a 5 mile radius of your restaurant.

LinkedIn – Are you open for lunch? Do you depend on a lot of business traffic to fill your store at lunch-time? Find the companies that are nearby and infiltrate their groups. Let employees or these businesses know that you exist. You want everyone at every business to think of you the next time that they have a meeting and need catering done.

Yelp – Yelp has your most vocal customers. These are people who have actually taken 15 – 20 minutes to complain or exclaim how lousy or great your service is. Not only that, but you, as an owner, have a chance to communicate directly with this most rabid fan base. Reach out to them, find out what they loved or what they hated. If they hated something, get them to come back and make it right. If they loved something, get them to come back and replicate it.

Twitter – What a great way to have a real conversation with people that come to your place. Here is a chance, to send a message to people that like your restaurant every day, an hour before lunch or an hour before dinner. Remind them that you are there. Remind them that they are getting hungry. Remind them that if they come by and mention Twitter, the first round of drinks is on the house.

Text Messages – I’ve noticed that some restaurants are doing this now, but I haven’t seen any type of consistency or noticed the technology. However, at some of the restaurants in busy shopping districts, I’ve been offered the ability to get a text message when my table is up. It is a great way to keep me close, but not force me to sit in some waiting area.

Blogging – If Wolfgang Puck can make an amazing living selling his recipes and frozen foods you can too. Do you have some amazing dish that you serve? Put the recipe in your blog. Trust me, if I have an opportunity to make something and spend $20 on ingredients and probably screw it up or spend $30 to come to your place to enjoy it perfectly over a glass of wine and some friends, I’m spending the extra $10. If your place is good enough, and gets enough buzz, go Rachel Ray and just publish your best dishes in a book. Keep your place, license your name and enjoy the fruits of your labor on a beach in the Caribbean.

Hustle Your Face Off – This is something that Gary Vaynerchuk always says. Social media is not a magic bullet. Just because you have a Twitter ID, doesn’t mean that business will some how just show up. You probably will need to spend at least a couple of hours a day monitoring these services and keep the conversation going. Engage with new people, set goals to add at least one new fan a day.

Don’t be a Jerk – If you are just setting up these services to spam people that aren’t that interested in what you have to say, you will fail. Set up these services to have a conversation with your customers. The conversation should be no different than one you’d have with your customers if you saw them on the street or if they were at your bar.

In the spirit of Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans, you may not need 1,000 or even 500, but if you can get a couple of hundred, fiercely loyal people to show up at your place just once per month, you’ll have a great business.

Here is a link to 20 free books about social media to get you started.

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/20-free-ebooks-about-social-media/

———————————————————————————————
Bio & Photo
Scott Schnaars is a 15 year enterprise collaboration sales veteran with a penchant for writing. He is currently a sales executive with Socialtext, the leading provider of enterprise social networking services. He also blogs at Knuckle Sandwich, periodically does a sales video blog at Beyond Snake Oil and can be found on Twitter under his moniker: Schnaars.

A very under used method of getting attention for small local restaurant businesses is submitting Press Releases. Submitting a press releases about your restaurant during the holiday season can be a great way to create buzz, awareness, and even increase your profits. If you follow most PR experts they will tell you that anytime you can tie you story into current events is a great time to release a press release.

‘The Holidays’ are a excellent opportunity for a restaurant to be creative with a campaign that is worthy of publishing in local news events. One of the best ways to get your events noticed by news channels is to submit press releases. We reccommend using a service from PRWeb which releases their PR’s into Google News and Yahoo News, where many news channels, (offline and online) are scouting for their next news story.

SIDENOTE: It is usually easier if you cater your press release to being related to a local event or cause because your chances of being picked up in one of the local news channels is greater as opposed to trying to get recognition nationally or internationally.

We wanted to get a list started of some great Holiday Press Release Ideas for Restaurants:

1. Tie a day of your sales into you local Food Bank like the way Cobre’s did with their Corazon Day, where 100 percent of its net food revenues to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank.
2. Get involved in a give-a-way like Restaurant.com’s Feed it Forward program or create your own give-a-way program.
3. Have a Christmas Party and donate the funds raised from the party to worthy local cause like the way Johnny D’s Restaurant does for the homeless.
4. Create a special “holiday menu” the way Hart House at Deer Lake did, it scored them a write up in UrbanDiner.ca
5. Stage an event the way Charleston Restaurant with their annual Progressive Dinner Dickens Dinner, where they take visitors by horse-drawn carriage to several historic inns and restaurants for different dinner courses. What a great way to network with your local restaurateurs too!
6. Create a special item for the holidays like Swirlz’s holiday cupcakes, if is a remarkable item it is worthy of a press release.

Now we gave some great examples of ways to use holiday press releases to create some local buzz about your restaurant, but we know there are many other great ideas floating around out there.

Here’s your chance to get in the holiday spirit of ‘giving and share’… tell us in the comment section below what great ways you think a restaurant can use press releases during the holiday season to help increase awareness, buzz, and profits for their business.

Recently my wife and I had a craving for an All You Can Eat Buffet situation a few times. Once for Japanese and once for Chinese. It was a spur of the moment thing, not two weeks of planning with a babysitter. We have three children, a newborn, a five year old girl and an eight year old boy. Both places wanted $12-$17 for any child over 3yrs old. Two skinny Asian kids! My girl can eat ONE adult portion max, my boy is a starch only eater and seems to live on oxygen alone. It’s not like my wife can eat more than one adult portion either, we just wanted a huge selection of food to try out. In the end, we decided against going and spent our money else where. Those businesses lost approx $60 of business each time just from my wife and I ($25 per person, plus one drink each) for being greedy as they are.

I know that there are different business models, different ways of doing things, certain clientèle that you may deem ‘undesirable‘ (in your head only, don’t broadcast this) for your particular business, etc., etc. My point is be reasonable in your pricing structure and put yourself in people’s shoes. How much does it cost a family of four at McD’s these days? With tax probably around $22-$25. So how much more value do you provide than your competitor? How different are you? What is one happy customer worth to you over a few years in repeat visits and recommendations to family, friends and co-workers?

How’s this for a marketing technique? Post the $12 for a child over 3yrs clearly at front and on your menus, and then train your hostess to say: “Gee your kids are so cute. I’m sure they don’t eat much. Let’s make sure that you can all enjoy our great selection tonight. I’ll make sure that your waitress gives you a 40% discount, so you’ll only pay $7.25 for each of these adorable children. Come this way, your table is ready.”

Voila! – $75 sale made before tax and tip. I’d be back there once a month, wouldn’t you?

It takes very little to stand above the crowd of competition, always think like a customer.