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Restaurant Technology Trends for 2023

Restaurant Technology

The last few years have been a rollercoaster for restaurants, with closures, supply chain issues, labor shortages, technology advances, and inflation posing unprecedented challenges. What could the coming year possibly bring? I’m predicting six things to expect in 2023:

  1. Labor pressure is easing, but operators are still looking for labor management solutions. The labor crunch has been hard to bear, but the situation is improving. Operators who don’t already have a system in place will need to prioritize finding one to control costs ASAP.
  2. Incentivizing in-house delivery and in-app purchases will be key. Operators will need to provide incentives to encourage customers to order directly from their websites or apps.
  3. P&Ls will adjust to added technology fees as the need for new or unified technology grows.
  4. More restaurants will embrace cloud-based solutions as they offer more features to simplify amplify operations effectiveness.
  5. Restaurant owners will continue to look for ways to optimize costs and increase efficiency.
  6. Guest experience will be more crucial than ever in the face of a likely recession.

Our Choices:

As the restaurant industry evolves, these changes will shape the future of the industry and the success of its participants.

Restaurant Mobile Ordering Technology

As national chains and billion dollar valuation delivery operations drive revenue to their locations / partners where do today’s independent and small group restaurants turn to maintain their share of the market?

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There are thousands of stand alone app creators, and now restaurants are dealing with clusters of tablets and reconciling sales totals and reimbursements from several systems daily. It’s a mess.

Streamlined POS systems that integrate in person, online, and mobile orders are somehow still eluding us.

What is the best solution you have found?

 

 

 

Restaurant Tech Upgrades For Right Now

As the year comes to an end upgrade your restaurants’ tech with these easy to install products for a more efficient, more appealing, and more secure 2015.

Restaurants Lighting, with its long hours of all bulbs burning electricity is a major expense. Upgrade to LED bulbs today and start saving up to 80% of the electricity immediately. This is one of the easiest ways to upgrade your space. Be careful not to get lights of a cold temperature that change the atmosphere of your space, I upgraded some halogen bulbs to these warm LEDs and have enjoyed their light, the electricity savings, and the quality of the build. Here is an amazon link:

Tired of your clunky old emergency lights with the huge, expensive, lead batteries that never seem sto be charged when it is inspection time? Yeah I was too, that is why I upgraded my restaurant’s emergency lights to these sleek, affordable, LED units that uses small easy to find rechargeable batteries. Oh and they always seem to be charged anyhow. These are a quick and easy install especially when you are just replacing an existing unit.

More and more customers expect to have a wifi network to use at the restaurant’s they frequent, whether it is a kid contently playing with their grandmother’s iPhone or a a business dinner that needs access to the cloud wifi is becoming a necessity and you don’t want guests choosing to go elsewhere when they need it. You also don’t want guest use to clog up your business network and or create any vulnerabilities in your system. That is why you need to get a wifi router that has dual networks, one for guests and employees and one for your business systems. This is the one that I recently upgraded to and I can fully stand behind its performance.

What upgrades are you thinking of making, want some advice on what I would do? Hit me up on Twitter @spirocks and I will be sure to get back to you.

Merry Christmas!

 

Tech Tip: Disconnect iMessage

If you are like me, and you got tired of paying more to have a phone whose screen breaks, battery dies, and is trailing in the new technologies and sharing capabilities… you may have left or are thinking about leaving the iPhone world.

Shudder not, though we are attached to our phone of choice, we have moved on before, even from Blackberry and BBM.

Here is a new tool from Apple that allows you to free up your number from iMessage so that the texts your still iPhone having friends send you dont get stuck in iMessage and never reach you.

Disconnect iMessage

disconnect imessage

The Social Feed and Employees

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How does your social feed embrace your employees? Does it at all?

These are the questions you should ask yourself. Are you tagging employees in pictures of the product of their labors, are you recognizing the fact that many hands are involved in creating what your business accomplishes? Do you thank, mention, and acknowledge in your social feeds?

Here are some reasons you should: 

  1. People who love doing a good job, like to know it is appreciated. And keeping great employees is the first step at keeping customers coming back. Be the leader they want to work for, one that gives them love.
  2. Social Media is public, and employees of other businesses in your area are watching. They will be more likely to want to work for you if they see you building your team up.
  3. Your employees have friends and family that want to see there work life celebrated too, these are not only sources of positive reinforcement but also potential customers who are looking to embrace those that support their loved ones.
  4. These employees are the faces of the story of your business that the community will want to embrace, a cocktail without a bartender is not the same experience. Celebrate your story, and the characters that make it unique.

There are tens of thousands of reasons to involve your Social Feed and Employees. These are just a few. Above you can see Mike, Spencer, and I having some fun at Sauce. If you wore your Jorts in that Thursday you got a free hand cut french fry… see those Jorts are worth something!

Tip: Consistently Communicate with Customers

Marketing a restaurant is a game of consistency, you can’t post/email thirty two things in the next 15 minutes and then take two months off. You know that. Yet it is still likely the case that you find yourself with gaps in your communications, lapses in the connection with your customers that helps drive business through your door. What you need is a plan, a system that helps you simplify, and I have one for you. 

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See What I do on Instagram and Twitter by following @spirocks on both. 

Restaurant Marketing Simplification System:

First you need a base that you control, a place where you can guarantee the rules won’t change and affect all the work you have put in. That is your website/blog, and I spelled out the reasons here: ( Don’t Just Rent Your Friends ) If your restaurant website does not have a blog section, you should make that project number 1.

  1. Create a Blog on your website: Your blog is going to be the place where you create the content that is spread throughout your social networks and email lists.
  2. Create a Mailchimp Account. Great news; they are free up to 2000 contacts so you can try this out with no risk. Mailchimp allows you to send RSS campaigns, which means that once you publish a blog post you have Mailchimp automatically create an email from it and email it out when you want, like say 10am on Friday. That’s it, email campaign done. 
  3. Decide the frequency with which you wish to contact your email list. Once you have that plan, all you need to do is create a post before the date and time (give it an hour early) you set in Mailchimp and you are done. Most people find creating a blog post a less cumbersome process than creating an email and best of all you kill two birds with one stone. 
  4. Social Network integration via Mailchimp allows you to connect your restaurant social accounts and post to them at the same time.

So there you have it a simple way to create great content once, on a platform you control, and get it distributed free to everywhere it needs to be.

How frequently to post to your social networks:

In addition to the above, I suggest having a plan for social media only posts, as you should post to them more frequently than you email. So say you have a new special every Tuesday, share a picture of that with a simple one line description.

One great place to do this is through instagram, where you can take a photo of a special appetizer for example and share it to not only instagram, but also facebook, twitter, flickr, and tumblr all at the same time. Maybe I will write another post on that if you are interested.

Got any tips on how you streamline your restaurant’s online marketing? I would love to hear.

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Don’t just rent your friends from Facebook

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Too many business owners have an online strategy which relies on garnering as many likes as possible for their Facebook page. This is wrought with peril and here is why:

At any time, and they do it often, Facebook alters how you connect with these people to further their goals. Which all revolve around making money off of these connections. They want you to rent your friends, plain and simple.

So as time changes, the investment you have made in those connections is adjusted, filtered, and rearranged to become more profitable for Facebook. Recently they altered how many of your business posts people who liked your page see if you don’t pay to promote them.  Its time to focus on making connections with these friends and followers as permanent as possible.

The answer for most of you: Build your email list. Start today, make it worth their while. How much should you invest in time and money? Answer one question: What is a permanent connection to your customers worth to you?

Dominate Instagram Marketing: How to Increase Your Brand’s Local Audience

Instagram has held the distinction as the fastest growing social media network for over a year now. For brands like yours, it puts the ability to get close to your targeted local audience in the palm of your hand.

This requires a healthy dose of inspiration be it artsy, humorous, insightful etc… it also requires you to have a solid understanding of the ins and outs of Instagram. That is what this post is about.

1) Follow the most influential local Instagrammers, interact with them.

Start by finding those that have tagged your business in a post, either by mentioning its name, or by geotagging photos at your place of business. These are happy customers who you must follow and interact with. Like their photos and let them know you are fans of them too, that good feeling is the beginning of an amazing instagram relationship.

Look for others in your community who are active on Instagram and follow them, like their content, get to know what they find interesting, finding customers that will sing your praises is a great thing. Remember you are great at what you do, once they give your business a try you will make them wish you had found them on Instagram earlier.

2) Hashtags are key to getting found, here is how to use them.

While I have a post devoted to this topic on its own, I will give you the cliff notes version here. Focus on finding the relevant hashtags for your post, making up a funny word may be entertaining for your followers but it isnt going to get searched for often if at all. Consider a fitness related post that included the hashtag #beeeasstmodelegdaaaaze versus #squats #legday #workout… clearly the latter post would transcend and be found more often. Studies have shown that including three or more hashtags in your post drastically increases how many people find it. In fact up to 7 are acceptable to Instagram users.

As far as local marketing goes, use hashtags that relate to the town/state/university that makes up your target audience. For instance I use the #andover hashtag frequently for my restaurants in downtown andover. It both relates to those who live in town, and to the prominent boarding school Phillips Academy Andover that is in town.

3) Pull back the Curtain, and do it frequently.

Intersperse images of what you are selling with behind the scenes pics of your team, your office, previews of future offerings… let your audience feel privy to your process and in turn they will feel a part of it. For instance showing pictures of our recently launched sunday brunch dishes is a good way to let people know how amazing they are, but showing them pictures of a bar full of people having a blast eating them is another angle. Those ‘product in motion’ or ‘experience’ images are often even more impactful. Try something different and let your audience look forward to finding your next image… be you, be human, share you business story. It may be your everyday, but to a lot of people it is very interesting and your providing a window into the happenings can make them feel much more comfortable taking the plunge and becoming a customer.