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Secret Sauce - The Restaurant Marketing Podcast

We discover the ingredients of your Restaurant's secret sauce. SEO, Facebook, Twitter, emails, coupons, yield utilization, USPs, Menu engineering, direct mail, partnerships - there are many ingredients for creating your Secret Sauce and with the right Secret Sauce you can find more customers and turn them into repeat customers. We deconstruct the recipes, so you can increase increase turnover, increase profit and maybe decrease the amount of time you spend working in your Restaurant.
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Secret Sauce - The Restaurant Marketing Podcast
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Now displaying: November, 2017
Nov 26, 2017

6 - Marketing is all about discounting.  A lot of Restaurants already discount, especially if you are doing lunch or breakfast meals.  We look at dynamic yield pricing for Restaurants.

7 - We are killing it on Instagram, (or Twitter or Snapchat) - we don't need any other marketing.  Marketing must, Must, MUST be tied to revenue and too many people think that having 100,000 people following them on Instagram, but you can't meet payroll with Instagram followers or likes. 

8 - Our third party provider does all of our marketing.  Restaurants using people like Menulog, Dimmi, OpenTable, Just Eat, GrubHub, think that they are doing marketing on their behalf.  The 3rd parrty providers do marketing on their own behalf, not yours, especially, 

9- We can't afford a $1,000 a month marketing budget.  We have restaurants doing 1,000 seats a month.  With Dimmi that is $1,000 a month!  We recommend spending $3 - $10 a day on Facebook marketing.  We are also looking at a results driven marketing campaign as well.  Too many people are spending $3,000 a month with companies that aren't focused on revenue.

10 - We need to do brand marketing.  You should always be looking at your sales funnel and drive people into the funnel.  Great social media driving customers to websites that tell an engaging story and convert with great photos and menus and customer experiences.

11 - I am too old to do the marketing for my Restaurant.  This is a poor excuse.  If it is your restaurant, it is your story that your customers want to hear and Restaurant Marketing isn't Rocket Science.  Anyone can learn the basics of the tools that work really well to help you tell your Restaurant's story.

12 - I already have a website.  Restaurant owners don't want a Restaurant Website, they want a Restaurant eCommerce machine that generates revenue.  Don't let your main sales person in your team (your restaurant's website) do nothing - it should be working really hard.  Make sure you know the metrics, make sure it is fast, make sure it is optimized for mobile, make sure it tells your story.

If you need help with your Restaurant website, have a look at our Restaurant specific way of helping you to tell your Restaurant's story.

 

Nov 20, 2017

Wouldn't you be sad if your Restaurant was missing out on $100,000 a year in revenue because you believed a couple of these myths.  We discuss what we hear from Restaurants vs what we actually seeing as working for Restaurants around the world.

We look at Restaurant Dark Kitchens and how they are starting to change the way that food is delivered to Restaurants.

1.  SEO is a monthly ongoing cost - what is this all about?  Restaurant Keyword Optimisation - can be a can of worms and often it comes down to a monthly report only a lot of the time.  Some restaurants are paying thousands of dollars every month for no real services.

2.  If your Restaurants name comes up number 1 when someone searches for it, you have great SEO.  There are 2 types of people out there and you are only reaching 1 group (the much smaller group) if you are only getting traffic when people type in your Restaurants name.  We discuss the secret of SEO and how you can use that secret to dramatically grow the number of people going to your restaurant.  If someone doesn't know about your Restaurant, how many will find your Restaurant in Google - the answer should be lots!

3.  Great restaurants don't need marketing.  Too many times great restaurants with great food are outdone by crappy restaurants with great marketing.  You don't want to be the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of.

4.  Restaurant Email Marketing doesn't work.  Email marketing is great because it goes to people who know your Restaurant and it is very cheap to run and they are a great part of the yield utilisation process.  The hard part is building your marketing database.  

5.  Facebook no longer works.  Ongoing changes to the Facebook platform have meant that some restaurants don't think Facebook works any more.  Listen to last week's episode about Mama's BBQ Chicken and Salad Bar and how they got 1,000,000 views on Facebook.  For everyone who can't dance like Wally, :), it has become pay to play, but the budgets are often just $3 per day.  We talk about our new Marketing University course on running your first Facebook Marketing ad campaign.

 

Nov 12, 2017

We talk to Wally from Mama's BBQ Chicken and Salad Bar and the process he has used with Facebook Live videos to turn around his business.

The Chicken Shop wasn't doing too well, some weeks needing to put money in to keep it running.  This is a problem that far too many Restaurant owners are all too familiar with.

To try and turn things around, Wally started doing some Facebook Live videos.  More people started watching and he started dancing on the videos.  Over time his followers built up and he now has over 2,000,000 views for his videos.

He has been on TV multiple times and dramatically turned around the his business.  

He has grabbed the slogan 'Flavour, flavour, flavour', after mentioning it in one of his videos and seeing the reaction that people have had with it.

No script - just Wally's passion for his food, his business and his customers.  This and Wally's epic dancing skills :) have created content that has gone viral with very little marketing spend.  Very few of the videos are boosted, which is a testament to his passion and how he has tapped into what people want to see.  His videos have even been made into a rap song by one of his fans!

The effect on the business has been massive.  He has turned a business around that was late on making payments to tripling revenue and being a lot more successful.

This is a powerful story about how your Passion can really be the big difference in your Restaurant when you match it up with technology like Facebook Live.

 

Nov 7, 2017

 

Processes - How do your team know what it is that they are meant to be doing and how do you ensure consistency across visits for customers.  Work out where the problems are and create a system around that procedure.  This is a part of winning back more of your time.  There will be less questions for you and less time fixing up mistakes.

Restaurant Business Plan - Lets review the Business Plan that you had before you opened and update it with the reality that is your restaurant.  Look at the numbers and start to think about how you are going to make them work.  Once you identify your current numbers and what you need, that will start to create some of the action steps that you need to take.

KPIs - what are the numbers that are important for your Restaurants?  Customer numbers, average check size, food costs, delivery vs pick up orders.  These come out of your Business Plan and help everyone on the team understand how they are tracking.

Finances - you need to understand the finances because if you don't you are never really going to have control over your restaurant, you'll never be able to manage it.  What are the levers that you can pull to increase profitability.  Understanding the finances can help you with things like negotiating the lease.

Menu - Your menu is an important sales tool for your Restaurant.  How hard is your menu working?  Have you ever costed the menu?  Too many restaurants don't cost the menu and go out of business as a consequence.  COST THE MENU!  Do it today.  How many items are on the menu?  How long do they take to prepare?  How much of the throughput of the kitchen do some items take up?  Marketable, costed items that can be prepared quickly are critical to the restaurant.

Marketing - last but least, marketing.  You need to fix the other issues before you look at the marketing.  If the food is not great, you don't want more people coming in.  You want your product and experience to be great before you start marketing.  What is the USP, what is your story and how are you telling it?

Have a listen to the low cost and no cost ideas to help you build the restaurant that you always wanted.

 

 

 

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