restaurant marketing

Last Minute Restaurant Valentine’s Day Marketing

Its one of the biggest weekends of the year for restaurants, and it is only days away. Are you doing what you can to make it the best it can be? At GuestFeed we are working overtime to help our clients capitalize. Here are four things you can do yourself starting today to make this weekend all it can be, it is time to get cracking.

1) Understand the Male Mentality: Last minute planning is the way guys operate, they will be looking for a miracle on Monday afternoon. BE THERE FOR THEM. Leverage your social media with posts like: “We have two openings at 5pm, call quick to get them.” After years of working this holiday I can tell you that the last minute calls of desperation are some of the most intense of the entire year, one after another.

2) Use your email list to share the specials and remind everyone to make a reservation, the earlier that you can get them booked the sooner you can fill up your book, by sorting people into the less desirable times. Rewarding your email list members who have been loyal to you all year with a bonus dessert for coming in before 6pm is a good idea one of our clients is using this year.

3) Watch for local reporters who are talking about Valentine’s day on Twitter. One of our clients ‘Evenfall’ has gotten three stories written about it’s Be Mine Mojito, the single ladies at the bar, and one of the dinner specials for Valentine’s Day this week. Reporters love a local tie in to a major story. @ Mention them and tell them on twitter what you are doing.

4) Use the EFT ratio and make sure you are sharing links to your reservation system, V-day menu, and providing easy ways for guests to reserve.

This is what we do everyday for our restaurant and retail clients, if you think we could help you, let me know: @spirocks on Twitter, spiro@ guestfeed.com, or here in the comments.

Build Social Proof for Your Restaurant

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Note: I have written a Post Full of Examples due to the popularity of this post here: Social Proof

You have heard it before: This is social media, be social. Interact with people who post on your wall, who tweet about their dinner the night before, and post reviews of your restaurant online. Doing so will encourage these positive members of you social circle to be more active with your business online, and create what is known as Social Proof.

Social Proof is magnetic, it make people want to be a part of what everyone else is talking about. You see it on a Facebook wall all the time, here is something from today:

Someone posts something about an event at a restaurant and people pile on, building credibility to the event, and a sense that one should attend to see what the deal is. Would it be good without the hype? Probably. Will it be better with the added bodies, minds, and buzz? Definitely. Does that add to the profitability of the night, and most importantly the thousands to follow? Absolutely. We build social proof for our clients all the time at GuestFeed.

Three things you can do to make this happen:

1) Post happenings, specials, pictures, and video in creative ways to spark conversations.

2) When conversations happen, make sure you do not neglect them, show enthusiasm for interacting with your guests, and always acknowledge their comments.

3) Be sure to monitor the mentions of your place online as best you can, take advantage of google alerts, twitter searches, and to a lesser degree the news stream on facebook. When they happen jump in and show that you are there, you care, and you want to make your place special to them. Seeing that someone is coming in with five friends for a birthday dinner… you could comment that you are happy they chose your place, and then when they are there do something to make it special (dessert martinis or something), and after they leave comment again saying it was a pleasure to host them.

I promise you will see a flood of comments from them, and when they do their entire social network will see that your place is obviously a good spot for birthday dinner.

THAT is Social Proof.

Lets build some right now. How about you comment or retweet this and see where it goes.

Restaurant Servers, Get Social Now.

Spiro Pappadopoulos

I have long wanted to write about this, but just always wished I didn’t have to. Since my wishes have gone unanswered I have given in to the temptation. A friendly order for restaurant servers everywhere. Take it from me, a restaurant owner and marketer.

RESTAURANT SERVERS YOU NEED TO GET SOCIAL NOW

To my favorite restaurant servers everywhere, you should be using your networks on facebook and twitter to do more than to try and get the attention of the girl/guy behind the counter at Starbucks. Use them to make money, so you know, you can buy a coffee at Starbucks everyday.

Sure promoting the restaurant is promoting a business that someone else owns, but truthfully you own it too. Put it this way, a restaurant owner would be thrilled to make 20% on his/her sales. She likely invested all of her money, some of her families money, and has a few investors to answer to. She has to find and manage all the employees, deal with nitwit reviews on Yelp, file and pay taxes every month, fix the toilet that a patron flushed a napkin down, worry about the local cops sending in an underage kid right when it is slammed, pay the snow plow guy, etc etc…

You? Well you get to come in at 4pm to start your shift, make some coffee, check that your section is neat and tidy, and serve your customers (some of whom may be nasty), you have to deal with the chef if he/she is testy over a slightly over cooked steak, and you have to be there to make money. But really, if you do a good job with a smile you will end up with 15-20% of your sales in your pocket. Done.

So you should be promoting the restaurant with your social networks. If you are working that night you should be sharing. You should be encouraging friends, family, and followers to come in and ask for you. You should be tweeting out the night’s special, and pictures of the blackberry mint martini. Sooner or later, money will be in your pocket because of it. Not to mention the social clout associated with working at a happening place, its yours to be had.

So own it, and do the right thing for you, your co-workers, and yes the restaurant owner too. I bet he/she will find a way to hook you up for it as well.

At GuestFeed we work with the employees of the restuarants we promote to educate, encourage, and reward their social efforts. Could we help you?

Marketing to the Calendar

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Its easy to get caught up in the technology, the latest Quora/hashable app du jour… and trust me I love them all, but you have to apply every thing you do to real life. Often times that means taking a step back and thinking, simple right? Well most of us get caught up in our to do list, things that pop up unexpectedly, and then before we know it we realize that we missed our chance to prepare for the present.

That is why this year I am going to ask you to Market to the Calendar. Right now I am meeting with my GuestFeed clients and we are mapping out January into February. We are looking at the upcoming events at each venue, the holidays upcoming (Valentine’s Day) and planning out when and how the marketing of them will be most effective. You should be doing the same.

For one of my clients, I am laying it out like this:

January’s Theme: Emphasize the Authenticity of the Ethnic Menu Items (They are made by his Immigrant Mother)

Week One: Tweet and Facebook post pictures of the menu items, with messages that express the authenticity of each item.

Week Two: Continued Tweets with a GuestFeed produced video of his Mother making some of the items. An email sharing this video with the email subscribers, and also sharing the video on the restaurant’s facebook pages and twitter account.

Week Three: His chef is given a deadline of the 21st to have the first draft of the Valentine’s Menu ready. This is where the Marketing to the calendar comes in. We have a start date of January 28th for Valentine’s day marketing. GuestFeed will layout his menu, distribute it through all the channels, there will be in house marketing done at the restaurant for three weekends beginning with the 28th, and we will have the ability to send two emails about the Valentine’s day holiday without feeling rushed. During this time the restaurant will also be sharing photos, stories, the videos, its special event menus, etc… but the Valentine’s Day Holiday will be center stage in our minds.

I am going to cut the detail short here. What I really want to get to is that throughout the year your have to be thinking ahead marketing wise. The message takes time to form, distribute, reinforce, and be acted upon. Read that line again. What day does Valentine’s Day fall on this year? If you don’t know yet you aren’t doing it right. I don’t mean to sound harsh but I know how it is, I have been there, and that is why I am working to help as many small business owners as ask me to. I know that one of your waitresses just went on maternity leave, a bartender you relied on just took a day job, the grease trap has been leaking for a month and you can’t find the right person to fix it. I know that you have a disorganized mountain of paper on your desk, and ten other things to do.

Valentine’s Day is on a Monday this year. It has the potential for one of the best weeks of the year. Lets not let that opportunity pass, let’s prepare for it with that in mind. Thats what I am here for, if reading this is all you needed, great. If you need more I am here to help in any way you want. You can find me via comments here, twitter.com/spirocks, or spiro@guestfeed.com I would love to meet/hear from you.

Oh yeah, Happy Valentine’s Day Planning.

The Year Ahead: Five Goals for Social Media Marketing

Spiro Pappadopoulos

It is natural to look at all the parts of your business operations at this time of year and make plans for where you want to go. So where should your Social Media efforts point in 2011? Most likely a ton of places, but there are some ideas and themes that you should make part of the discussion. If you do you will be among the leaders in your industry, and most importantly you will know you are making decisions about where your business is going and not waiting to see what happens to you before you do.

So Here are five bullet points to consider:

Understand your key themes. Work with your staff to define key messages that communicate the guest experience to attract the right audience. Define your organizations goals for the new year, and assign marketing and PR goals for your social media efforts that align with the organizations targets. Work to create the messages that communicate the experience tied to those goals to your guests and their networks. Those messages are the foot soldiers of your Key Themes. Example of Theme Development Here.

Involve your non marketing staff in the social media campaign. Encourage involvement within your staff, the power of social media is relinquishing total control, and even better total responsibility for the marketing efforts. We often run contests amongst the staff of businesses that GuestFeed works for, to encourage and reward those that make the social media promotion of the business part of their daily routine.

Make the Management of your Social Campaign Professional. Whether you decide to hire a company to help or to have an inside employee manage it, remember, it’s still PR and marketing and it requires professionalism. Look at your goals for the year, the consistency/experience/technical knowledge needed to accomplish them, and for many of you hiring a professional to get you started on the right track, or to continually manage the campaign is worth the investment.

Make metrics the judge of the campaign. Use the various analytics tools available to follow the effectiveness of various messages, the traffic to the key pages of your website that you are promoting, the commenting on your social profiles, and the sharing of your photo/video and other marketing posts. The information you gleam from these sources will help you fine tune your efforts to your particular audience on the fly.

Nurture your social following. It’s what the guests talk about that matters! Being consistently present to provide answers, offer thanks, and suggest services you offer is important. Just as important is being human and saying happy birthday, commenting and participating is being part of the community you want to support your business; it is part of the deal now. Many businesses recognize that means it is a good idea to investigate a professional that can help with management, PR plans, and tactics to ensure your message stays intact.

I hope this helps you as you take the next step in your marketing efforts for the coming year. thank you for reading and your comments are welcome here, got questions or answers for me? I would love to hear. You can find me on twitter @spirocks too.

More thoughts on the year ahead: 2011: What Social Will Do For Youpoint

Restaurant Marketing Via Social Media 5 Things to Do Today

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Not up to speed with social media marketing for your restaurant? You need to get going and here is the formula for a beginner or a slacker.

Start Social Media Marketing Today: Five Things To Do
1) Get a HootSuite account and link all your accounts to it so you can manage them from a singular interface. Focus on Facebook and Twitter.

2) Get a smartphone with a good camera (flash not a must), and during business hours take photos of your food/drink/bar/dining room. Get the hootsuite app for your phone (iphone/android) and upload these photos to your linked accounts. Consider getting a pocket sized point and shoot camera that takes HD video and good pictures in low light, here is a post I wrote about the best one you can get: Step Up Your Photo Game

3) Respond to each and every customer that comments on your posts, thank them for their support, agree with their compliments, keep the dialogue going. This is social media remember, be social.

4) Get a constant contact account, make sure every customer gets the chance to sign up for your email list during their visit. Use it to share what is going on at your restaurant no more than once a week. I prefer bi-weekly emails for my restaurants, and I have a 3350+ person email list.

5) Make sharing content via these avenues a part of your day, there is never a shortage of things to share at a restaurant, tonight’s specials, a new wine, menu changes, new hires, and on and on. Keep your phone on you and share on the fly.

These five things you can do in one day to dramatically change your social marketing efforts, you have to keep it up, consistently becoming a part of people’s lives and online experience. You can and will experience increased sales from doing just these things, to take it to another level check out what we do at GuestFeed.

Why Groupon Will Fail

Spiro Pappadopoulos

When you look at your marketing options, Groupon should be the first off the list. This is a fact I will outline for you in detail. I have linked you to some of the most poignant and well written articles I could find to back my claims up, so on with it:

Why Groupon will Fail.

Groupon represents a trend sweeping the country, the group buying craze. Fueled by the recession, retailers, service providers, and most actively restaurants are allowing Groupon to sell certificates for a certain amount of buying power (say $50) most often for half price ($25). The consumer gets a whopping 50% discount, and as you might expect the certificates are selling like crazy.

Groupon then turns around and pockets at least half (sometimes all) of the sale price ($12.50), and forwards on the remaining $12.50 to the small business owner who is responsible for supplying the consumer with the $50 worth of product. The fact that merchants would be willing to make such a deal is indicative of the state of the economy. It just isn’t a good deal for them, and already some are publicly complaining that their ‘promotion’ has led to huge losses, and they must tough it out while the thousands of certificates that Groupon sells come in.

Outside of profit and loss, what are some of the symptoms of this Groupon fatigue? Among the worst:

1) Customers who are ‘deal hawks’ that only visit for the deal, not to ‘discover’ new places, and become regular customers.

2) At restaurants groupon holders who only tip on the discounted total not the normal amount, leading to staff fatigue and resentment.

3) Overwhelmed merchants whose reputation is damaged with their full price paying customers because they are unable to provide the same level of service when all the Groupon wielding customers flood them after an offer.

These reasons compound the fact that it is a bad deal for business owners to sell their goods at 75% off. I mean is it that hard to figure out? I don’t care how flashy their marketing is; it’s bad business, period. Businesses have been struggling to make a profit for the past few years, and running 75% off specials is only going to make it harder.

So expect to see Groupon start making the deal better for merchants as more and more get burned, or just reject the Groupon come on in the first place. Groupon will have to lower its take in order to continue to sell. When you ask a Groupon merchant if they think it was valuable to them, you are likely to get the answer ‘Yes we feel that we got exposed to a whole new group of customers that we hope will become regulars’ the truth is that privately many of them would tell you that they are very glad the onslaught is over and they can get back to selling at a profit.

Groupon will fail because it is a short term fad marketing ploy, that will not inspire repeat enrollment among merchants, other than those who game offers to trick consumers into a deal that really isn’t. So Groupon will expand rapidly and then begin its inevitable transformation into a modern day direct mail marketer with a ‘pay ahead for a discount’ value to consumers. That transformation will not justify the lofty valuation placed on it by investors and will likely lead to its acquisition by a larger firm, and the end of Groupon as we know it today.

At GuestFeed I advise my clients to not get lured into a deal with Groupon, or any of the other copycat group buying firms cropping up everywhere. It seems all you need is a big email list and some true believer sales people to hit the streets these days. I urge my clients to do the math and to really break down the numbers to discover the real cost of such an offer. It is hard work running a restaurant and even harder when you are doing it to lose money.

For consumers a great deal, for merchants a big mistake. What do you think? Have you had any experience with Groupon you would like to share?

I am here to talk it over anytime, just hit me up. Twitter: @spirocks

****UPDATE****

I plan on updating this post as more stories surface regarding small businesses experience with Groupon.

Consider the Boston Herald piece in which Jeff Gates, one of Bostons most successful restaurant owners said:

“They (Groupon and clones) are deflationary weapons of mass destruction and are very, very dangerous for the restaurant industry to get involved in,” said Jeff Gates of Aquitaine Group. “I don’t think restaurants realize how challenging the bottom line is without giving half off to your customers. (They) lose track of what they’re giving away.”

None of Aquitaine Group’s six restaurants – including Aquitaine Bar a Vin Bistrot, Metropolis Cafe, Union Bar and Grill, and Gaslight Brasserie du Coin – offer the deals.

Here is the piece itself followed by several more stories below:

Clipped from: www.bostonherald.com (share this clip)

Recently Entrepreneur wrote: “A recent study by Rice University surveyed 150 small to midsize businesses that had used Groupon, asking about their social-coupon experience and whether they would use the service again. While 66 percent of the 150 respondents said that their Groupon deal was profitable, a significant 32 percent found it unprofitable. And 40 percent of the respondents said they would not use Groupon again — notable, considering Groupon claims that at least 95 percent of its sellers request to be featured again.

Before you jump on the social-coupon bandwagon, make sure your business can handle it. Here are five Groupon nightmares that could happen to you — and how to avoid them…”

Here is the article:

Clipped from: www.entrepreneur.com (share this clip)

Then there are others who are writing about warning signs regarding Groupon’s future. The likelyhood of a fad type waning of interest and saturation of market with competitors is written about in this article which provides some interesting historical references:

Clipped from: bostonvcblog.typepad.com (share this clip)

Clipped from: spirocks.com (share this clip)

Thanks for reading.