The Florida Restaurant & Lodging Show and Pizza Tomorrow Summit just concluded in Orlando, FL. This was great! They combined two shows into one and had an even better-attended event with more people and more diversity.
One of the reasons I really love this show – the content has a focus on business education. While pizza is definitely an art form, the restaurant business is an ever-changing landscape. Education is the only way.
I was very fortunate to host a marketing Q&A in the general session along with Chip Klose and Brian Siemienas from NIFT, as well as a 3.5-hour private workshop called the Restaurant Marketing Playbook. Throughout the almost 5 hours we spent on stage answering questions and sharing marketing playbook tips, tricks, and tactics, we learned a lot about what independent restaurant brands need to focus on right now.
We heard many times restaurant owners saying things like “I need to be better at marketing.” I would argue it’s your responsibility to run and grow a successful business.
Understanding marketing so that you can give direction to somebody who works for you or an agency is a better place for you to spend your effort. Understanding Marketing helps you to give direction based on goals and how to appreciate the value.
With that, here's my best advice to restaurants looking to improve the results of their marketing.
KEY ADVICE;
1. KNOW THE GOAL
A quote from one of my favorite movies of all time, one crazy summer- “without a plan, there’s no attack. With no attack, there’s no victory.” (80s movie reference in part inspired by Jimmy Frischling.) I’d like to add that without a goal, It’s impossible to come up with a plan.
It would be easy to say the goal is to make more money, and it should be. You need to know which activities lead to making more money. Then, you can have a goal for that activity and start planning how to accomplish it.
I’ll give you a good goal to have, Grow your database of customer emails. When you have customer emails, there’s a lot you can do to get them to come visit you again.
2. GET THE RIGHT TOOLS
Running a successful restaurant is much easier when you have the right tools, especially when it comes to marketing. Here are three tools used by the biggest of brands that will automate your marketing for you and won't cost an arm and a leg
MARQII: Get discovered by more people searching online for what they crave. Marqii optimizes you at the location level for local search by managing all of your information and reviews on sites like Google, Apple Maps, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Siri, Alexa, Facebook, Foursquare, and more. Enter your address, phone number, hours of operation photos, menu, and more in their dashboard and update 70+ sites all at once. And generate responses to reviews on Google and Yelp with their AI tool.
OVATION: Want more 5-star reviews? Want less 1-star reviews? Want more guest feedback? Want to collect more email addresses and phone numbers from your guests? Want to convert guests from ordering via 3rd party delivery sites to ordering directly instead? Want to be able to text message your guests and increase same-day sales? Ovation is what you want.
NIFT: This is the easy button for driving a couple more guests every week into your restaurant. You just turn it on, and they start sending offers to their network of millions of people who are looking to discover new restaurants. It's super easy to use, and you only pay after a guest has come in and dined at your restaurant.
3. BEST SEO NEAR ME
We sealed a lot of questions about SEO optimization and I’m glad that restaurants are thinking about the importance of getting people to discover their business online. Online discovery should be 67% of your traffic.
There are only two types of search results that are really valuable to restaurants: local search, aka map search, and paid search.
When somebody is searching for their next meal, the networks give them map results because most of those decisions turn into a conversion within the hour, which also requires knowing where someone is located.
There’s no need to pay an agency or fancy technology for traditional search optimization. All you need is the right tool, like Marquee, to help you be optimized for local search by managing all of your information on all the networks and about five to $10 a day in Google search ads.
Assuming your website has your name, your address, your phone number, your hours of operation, and your menu, and it is not on a PDF, it must be HTML. Then, for the most part, your website is optimized.
Again, the key is listing management and getting more 5-star reviews, and I recommend using Marqii for the former and Ovation for the latter.
4. BE REMARKABLE
What truly sets your restaurant, your service, your food, your people, your location, and your experience apart from all the other options out there?
What’s one of the above that you can improve by 10% that would make it even more memorable?
If you can improve one thing by to make it more memorable by 10-20%, more photographic, more enchanting… Giving somebody a reason to take pictures and tell their friends why they need to dine at your restaurant, you will see incredible results. Google bacon clothesline for an example.
5. GET HELP!
If you know you "should do it” or “should be better” about it … but continue to move it to the bottom of the pile, please just hire out. Stop saying you’ll get to it and just pay someone else to do it. Especially marketing, which is an investment, not a cost.
Really need help with your marketing? That's what we do ... send me an email rev@brandedstrategic.net
If you were at #FloridaRestaurantShow #ThePizzaTomorrowSummit, what did you take away?
---Do you need help with any of this? Send me an email rev@brandedstrategic.net
- Rev Ciancio
WHAT DOES REV DO?
*I help restaurants to build guest marketing programs.
*I help hospitality tech companies with lead generation and content marketing.
#restaurantbusiness #restauranttech #restaurantowners #restaurantmarketing #restaurantindustry #restaurantowner #tradeshow
