The Restaurant Franchising & Innovation Summit just concluded in Myrtle Beach, SC.
They describe it as "At the Restaurant Franchising & Innovation Summit, executives from leading brands will share their success stories of the numerous ways they have innovated to grow their franchises. Attendees will gain insight and inspiration to help them be more progressive in every facet of their businesses."
The show attracts growth mindset, proactive brands who are interested in learning, sharing and improving. Its a GREAT show!
Here are my KEY TAKEAWAYS;
- THE JOY OF CHICKEN
In an incredible keynote conversation with Maribeth Dela Cruz, President of Jollibee North America, she shared some high-level growth activities that any brand could activate. Here are a couple of my faves:
Introduce the community through product sampling. You want more guests, get them to try your food. You want more catering? Get them to try your food. If you are as confident about your food as Jollibee is, increase sampling.
Use influencers to help get awareness to the right audiences for your brands. If you know who your ideal guest is or what they care about, find content creators that speak to those people and work with them to gain awareness.
Need an influencer marketing playbook? Here's mine: All Your Influencer Marketing Questions Answered.
2. LIGHTS CAMERA ACTION
Here's a quick hit on content ....
- Menu photos (online and print): need to look professional and well edited
- Social photos / video: need to look more organic and natural.
- People:
1. Include people in your content as much as possible even if its just someone hand's holding your food
2. Prioritize getting good photos of your store and your executive team
3. GIVE IT 5 STARS
They could've renamed this the Restaurant Feedback & Innovation Summit based on the frequency of how often reputation management and guest feedback came up on stage.
The brands who are achieving success are doing all of the following:
- Asking every guest for their feedback.
- Asking every guest to share their thoughts on review sites.
- Replying to every guest who leaves a review, ideally in less than 48 hours.
- Analyzing insights gained from feedback.
- Analyzing insights gained from reviews.
- Taking action on both of the above.
Pro-Tip Keywords matter. Thanks to Avi Goren and Marqii for sharing the marketing hack of using keywords in your review responses to effect how your brand comes up in relevant dish searches (ex: pizza near me) on Google.
4. HOW TO BE HOT
Let's go deeper on that ...
What is your average rating on Google? Dave's Hot Chicken, with 270 locations, has an system wide average of 4.7. Do you know how hard that is to do!?!?
Here are some tips directly from them on how they do it, aside of having great service and food ...
- Encourage every guest to share their feedback
- Empower each location with the right tools and show them how to reply to guest reviews
- Reply to EVERY single guest who leaves a review. They have a 21 hour response time!
- Use insights from reviews to understand trends in guest feedback that can help improve operations.
Pro-tip Use Ovation to make it super simple and easy to get guest feedback on every order!
5. TECH - WHAT BRANDS WANT
Thanks to Crisp Restaurant Systems, I was fortunate to be able to lead a conversation some incredible brand leaders around how to build and deploy a tech stack successfully throughout the organization.
➡️ Amanda Kahalehoe, Vicious Biscuit
➡️ Heath Nielsen, HTeaO
➡️ Dylan Roeder, Swig
A couple of key takeaways from that conversion:
Most important things brands look for in a tech partner
They act like a partner, especially when it comes to understanding a brand's roadmap.
Support. Support. Support.
Insights. Vendors work with tons of brands with tons of locations, what best practices are you seeing? What are your top performing clients doing to be successful? Share those playbooks with your other customers (especially me!)
Integrations that solve operational hurdles and make customer data easier to visualize.
6. WHEN TO TECH IT UP
On that same panel, we discussed when is it time to take on new tech. I have a really simple formula for this.
Every department needs to know what are the non-negotiable pieces of tech that if taken away, they would not be able to perform. The rest of the organization needs to respect each department's needs.
Then every department needs to have an idea of what would make them even more effective. Once it becomes blatantly apparent that new tech would have an exponential effect, its time to start the RFP process.
Knowing what's needed along with what would be a nice to have, keeps you to a certain degree in a constant evaluation process.
7. WHERE TO AI RIGHT NOW
Interesting ways brands are using AI
- Smart kiosks that tailor the experience to the person
- Online ordering optimization
- Projections and work flow preparation
- Inventory and ordering
- Kitchen robotics
- Creating copy for digital ads
If you were at #RFISummit, what did you take away?
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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.
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