Restaurant Owner, What Are Your Sales and Marketing Goals?
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After reading seven periodicals a month, frequenting blogs, attending restaurant group meetings and tradeshows, reading books, listening to audio tapes and frequenting seminars etc etc… I’m surprised at how many times are the BASICS are not reinforced.
Seriously. Did our businesses meet the goals set for 2007?
Do we have EXACT figures for restaurant business sales and marketing that we hope to meet in 2008?
For all the “strategies” and “tactics” that Restaurant Revolution and others will bring to you, please don’t lose sight of basic goals. And remember: Goals are SPECIFIC. They can be MEASURED.
When we have a plan, complete with goals that can be measured and tracked, we have CLARITY. The more CLEAR we are on what we want to accomplish, the easier it is to filter out the noise that’s encountered on a daily basis… including the phone calls, walk-in salespeople and everyone else that wants a piece of us.
So, with all the great information that is (and will continue to be) available… please remind yourself at the sub-conscious level to write down your restaurant business goals and stick them in a place you will see them every single day.
I’m warning you now that 2008 is only going to deliver another truckload of new information. It will be interesting, some of it will be amazing… and most of it will do absolutely NOTHING for you… but the only way to really know is if you have a plan to judge it by.
Check the next post on How to Reboot Your Brain for more in-depth information on exercises I recommend and personally use.
Get Creative Restaurant Advertising… Completely “Free”?
In the latest issue of Nation’s Restaurant News, Gregg Cebrzynski mentioned Chipotle’s video contest. The short story is the restaurant chain hosted a contest that had students (and others) produce Chipotle commercials in exchange for prizes.
Terrasynth LLC was closely involved with a similar video contest earlier this year for T-Mobile’s Sidekick phone, hosted on Myspace. You will see here that not only did the video contest go extremely well, but the popularity of Myspace alone was able to drive interest in the new product.
What does all this mean to you?
People will do creative work for you absolutely free. Period. It’s simply a matter of you being creative about it in the first place… and making sure that you have high standards (otherwise your contest is likely to bust).
So, what are steps to consider when asking your customers to make advertising images for your restaurant?
- Remember that contests don’t have to be Video. You can have a contest for people to create newspaper advertising, radio spots, logos, billboards… just about anything you want.
- Giving recognition and value is the key. Artists want recognition, praise… and free food. Giving a combination of these will drive benefits to your restaurant and the designers fighting for the prize(s).
- Make your contest a newsworthy event to double the miles. When was the last time a local restaurant had a contest worth noting? Make the contest interesting and when you start to promote it on-site, tell your local news station about it.
After you have entries coming in, prepare your customers to get involved!
People get weirdly excited at the opportunity to make a difference. Get the public involved and have votes taken as a way to decide the “winner” for your contest. Quickly design little voting slips, and request the name, email and any other information you’d like ON THE VOTING SLIP.
DO YOU SEE THE POWER OF THIS IDEA?
By running a contest for advertising ideas, having the public vote on the winner, and getting each voter’s contact information… I have no doubt that you could easily revolutionize your restaurant for an entire year or more!
Creating A Restaurant Customer Database - Part 3: Sorting Information
It was mentioned in a previous restaurant database creation article, but I want to emphasize again that the best way to get in the game is using a very simple program like Microsoft Excel.
If you’re on a tight budget, and don’t already own Microsoft Office (which includes Excel), I recommend downloading the FREE application OpenOffice. OpenOffice is 100% compatible with Excel, it’s just missing a few of the bells and whistles… which is fine for what you need to start.
After you have an application open, you’ll be making columns for the information to be collected. The information itself will go in the rows.
This is basic… basic… stuff. And that’s good because it means you have NO REASON to avoid doing it! And everything you create by doing this will be capable of being imported into any fancy system you get in the future.
You can see in this example that I’m asking for:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Address 1
- Address 2
- City
- State
- ZIP Code
- Phone Number
- Email Address
Some might consider this to be ambitious… but if you’re providing enough UP FRONT value to receive the information, any customer that’s serious about your restaurant will give it. I think it’s fair to hand a $5 Gift Certificate to every guest that is willing to fill out such a card. (That’s actually very low cost!)
Regarding the two address boxes — this is thinking long term. You can probably get away with only one box, but having two will let you split off Apartment numbers, Suite numbers and other secondary information.
This can make things easier when migrating to a database system later because you’ll be able to sort by streets and have the secondary numbers come up separate. (There are other, more technical reasons too.)
Every Restaurant Needs A Customer Database - Part 2: Systems
Every restaurant operator needs to have a systematized method of gathering customer names and contact information. This concept is rarely a problem - most business owners understand they need a database. The issues arise when they fail to create a SYSTEM that operates with very little, actual work.
Building a database for a restaurant is not that hard… after you get the operations in place. (That goes for most anything, doesn’t it?)
It’s really a matter of deciding HOW you want to get customer information. That effort then needs to be maximized so that it creates real, physical, monetary value that the accountant can see.
As with all things, I recommend developing a specific “roadmap” that describes what the task will look like. And before creating any map, I have to know my destination… my goal. For a customer database, I need to determine exactly what information I want.
At the beginning it’s not very important to know exactly why I need the information. This might seem odd, but with technology developing like it is, I tend to settle with getting as much information as I can so that if a way to use it becomes available, I will! The one caveat is to not get so personal that your customers think you’re crazy (ie. don’t make the comment card look like a loan application).
When “contact information” is mentioned, it isn’t necessary to limit that to an e-mail address. E-mail is great because it’s basically free and allows restaurant owners to contact several hundred people simultaneously… but it’s also limited for several reasons… one of them being the competition in the Inbox (more on that another time).
I usually ask for First and Last Name, Address, City, State, Zip Code, Phone Number and E-mail address.
Depending on the types of promotions a restaurant intends to do, other useful information would be Birthday, Wedding Anniversary dates, and even the Birthdays of children if the restaurant is family oriented.
After deciding what information will be collected, I sit down to brainstorm the number of tactics that can be used for getting it. Let me clarify that: I literally sit at my dining room table with a piece of printer paper and my favorite pen and write out my intentions. Putting thoughts onto paper helps me think through the system I’m about to develop.
When brainstorming I don’t limit myself to what marketing strategies are currently available — I consider all those that are possible, even if they’re out of my budget at the time.
The next part of the system creation is determining how the processes will be handled. Who will collect the information? Who will put it into a database format? What steps can be removed to make the process quicker? These are just a few questions to consider, and I’ll talk about more in the next article for this series.
Every Restaurant Needs A Customer Database - Part 1: Value
Having a database is like having my very own, personal goldmine. Because I’m able to contact the people who enjoy my services, I can build a long-lasting relationship with them. I’m able to announce specials, send news and also create a dialogue that allows me to learn more about them… in a way that helps me serve them better.
The same goes for restaurant owners: by not maintaining a customer database, they’re literally throwing money out the window.
Knowing the names and contact information of customers makes marketing easier, but there is another fact about databases that 99.99% of restaurateurs don’t consider…
Having an up-to-date customer database can easily quadruple the value of your business.
If you’re ever thinking of selling the business or expanding it as a franchise, having the ability to tell the new operator exactly who eats at the restaurant and how they can get in touch with them is invaluable. It just makes running the business easier.
But what if you’re not itching to sell? There are a near infinite number of ways to work with current guests to boost profits. We’ll be talking about those in future articles, so stay tuned.
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