The most important aspect of any marketing promotion for your restaurant will be the campaigns that convert ‘casual’ or ‘occasional’ customers to regulars. Perhaps your primary goal is to get the lunch customers into the restaurant for dinner, and attract new customers to the restaurant for lunch. Once your new customers begin to become ‘casual’ diners you should strive to convert them to regulars.
Hands-On Marketing Strategies. Grass Is Green With Grassroots Marketing.
1. Give visitors a “taste” of the restaurant.
The customers that dine Monday – Thursday are “Regulars” or “Potential Regulars”. In contrast, the customers that dine on the weekends are often visitors or tourists and not likely to return regularly. Your restaurant should therefore focus its efforts on cultivating its relationships with weekday diners. On weeknights, provide each table with a “gift” from the chef, such as an amuse-bouche. Creating a good impression from the start as well as establishing reciprocity and goodwill makes the experience memorable and worth talking about. They could also give “Regulars” and “Potential Regulars” a free after-dinner drink to leave them with a positive memory of the restaurant, and to drive their emphasis on signature cocktails.
2. Share of Mind! Create Awareness! Become Known.
Your restaurant should regularly canvas the neighborhood with samples of food, such as truffle fries or sliders. Instead of trying to convince customers that the business is better and different than the competition; the focus should be on demonstrating the business’ higher value to the customer. A sample gives visitors tangible proof of what they can expect to get and drives awareness.
3. Late Happy Hour.
Your restaurant should capitalize on the bar’s popularity as an after-work meetup spot by offering a promotion every evening (from 7-9). Specials will provide an incentive for customers to stay past the typical happy hour hours.
4. Daily Specials.
Our competitive analysis shows not many restaurants have a “Plat du Jour”, and this may be a good way for your restaurant to bring customers in for a favorite meal available only once a week. Your restaurant can take advantage of the Scarcity Principle to attract more customers with daily specials, prompting their customers to try the “dish of the evening” since they will not be able to do so in the future. Specials also provide an opportunity to complement after work promotions.
5. ‘Food Challenges.’
The restaurant has an opportunity to drive new customers to the restaurant through a food challenge event. For example, The East Coast Grill has a “Hell Night” which includes a special, limited time menu that features extremely spicy food. This has drawn such a crowd that it now sells out well in advance. Your restaurant should consider hosting a similar food attraction such as a Biggest Burger Challenge or Beer Pairing Dinner. The key is to do something different and unique, and do it at least once a quarter or possibly once a month to create a consistent customer experience.
Social Media Marketing. Pull Your Customers To You.
6. Broaden the top of the funnel.
In order to increase the value the restaurant derives from social media your restaurant needs to start broadening the top of the funnel. The restaurant has a number of useful tools at its disposal to foster lead generation through inbound marketing. For example, your restaurant can collect comment cards from restaurant diners while to capture email addresses. This touch-point in the customer lifestyle (after they’ve just enjoyed a delicious meal and quality service) provides an excellent opportunity to reach out to users to connect with them through both email and Twitter.
Your restaurant should therefore include a field on the comment card for users to list their Twitter handles, so the restaurant can follow these users online. This will allow them to collect valuable analytics about their customers’ interests & activities. Ideally, it will also spur users to “follow back” your restaurant.
Finally, your restaurant should include “like” button on its website using the Facebook Like Plugin. This allows visitors to “like” elements of the site pages, such as concert posts or menus. When a user clicks on the button, it will automatically post to their feed, providing your restaurant with exposure to that user’s entire list of friends. This is an excellent tool for lead-generation that enables you to reach new prospects.
7. Follow, follow, follow!
It's important to not only get followers on Twitter, but also to follow others. By following bloggers and media contacts, such as @eatboston, boston.grubstreet.com, passionatefoodie.blogspot.com, and Chowhound New England Boards, your restaurant will hopefully attract new followers, so that they can promote events and specials to the media more effectively, and benefit from additional PR and relationships with those who talk about your restaurant.
Your restaurant should also follow users with similar interests. For example, the restaurant should set up search columns in Tweet Deck or another monitoring tool to watch for users who are talking about “happy hour in the downtown crossing neighborhood” or “dining out in Boston”, and they should definitely be looking for users who are talking about your restaurant. You can connect with prospects at the exact moment that they are considering dining options for better return.
8. Stay Alert!
Another way to find who is talking about your restaurant in real-time is to use Google’s free Alerts (www.google.com/alerts). Alerts can be set up, as in Tweet Deck, to be notified in real-time via email when someone mentions your restaurant or a related search term on the web, in news, blogs, and other online media. We also recommend monitoring influential blogs written about the Boston restaurant scene.
9. Create content that adds value and that people want to share.
Ultimately, one of the most powerful lead generation strategies that you can embrace is to generate relevant, engaging content that your fans and followers are compelled to “re-tweet” and to “like.” This will then expose the content to their own lists of followers and friends. First, your restaurant can entice users with relevant links to blogs, news articles & online recipes. “Giving away” this information won’t deter users from coming to the restaurant; it will give them a taste of the your brand and will appeal to their senses to bring them into the restaurant. You need to inspire users to interact with the page.
Incentives are also a powerful mechanism for attracting new prospects and keeping existing users engaged. A few examples of these contents might include offering users a one-time discount to sign up for the mailing email/Twitter list in the restaurant, extending Facebook followers a special birthday discount, or running limited time appetizer specials for Facebook & Twitter users (using a promo code).
10. Listen to the music!
If your restaurant has musical performances, you should create a youtube channel with recordings of the performance to increase its web exposure. Overall, inbound marketing has proven to be five to seven times more effective per dollar spent than traditional marketing. You should include the YouTube video box on your Facebook page to display concert excerpts and keep users engaged.
11. Engage users by soliciting feedback and user-generated content.
You can nourish your existing customer base and fan base by reaching out to discover what they are interested in/would like to see more of at your restaurant. Some examples of contests & content that should test on Facebook and Twitter include:
• Ask users what they’re favorite menu items are & why.
• Find out what new items followers would like to see on the menu. Use this as the foundation for research for expanding the menu.
• Request photos of followers dining at your restaurant to post in your feed.
• Include customer testimonials in feed content.
• Reach out to followers to learn what types of musical events they’re interested in.
12. Tell a story.
You should use your website to build trust and to provide a platform for your brand. In the article “Harnessing the Science of Persuasion” the author, Robert B. Cialdini describes The Principle of Liking: People buy from people they like, or, as the author said it; “To influence people, win friends”. Many restaurants already use this technique, by including on their menus and website a brief story about the beginning days of the restaurant and how the owner decided to embark in thus new venture. You can incorporate a short story in your website (which you should then promote through social media channels) that discusses how you became the owner of your restaurant(s); by opening up in this way to customers, you will come across as trustworthy and when you get the chance to meet customers in person, they will already feel like they know you.
13. Start Talking (start blogging!)
An average of 10 hours per week should be spent on the inbound marketing campaigns and blogs. In order to do this more efficiently, employees should be encouraged to each be in charge of a section of the blog that is closest to their interests; be it music, service, or menu offerings, as well as inviting frequent customers to write guest blog posts about their experiences at your restaurant. This is a great way to build rapport and trust with potential clients; the first step in RAIN selling and the most important building block in any service relationship.
14. SEO/SEM Optimization
Your restaurant has a significant opportunity to increase traffic to the site and ultimately to its restaurant by optimizing it’s online presence for SEM & SEO. The use of a blog with content targeting Boston restaurants, Boston brunch and food-related topics will increase your SEO wattage will potentially drive new visitors to your site. When using AdWords, make sure you narrow the focus to targeted keywords that are relevant to potential visitors in the specific Boston area of your establishment.
15. Expand into new channels.
Foursquare is a location-based mobile application that enables users to connect with friends and discover new bars, restaurants and events in their cities.
Foursquare represents an opportunity to: (1) drive traffic to the restaurants, (2) foster customer loyalty through incentives for frequent visitors & “mayors”, and (3) measure user engagement through robust analytics and custom tracking. There are a number of tools within Foursquare that could meaningfully impact these metrics.
Foursquare enables businesses to offer rewards for frequent visitors & “mayors” (e.g. free dessert with dinner or a free order of calamari with the purchase of two beverages). In addition, once your restaurant has established a stronger Twitter & Facebook presence through which you can promote the event, you should consider launching a Foursquare “Swarmup campaign.” On their inbound Marketing Blogs, Hubspot’s cites a case study in which restaurant owner Joe Sorge attracted 161 Foursquare users at the same time to his burger joint in Milwaukee, AJ Bombers. The restaurant more than doubled its typical Sunday sales, with an increase of 110% that day. Sorge was able to attract the visitors by promoting the possibility of restaurant-goers earning the coveted Swarm Badge, which is awarded to users who check in at a location where over 50 other users are checked into at the same time. Your restaurant could see tremendous benefit from just a one-time event in this regard.
This article was written by: Scott Rousseau, Sarah Hodges and Kelly Hulme
This article was written by: Scott Rousseau, Sarah Hodges and Kelly Hulme
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