The Gift of Restaurant Feedback

Getting feedback about your restaurant is, perhaps, one of the best ways to improve your business. After all, the people bringing you the money are telling you what they like and what they don't about your restaurant.

Giving feedback requires time and energy so most of your dinners won't bother telling you about your food, your service and/or your ambience. Only when clients have very strong opinions (positive or negative) they will take the time to give you their feedback so you better pay attention to what they have to say.

It is true that most of the feedback that you'll receive will be negative. People are mostly moved by emotions and nothing motivates a person to act more than expressing their feelings about why their dinning experience was ruined by your food, service, ambience, or some combination of them...

I've just published a new article in my website that talks about this issue. You can read the full article at my website: The Gift Of Restaurant Feedback

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco

Follow me in Twitter: www.twitter.com/jlriesco

80/20 vs. 4: Restaurant Marketing By The Numbers

By Greg McGuire

The Pareto Principle has long been hailed as the Holy Grail of marketing, the one rule by which all marketing efforts succeed or fail. The principle itself is pretty simple: 20% of your customers drive 80% of your sales. There’s always a core group of loyal customers who not only spend money in your restaurant, they bring their friends, give glowing reviews at dinner parties, and otherwise provide a vital linchpin in your money making machine.

Figuring out who those 20% are can be a full time job, and the logic has long held that if you find them, and target them effectively, you’ll be well on your way. But as the Information Age has matured, so has the wealth of tools available to marketers, and therefore the size of the groups you can target has gotten much smaller. Some marketers have even begun to parse groups of customers down to what some are calling the 4% factor, or specific offers that have a high conversion rate among 4% of your customers.

So how does this apply to restaurants? Well, for starters, restaurants are a business, just like any other. And as a business, restaurants have products that need to be sold to the right customer. Every day your restaurant has the opportunity to learn more about your customers: how often they come in, how much they spend, what they order, etc.

The more you know, the better you can target your promotions and marketing. Too often restaurants take a shotgun approach to their marketing campaigns – blanket advertising in local media outlets and generalized coupons (20% off your order, etc.). That strategy used to be enough. But as more restaurants compete for the same customers, aging marketing approaches are simply not going to work anymore.

Here are some tips to bring your restaurant marketing strategy into the 21st century:

Know thy customer. You’ve probably heard this one before, but it has never been more true. The main difference is that you have many more ways to get to know your customer today that simply didn’t exist before. For restaurants specifically, consider some strategies to learn more about your customers:

• Hold a raffle/door prize event.Customers who enter must fill out a card with their email address, favorite menu item, really anything you want to know about them.
  
  
• Use an email marketing campaign to engage customers and collect information about them.
  
  
• Conduct surveys, either electronically or on paper in your restaurant.

Use coupons to learn more about your customers – if you can collect an email when a customer redeems a coupon for a specific menu item, then you can use that information to target them for specific types of future promotions

Leverage thy knowledge. Now that you’ve put some effort into collecting information about your customers, you need to leverage that information to your advantage. Use the 4% factor to separate customers into specific groups with particular tastes. Then hit those groups with specially tailored promotions made just for them. The goal is to get your response rate (i.e. conversion rate) through the roof.

Engage thy followers. Targeting small groups of loyal customers should generate an enthusiastic response. And when customers respond, you should be poised to engage them and solidify your rightful place as one of their favorite brands. The tools you have available to you today make customer engagement even easier. Experiment with different avenues until you find the social media that works for you.

Gauge and repeat. The idea is that these small groups you find through your marketing campaign will respond at much higher rates than a traditional (and usually more expensive) marketing campaign. You’ll only know for sure if you gauge response. Use coupon codes and other ways to measure who’s biting on what, and then modify and improve your campaign until you have it honed down to a high performance machine.

The good news is that running a 4% campaign will probably be much cheaper than a traditional shotgun blitz. The bad news is that it takes some significant time investments and more than a little trial and error. For those willing to put the time in however, the gains can be huge.

---

Greg McGuire blogs about the foodservice industry at The Back Burner, which is written by the employees of Tundra Specialties, a company specializing in restaurant equipment and food service supplies.

Restaurant Email Marketing or Restaurant Social Media?

Last week I've posted a blog in FohBoh titled Restaurant Email Marketing and to be honest, I was surprised about how many heated comments it got.

You can read it here:

http://www.fohboh.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1411008:BlogPost:338824&page=1

Obviously restaurant Email marketing obviously strikes a chord equally with marketing experts and restaurateurs. One of the comments was very interesting. Brett mentioned that "True interaction and exchanges of information happen on social networks."

His point is that email is intrusive while in social network media people chose to follow other people (or a business) and therefore the information is shared voluntarily.

This is not totally right since people can also unsubscribe easily from email lists if the content is not to their liking.

The difference between email marketing and social media marketing is that email marketing is a push marketing (people receive your communication) while social media is a pull marketing (people need to connect and check what's going on).

So which one is best? The answer is both:

Email marketing is really appropriated to send a message to your customers that you want to make sure they receive (like an important event or announcement).

Social media marketing, on the other hand, is better for posting general news, photos of your restaurant, staff or dishes, etc. and in general for keeping your restaurant fresh in your customers' memory.

Use both with moderation and always post interesting information and you will accomplish to keep your customers happy and informed.

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

PD: I've updated my website with a ton of free marketing information, resources and ideas. Check it out!

The Best Restaurant Marketing In the World

Restaurant owners and managers often spend quite a lot of money in marketing, trying to bring new customers to their restaurant with mixed results.

However, that obsession with bringing new customers often diverts the attention from their core business.

Let’s face it; before you start spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a month trying to bring new customers to your restaurant, you should focus on your core competences, making sure that you can deliver an excellent dining experience to your clients.

Restaurants should show their commitment to excellence in four basic parameters:

√ Quality of their food

√ Excellence of their service

√ Cleanliness of their place

√ Agreeable, beautiful, unique, and/or attractive ambience

If you can’t deliver in all these categories, then perhaps you can still bring new customers to your restaurant using smart and targeted marketing. However, many of these people won’t come back to eat at your place, so you will have to keep on investing over and over in new marketing vehicles to always attract new customers.

Instead, try to take a hard look at your current offering. Do you deliver great food with excellent customer service in a clean and attractive place? If so, great, you are ready now to promote your business.

However, if you think that you are missing in one or more of the four categories, you should focus your energies on improving them.

These are some basic things you can do to improve your core business:

√ Changing or simplifying your menus. Sometimes less is more and your kitchen staff can focus all their energies on your signature dishes and your servers will know better the menus. If your cooks can deliver great quality food, then it’s time to hire new more skilled cooks.

√ Training your staff by switching all the emphases to customer service and satisfaction. Setup clear guidelines about how to deal with unhappy clients.

√ Making sure that your restaurant is spotless. There is not excuse for less than a clean place where people go to eat. If your place is not clean enough, change your cleaning service (if you hire one), or ask your in-house people to clean better and review thoroughly after they clean to make sure that the place is spotless.

√ Creating a nice ambiance. Sometimes, a fresh coat of paint and some accessories is all you need to give your place a fresh and pleasant look.

But the most important aspect of all, is a total commitment from the management to deliver to your clients a great dining experience. This is what separates the great restaurants from the mediocre ones.

I encourage you now to go to the main restaurant review sites (www.yelp.com, www.citysearch.com www.metaflavor.com, www.menusnearu.com, etc.) and read the reviews that people wrote about your restaurant.

Sometimes this is a revelation because as the proud owner, you think that everything is fine with your place, and then you read some nasty reviews from disgruntled customers. I know that these reviews are hard to swallow but you must think about these reviews as a great opportunity for you to know your weak spots and improve your business.

Do they mainly complain about your food? Your service? Do you have tables that people really don’t like (perhaps no very well located…)?

These should be clues for you about what are your restaurant’s weaknesses and try to improve upon them.

Many times, the problems are related to consistency. A great review from one day becomes a horrible review the next because the dish was wrong, or the service poor. This is also a clue that you must set up processes that everybody should follow to make sure that things work as expected.

Of course, all the processes and safeguards in the world won’t assure you that mistakes won’t be made; after all, the restaurant business is a people’s business and people will make mistakes, count on it. So, what can you do to make your clients happy? You should make sure that people are adequately compensated for any wrongdoing that spoils their dining experience.

Having a compensation plan for your clients is the best marketing strategy that you can implement in your restaurant. After all, happy clients will write enthusiastic reviews about your place. These glowing reviews will be read by many prospects in the many restaurant review sites, and they will bring you many more happy clients.

Also, once you have solid systems in place to assure your customer's satisfaction, you can implement a formalized restaurant referral systems to bring back over and over your increasingly happy crowd.

If you focus on your core business and you always exceed your customers’ expectations, you won’t have to worry about marketing anymore.

Your clients will become your best marketing and sales force. Their testimonials will have ten times more credibility and power than any fancy advertisement or marketing campaign that your restaurant can run.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco
www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

People Are Searching Online to Find Restaurants

How important is your restaurant's web presence?



According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, in 2008 over 72.5% of the U.S. population was online (that’s OVER 220 MILLION Americans), and 70% of them use the Internet everyday. This means that most of your customers are looking for restaurants online, and many of them use Google to find a good place to eat.



I don't know if you are aware that Google has recently introduced a local search feature that detects your location and shows local results instead of global ones. What this means is that, for example, if somebody wants to find a Mexican restaurant near their home, they just have to type "Mexican restaurant" in the Google bar...

...and Google will show them a list with the top 10 Mexican restaurants nearby. No need for them to even tell Google where they are located. Google knows.



Now, if you happen to own the ONLY Mexican restaurant in town, you probably don't need to worry about showing up in the top-ten list. However, chances are that your restaurant is not the only one in your category so you better start working on your web presence or people won't find you online!



In addition of showing the list with the names of the top 10 restaurants, Google also displays their websites, their phone numbers, and the number of reviews that people made. It is just one click away to read what people have to say about your restaurant:

So, OK now you get that you should show up in the Google searches when somebody looks for your restaurant’s cuisine, now what should you do to make sure that your restaurant shows up in the top-ten list?



To start, you should make sure that your restaurant has a decent website. This is a basic requirement. It is not enough to show up in Citysearch, Metaflavor or Yelp. If you’ve noticed, all the restaurants in my search have their own websites.



Also, your website should be informative and very easy to navigate. It should contain the following components:



✔ Your complete menu with prices



✔ Photos of your dishes



✔ Your location: address (with a map), and phone number



✔ Hours of operations



✔ Information about other services: catering, special events, cooking classes, etc.



✔ The option of making online reservations directly from your site (very important for many people)



✔ An online form to capture your prospect's name, email, birthdays and anniversaries (essential requirement to email them promotions and attract them to your place)



✔ Press releases, testimonials of happy clients



✔ etc.


In addition, you should promote your site so that it scores high in the Google natural search results. How do you do that? This is a whole new topic (it is called SEO) but basically you should have as many cross references to your site as possible from other sites and social networks: blogs, reviews, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

You can sign for a free account in Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start blogging about your place. You can write about your dishes, your staff, your wines, or beers, about geography (country, region) and culture of your restaurant’s food or any other information that could be interesting for your clients.

Of course this blog will have links to your website. You can even link this blog so that it also publishes to your website at the same time…

Also, open a free Facebook account and populate it with content. Link it to your website. Open another one in MySpace. Do the same with Twitter and tweet away information, discounts, timely coupons, etc. Don’t forget to point people to your website as well in Twitter.

There are many other ways to promote your website. I will cover some in future blogs.

In the meantime, get to work.

✔ Google your restaurant’s cuisine and check if your website shows up in the top 10.

✔ Review your current site and start improving it with all the necessary requirements to make it attractive, useful and easy to navigate.

✔ Open an account in Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and start a blog. Link it to your website.

✔ If you don’t already have, open accounts in the various social networks and create your restaurant page.

✔ Open an account in Twitter (or tweet away if you have one).

Link all of your offerings back to your website and in a few weeks, check again. You should start showing up in the top 10 restaurants for your category. This is what you want. This will attract you new customers.

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco

http://www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Simplify Your Life: Optimize Your Restaurant Operations (1st part)

This is the second blog of the Simplify Your Life series. The main concept behind these series is to give you some ideas to help you simplify your workload (and your life!) AND in the process, improve your business.

I my previous blog, I mentioned that you need to reduce the number of items in your menu. In this one, I will talk about simplifying your operations.

Operations in a restaurant are all the actions that happen from the moment that you open your doors in the morning, until the moment when you close them at night.

For simplicity purposes, I will split the operations in two separate components:

1. Your front of the house: whatever is visible to your customers.

2. You back of the house operations: what happens behind your restaurant doors that your customers are unaware of, but that it is essential for the smooth working of your restaurant.

In this blog, I will focus only on number one: the front of the house operations that covers from the moment than a customer makes a reservation (online, on the phone or in person) to the moment that they leave your place and everything between.

Every single aspect of your operations should work like a well-oiled machine; without hiccups and without your staff needing to wait and think how to act in each moment that something unexpected happens.

Often, restaurant owners and managers spend an incredible amount of time troubleshooting problems and dealing with customers complains and issues.

So what can you do to avoid this trap?

First, you must document all your current processes. I know that this may sound like a tedious task but trust me; it is important. You can’t improve your current processes if you don’t know what they are.

Just sit at your computer start writing down how do you currently handle your bookings:

✔ Online from your site: do you have an easy and efficient way to manage online bookings? If not you should consider one. You should check www.bookingangel.com or some other online reservation system.

✔ On the phone: Does your staff have a consistent and polite way to answer the phone?

Create a nice message and write it down. Make sure that you include the following points:

☛ “Hello, this is restaurant XXXXX” (Pronounce clearly the name of your restaurant), “How can WE help you?” (It is better to use we than I since it creates a sense of community)

☛ Make sure that you capture their name (ask to spell to make sure it is correct), contact's phone number, AND ask the reason of the visit and if they are coming for any special occasion.

This is very important. Most of the times when I make a reservation, the host(ess) don’t ask me why I am visiting the restaurant. If this is a special occasion, (birthday, anniversary, some celebration, etc.) make sure to write it down in the reservations book or online system so that you can greet and compensate your clients as appropriate.

☛ Repeat back to the clients the booking information: their names and phone numbers, the date and time and the reason for their visit. Not only this will avoid you misunderstandings, but your prospects will be happy to know that you are acknowledging the reservation, and you paid attention to them.

✔ In person: Basically, follow the same rules than on the phone.

NOTE: Make sure that the person answering the phone or taking the reservation in person is smiling to the prospects. Even thought the phone, one can detect when somebody is genuinely happy and it makes the whole experience more pleasant.

In my next blog I will continue with the operations and talk about what to do when people arrive to your place.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco

© Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Simplify Your Life: Reduce Your Restaurant Menu Items

In these times of economic uncertainty, it is easy to get lost in trying to do many things all at once. A good example is restaurateurs trying to manage their inventories, their staff, their operations, their books, their sales, their marketing...

Do you know anybody like that? I thought so.

This is the first of a series of blogs covering simplification. You need to simplify your life and focus on just a few basic core competences to make your restaurant the best it can be to stand out from your competitors.

So let's start with your menu: do you have many menu items? If so, perhaps you should think about reducing the number of dishes that you offer.

Frequently restaurateurs think that having many choices is better for their customers, when the opposite is often true. The best restaurants in the world have limited selections with all around excellent offerings.

With large menu choices, the quality is often uneven since it is almost impossible to equally master all the dishes. It also becomes a nightmare to manage the inventory, probably your servers struggle to remember all the dishes (and components), and your customers get often confused with so many choices.

Perhaps you should take a hard look at your menu and reduce the items to just your basic signature dishes. Not only you will avoid that your clients order menu items that are less than exceptional, but fewer dishes mean that they will be easier to remember (making them; thus, memorable) the next time that your clients come over for lunch or dinner.

Having a short and exquisite menu allows your kitchen to focus on providing exceptional quality, reduces your inventory (and perhaps you can even get a volume discount since you will be ordering more of the same items), and makes it easier for your servers and your clients to remember.

There are other secondary advantages such as less programming in your computer or point of sale, better track of what items are selling the best, easier to create the paper menus (with larger font), etc., but the essential point is that your restaurant will be associated in your customer's mind to a few exceptional dishes. And this is what you want.

If you agree with me, I would suggest that you meet with your Chef (or cook) and go over your menu, eliminating dishes that are less than great until you focus on a few appetizers, salads, entrees, and desserts. Cut down everything else.

Believe me when I tell you that people, your customers, will love to go to your restaurant to eat just a few great dishes. The best restaurants in the wold are famous for one or two dishes that they cook to perfection. No need to reinvent the wheel and try to please everybody.

It is better to have faithful clients that come to your place continually looking for your signature dishes, than trying to please everybody by increasing the number of dishes that you offer, just to have everybody leaving your place with just an OK experience. The world is full of mediocre restaurants; you don't want to belong to this category. You want to make yours exceptional.

This is the only way to stand out from your competitors.

We will cover other aspects of simplification (operations, sales, marketing, etc.) in later blogs.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Technorati Tags:
restaurant marketing

Restaurant Marketing Strategies: Surprise Your Clients Today

When your clients go to your restaurant, they are looking forward to enjoy good food, good service, and usually to share a good conversation with friends, colleagues, or family members.



They expect to be taken care of, and to have a pleasant experience; what they don’t expect is to be surprised.



Usually, people like consistency when they are eating out, but this can play in your favor if you can provide them with an unexpected and enjoyable surprise.



It doesn’t have to be something amazing or expensive. It is more about the “wow” factor of a pleasant non-expected act from you that will make the eating experience memorable for your clients.

I will give you an example. A friend of mine, manager of an Italian restaurant located in Seattle bought a prosciutto to eat at home. He paid with his own money but asked the providers to deliver it to him at the restaurant.

Since he loves prosciutto, he started cutting the ham to get a taste of it. Then he though that it will be a good idea to share it with the people eating at the restaurant, so he asked one of the cooks to cut fine slices of prosciutto. He then offered it to the clients with compliments from the house.

Needless to say, his idea was a success and welcomed with open arms (or I guess mouths in this case). People were really happy to get a sample of prosciutto that they didn’t order, and specially didn’t have to pay for.

To make a long story short, this restaurant gives away now regularly complementary prosciutto to their best clients, and they just love it!

This is just an example of the many things that you can do to surprise your clients. Here you have some other ideas:

• Buy some flowers and give a flower to each woman in your restaurant.

• Buy very small bottles and fill them with extra virgin olive oil (you can buy it bulk at a very good price), then make a hole in one of your restaurant’s business cards and tie it with a ribbon (or ask one person from your staff to do it) around the neck o the bottle. Give one to your best customers for them to take home. They will love it.

By the way, you can also do this with any nice container filled with a special sauce that you use in your restaurant or some spices, etc. You get the idea.

• Create little snacks made with olives, dried fruits, nuts, or some other appetizer that your restaurant may serve. Give them to people who order a wine or a cocktail. They will happily eat them and will order more drinks from you.

• Print copies of two or three of your best recipes in a nice paper and give them to people ordering the dish. Put the name of your restaurant, your website, and the phone number. They will love it and keep it. And don’t worry about giving away your secrets. Most people are too lazy (or afraid) to cook even if they have the directions so you won’t be losing any business.

• Etc.

These are just a few ideas of things that you can do for little money to surprise your clients. You and your staff should come up with many more…

To conclude: here is an idea for you: Why don’t you establish the “Best idea for a surprise” weekly context and promote it among your employees? You can offer the winner a complementary meal, a movie ticket, or any other small reward. On exchange, you will get your staff involved in the process and very motivated to help you out.

It is a win-win situation for you, your business, your employees and most important, your clients. They will leave your place very happy and will be coming to your place again and again, looking forward to get surprised. As a bonus they will tell everybody how great it is to have dinner at your place!



Happy surprises,

Jose L Riesco

© Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

My Book is for Sale in Amazon Now

Today was a very intense day.

First, I had a very interesting interview/conversation with Jenna Lloyd. She is an online marketing consultant and copywriter who just launched a very interesting offer for restaurant owners and managers. It is is called My Internet Manager and it is basically a hands off approach to online marketing aimed to restaurant owners and managers.

So we talk for 1 hour and 15 minutes about online marketing, how to use social media to promote your restaurant and know what people are talking about your business, etc.

You can listen for free to the complete audio interview here: http://www.myrestaurantmarketing.com/Audio/JennaLloydInterview.html

At the end of the recording, she made a very generous offer to all my readers. You can find more information about her product and a very generous discount offer here: www.myinternetmanager.com/Jose

If you would like to subscribe to her restaurant online marketing offering, you can enter the following discount code (when you are in the shopping cart): 88F8D2 and you'll receive a discount of $200!!

But that's not all; while I was talking to Jenna, the UPS truck came and dropped off 30 author copies of my new Restaurant Marketing Strategies book. To my surprise, a friend told me that it is already available in Amazon. com and Barnes & Noble online.

You can find (and hopefully purchase) the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Restaurant-Marketing-Strategies-Dramatically-Spending/dp/0981935117/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252113817&sr=8-5

and here:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Restaurant-Marketing-Strategies/Jose-Luis-Riesco/e/9780981935119/?itm=1

The book came out pretty good. It contains really valuable and logical marketing strategies to help you improve your restaurant marketing (and business!). Check it out.

Now, I need a rest to enjoy the long (and rainy) weekend.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

How much should you invest to market your restaurant?

As a restaurant marketing and consulting expert, I get often this question: How much should an independent restaurant spend in marketing? The answer is... it depends. There is not a hard rule or fixed amount that a restaurateur must expend.

When I bought my first restaurant, I remember that the previous owner told me "You should invest at least 10% of your gross income in marketing if you want to be successful." So for a while I complied. Although 10% sounded very high to me, I knew nothing about the restaurant industry so whom was I to question the opinion of an expert restaurateur?

Very soon, however, I started realizing that I was wasting my money in marketing vehicles that just didn't work (many inherited from him). After lots of trial and error, I reduced the amount that I was expending in marketing; but even more important, I started investing in marketing that worked and brought me lots of customers.

So, let me ask you this question. Would you invest $1,000 in marketing if I told you that it will bring you $2,000 in profits? Of course you would, it would be silly no to.

However, many times, when I recommend some marketing investments to restaurateurs, they complain that they are expensive and can't afford them; even if I tell them that they will bring back many times their investment. This is specially true when these marketing investments are not the usual ads, flyers, coupons, etc. that restaurateurs are so used to, and love to hate.

Recently, I recommended to my list a great hands-off online marketing package from Online Reputation Management Expert Jenna Lloyd. This new program is specifically designed just for restaurants, nightclubs, and bars.

Yes, the price is $497 per month (soon to be raised to $697 per month), but the idea is that they will take care of everything, from writing newsletter articles customized to the restaurant, to take care of capturing customer's information, email them with personalized emails, etc. This is a hands off approach.

You can check the details here: www.MyInternetManager.com

After I suggested this online package to my list, I received many emails from restaurateurs complaining that they can't afford $497 a month. They get the wrong message. It is not a matter of if they can't afford it or not (they all can, $500 is not that high of a budget for a restaurant), it is about how much more business they will get if they invest this $497 a month!


They (and you) need to start thinking about marketing as an investment. If they get enough extra business to cover for their marketing expenses, then it is just a smart investment. If, on the other hand, after a few months, they see that there is not enough growth in their business brought by the marketing to justify the expenses, then this investment is obviously not working for them and they should cancel it.

At worst, they will expend only a few hundred dollars. At best they could improve their business dramatically. Isn't worth it a try?

Oh, and let's not forget all the hours that restaurateurs will save trying to market their restaurant online. How valuable is their time? Probably quite more than the $497 a month...

So should they cut any of their existing marketing and replace it all by this online system? Again, it depends. If it's working for them (and they can measure it and track it), then they should keep it. If not, they should just cut it and save their money.

It is as simple as that.

I hope that this blog put some sound ideas about investing wisely in your marketing. I surely hope so.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco

©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Dear Restaurateurs: Your Servers Are Your Sales Force, Are You Training Them?

Based onpersonal experience, many restaurateurs underestimate the importance of having servers trained in sales in their restaurant. Although most of the people serving food are pleasant enough, and can do their jobs, the best servers are always also the best sales people. Not only the get the highest tips, but they also increase the restaurant's profit.

Both, sales and marketing skills are key elements to make any business profitable. Usually (but not always), the restaurant owners and/or managers take the helm of the marketing while most of the sales rest on the shoulders of the servers. And this is probably where the problem lies since often, the servers just learn the operations and dishes. They never get any training in sales.

It happened to me more times that I can think of: I finished a very satisfactory meal just to be presented with the check, before anybody bothered to ask me whether I want dessert, coffee, or perhaps just an after-dinner drink. When a server brings the check, customers usually pay and leave the place, missing extra sales for very little extra effort.

Same thing with the water; offering your client’s mineral (or just bottled) water is an easy upsell that very few servers even consider.

There are many other examples where a trained server can increase the check amount without being pushy or bothering the clients. A client won't order (or very seldom will take the initiative to do it) an item that doesn't know of, or it's not blatantly displayed in the menu. However, many of them will appreciate an informed suggestion by a professional waiter.

Customer engagement is also another important element of the overall dining satisfaction

Don't underestimate the importance that your servers have in your business? After all, they are the main contact that the customers have with your restaurant. They are your image, your sales force and represent (for good or bad) your restaurant and the opinion that people dinning at your place have about it.


If you are not doing so now, implementing a formalized sales training for your servers should be very high in your priorities list.

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco

©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

twitter.com/jlriesco


CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Technorati Tags:
restaurant marketing

The Cactus Cowboy Sent Me!

If you noticed that I haven't posted any blogs lately, you are right, but I have a good excuse.

I've just come back from a well deserved 2 weeks vacation. Some friends were visiting us from Spain, and we all went for a 2 weeks road trip. We flew from Seattle to Las Vegas, rented a van and visited Grand Canyon, Antelope Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, and Los Angeles (from where we flew back to Seattle).

In one of the many motels where we slept in Arizona, I found a brochure in the room with advertising of local businesses. One of them was a typical Southern restaurant. What caught my attention waws that they had the following text under the ad:

When you come to our restaurant, mention the following to your server: "The Cactus Cowboy Sent Me!" and you'll receive a free coffee or dessert.

Now, the symbol of the restaurant is a Cactus dressed as a cowboy swirling a lasso (you can see it in the photo), so this ad somehow makes sense.

Although I would prefer to pay for my coffee than to say something so silly to my server, these people have a good point. They are tracking their marketing expenses. Each time that somebody says this silly sentence, they know that these people saw the paid ad displayed in the brochure. They could have included a coupon instead, but this would mean replacing the ad each time that a customer clipped it to bring it to the restaurant.

By saying a unique sentence like that, they can track the results of the marketing without having to replace the ad each time. It is clever and effective.

So what about you? Do you have a way to track your ads? If not, you should be learning from the Cactus Cowboy. After all, he knows what he is doing.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Technorati Tags:
restaurant marketing

Restaurateurs: Are You Delivering a Consistent Dinning Experience to Your Clients?

One of the main turn-offs for people going to a restaurant is the lack of consistency.

Customers expect predictable results when buying a product or a service. If somebody goes to a restaurant, and has a great dinning experience, they expect to get this same experience every time that they go back to the same restaurant.

And this is often the problem. Since restaurants are heavily relying on people (cooks, servers, bussers, hostesses, etc.), and people have different moods and needs, depending on their personal circumstances, delivering a consistently excellent experience is both difficult and challenging.

If these people get temperamental servers, wrong cooked food, or some any other unexpected results, they will leave the restaurant very disappointed to probably never come back.

Part of the success of restaurant franchises is that they work hard standardizing the processes so that the mistakes get minimized. They have thick operations manuals where they cover each aspect of the process, from receiving the guests to the timing and delivery of food, etc.

So what can you do to minimize randomness and deliver a consistent excellent experience to your clients?

To start, you should have the basic processes defined. From the moment that a prospect or client walks in the door, you should have clear processes to greet them, sit them, and deliver them some water or drinks quickly and efficiently.

Same thing with the flow of the meals; Your waiters or managers should know how long each table has been waiting, when and how to deliver the food, when to check if everything is going well, how to deal with difficult customers, etc.

But, even if you try your best to document every possible situation, you will never be able to cover all the possibilities. People react in unpredictable ways and there are not enough manuals in the world to cover every possible scenario.

The most important training that you must give your staff is a good understanding about what your restaurant is all about: Make crystal clear to them what makes your restaurant different from your competitor's and why your clients are your number one priority, and also it should be theirs.

You must specify in your operations manual that whatever issue occurs with a client, your staff should never argue with them. Make clear that your staff should do their absolutely best to compensate your customers for whatever incident (despite whom has caused it) that could make them unhappy with your restaurant.

If you have clear policies and rules to deal with problems and clients, you will be able to deliver the consistency that your clients are looking for.

Tomorrow I will be taking a well deserved vacation with my family. I'll be offline for two weeks so don't expect any new blogs during that time. :-)

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco

©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Restaurant Long Term Strategy or Short Term Profits?

Here is a fundamental question that restaurateurs need to ask themselves: Do you have a long term strategy for your restaurant or are you just focusing on getting short-term profits?

The answer to this question can have profound implications in the way you manage and operate your business.

For example, if you are just looking for short-term profits, then you don't have to worry about having clear policies regarding how your staff should deal with customer's issues. If a customer has a problem, you can take the short-term profit route and just refuse to compensate them if you see that they don't deserve it. You will get their money instead of making them happy. Who cares if they won't come back? You don't want those kind of customers anyway right?

Same thing with your staff; if you want to increase your short-term profits, you will try to discount every single penny that you can from them. If they break something, you will discount it from their tips. If they eat, you will also discount the food, etc.

You will also try to understaff your restaurant so that your fixed costs are minimum and you can survive in these tough economy that we are experiencing and you will cut or eliminate your marketing expenses to a minimum or even zero...

Although this short term vision looks like a good idea in these times of crisis, this is a sure way to shoot yourself in the foot in the long run...

People are very sensitive to the way they are treated. And this goes not only for your clients but also for your staff. If you treat people badly (or even not as good as they think they deserve), you are saving pennies and expending dollars. A disgruntled customer will let other 100 people (it was only ten or 12 but now with the Web, it can be hundreds) know about their bad experience in your place. Unhappy employees will do all they can to make you pay from a situation that they believe is unfair. They will be more prone to steal from you and slack as much as they can. The worst part is that your clients will notice that their food has been cooked and/or served by unhappy people.

Saving in marketing is also a sure way to funnel customers to your competitors. All things equal; people will flock to restaurants that bring them incentives to go, and provide them with the emotional experience that they are looking forward to when they go out to eat.

If, on the other hand, you have (or are implementing) a long term strategy for your restaurant, then you already know that people are your main asset. Your clients are the ones bringing you the money, and therefore you should bend backwards to please them. Above all, never ever argue with them; even if this means giving them a free meal and compensating them so that they always leave your place happy and impressed with your service.

Same thing with your staff; if you treat them fairly and even give them an occasional bonus to compensate them for the extra effort that you see they put, they will be very motivated and happy to work for you, and this means that they will transmit their happiness to your clients.

Let's now talk briefly about your marketing. This is a great time to evaluate how you are spending your marketing dollars. You shouldn't stop marketing your restaurant, on the contrary, you should use this opportunity to implement efficient and inexpensive marketing vehicles that could bring you repeated clients. Use the power of referrals (you may want to check my Restaurant Referral System in a Box, it's a very inexpensive and foolproof to bring back your best clients and their friends and families). Also, you should use the power of the Web to promote your business. Online sites like Twitter, Facebook, MetaFlavor, ResOS.net and other can help you spread the word about your place.

Yes, this may mean less cash in hand in the short-term, but you are establishing the foundation for a prosperous business for the long term. If you want your restaurant to succeed, you must create a long term strategy and follow it religiously. Any other action means sacrificing your most valuable assets looking for a short-term solution.

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco

©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Difficult Times for Restaurants

The NPD Group reports that the U.S. Restaurant Traffic Decline is the Steepest in 28 Years. You can read the complete article here: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/npd-reports-us-restaurant-traffic-decline-steepest-in-28-years,896710.shtml

This is bad news indeed but probably no surprise to anybody who is in this industry since you all can see your restaurants emptier than before.

This also means than competition to attract customers is now fiercer than ever. Less people going out for dinner makes the battle to bring people to your restaurant a more daunting task. To respond to this challenge, many restaurateurs are lowering their prices or issuing discount coupons to entice money-tight customers to go to their restaurants.

Although this marketing technique may work temporarily, I don't think that it's really a good strategy for the long run. First, you will attract the cheapest customers looking for the most inexpensive place they can go to eat, despite the quality of their dinning experience. Also, these people won't become loyal clients. Instead, they will go only to restaurants looking for the bargain of the day, moving to your competitors if their discount is bigger than yours.

So what can you do to attract people to your restaurant?

First, you need to be creative and position your restaurant so that it is unique and different from your competitors. Think for just a moment. Do you have something unique that your restaurant has/offers than nobody else does? This is called a Unique Selling Proposition, and you can use it as a differentiator in the marketplace. People understand that they need to pay a little more to get a unique experience, and even in these times of crisis they are willing to do so.

If you don't have, or can't come up with anything unique, then you need to put yourself in the minds of your customers. Why should they go to your restaurant instead of going to your competitors? What can you offer them that makes them want to go to your restaurant? These are key questions that can help you come up with your Unique Selling Proposition.

Once you attract new customers, you need to make their visit worthy. Give them the best dinning experiences that you are able to. Make sure that they receive great food and an impeccable service. Make sure that your place is very clean and inviting and that you treat them so well that they would love to come back to your place looking for those good memories that they've shared in your place.

Remember, people go to restaurants looking forward to have a good time. Provide them with a great experience and they will come back. Fail to do it and they will take their business elsewhere. There are plenty of restaurants that will be more than happy to comply.


Good luck and happy meals,

Jose L Riesco

©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Are You Stuck Repeating the Same Marketing Mistakes?

There is a simple yet often ignored rule: "If you are doing something that it's not working, it still won't work if you do more of the same."

If you are investing in marketing and yet your restaurant is not getting the clients that you are expecting, obviously your marketing is not working for you. Sometimes-marketing techniques that used to work, don't anymore. This could be because the marketplace is changing (more people are looking for restaurants online and ignoring the old fashion ads in radio, magazines, newspapers, etc.) and because everybody ends up using the same techniques and your message gets lost in the sea of marketing bombardment that people receive.

So what can you do to stand out? How can you get your message through?

Well, to start, you must evaluate what you are doing now and track every single marketing expense to see whether they are working for you or not. If they work and they bring you more money than you spend on the marketing, great, keep on doing it. If, on the other hand, you see that your investment is not worth it (or not trackable that it's pretty much the same), then you must eliminate it and look for an alternative marketing strategy that works for you.

Also, it won't hurt if you come up with some new marketing ideas to separate your restaurant from your competitors instead of repeating the same marketing that everybody else is doing.

And don't make the mistake of reducing your restaurant marketing because of the crisis. On the contrary, this is the time to promote your place like crazy. If all your competitors cut down their marketing and you increase yours, guess who will be remember by the customers? That's right your restaurant.

I know that you are busy people, running the daily routines, and you probably don't have much time to sit and think about great marketing strategies. I understand, I've been there, but then it is critical for the success of your restaurant that you plan and implement great marketing techniques that you can track and evaluate.

They will make the difference between a full restaurant or an empty one.

Now plan some time and think about your marketing strategies. Don't procrastinate this important task.

Good luck and Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Restaurant Owners and Managers: Are You Spending Your Time Wisely?

As a busy person who needs to deal with hundreds of problems, issues and fires on a daily basis, it is easy for restaurant owners and managers to get sidetracked and lose focus on what's really important for their restaurant.

So my question to you is this: Are you spending your time wisely? Are you using your working hours to produce the greatest strategic payoff for your restaurant, or are you just spending 80% of your time trying to do things that somebody else would do much better than you? Are you really using your skills to the maximum?

I know that restaurateurs have a hard time delegating tasks. I used to own a restaurant. I know how hard it is to delegate on somebody else when you think that you can do better than they, or that nobody else cares as much as you do. This is probably true, and yet it is not the best way to run a business.

Let's take a quick test. Please answer YES or NO to the following questions to evaluate if you are truly doing what you are supposed to be doing:

* Are you working mainly on daily tasks that are not relevant to your restaurant vision and strategy? (If you don't have a vision for your restaurant and a strategy to take you there, you need to sit down for a few hours and think about this one. It is key for the success of your business).
* Are you spending most of your time doing things that you particularly don't like, or don't care much about?
* Are you performing chores for which there are people who can do much better (and probably quicker) than you?
* Do you spend most of your time taking care of responsibilities that you are not completely passionate about?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, you should seriously consider to delegate some of these tasks to somebody else. Some things that for you are a burden, for somebody else could be a passion. Not only you will get rid of tasks that are of not interest to you, but you will also get somebody else's who excels at that particular task doing it. This is a win/win situation since you would liberate your most precious asset: your time, and they will be happy doing something that they really are passionate about.

So think about what really tics you. What are you really good about? What are your strengths? Focus on these and find people who can help you taking care of the necessary and yet unproductive tasks. You will be surprised to see how much you can improve your business by just spending a few hours making a list of tasks that you don't like and can delegate in some of your employees (or even finding help outside of your restaurant if necessary).

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Long Term Investment in Your Restaurant Clients

When you deal with your prospects and customers, you have to always think long term. For each action that you take with them, think that you are making an investment, because you are. This will also help you think more strategically whenever you have a problem with one of your customers.

For example, imagine that you have a table of four people, and that they are not in a very good mood today. No matter what your staff does, nothing seems to please them. Minor details that other times pass unnoticed, today seem to be a big deal. What can you do about this?

First, always try no to take the issue personally. Try to evaluate objectively if they are totally right and effectively there is something wrong with your food or service that day, and if so, of course take immediate action to correct any wrongdoing.

However, sometimes there is nothing wrong with your food, service, or ambience, and the problem lies within your customers. They are probably having a bad day, and they are looking for any external excuses to blame their internal feelings. We all do. Better for them to pick in your place than in their friends or spouses, at least for them...

So even in this case of unjust accusations, look at the big picture and think about that specific table as a long term investment for your business. You could take the short-term approach, recognize that it is their fault or problem, and do one of two things:

1.- Confront them and tell them that there is nothing wrong with your restaurant. Your pride will be very happy, but you will lose these customers for life and will get many negative reviews about your place in online social networks and offline referrals. This could mean tens (or even hundreds depending of how big their social cloud is) of potential new customers lost.

2.- Ignore their behavior and do nothing. You don't confront them, but you don't recognize the bad experience that they are having.

If you take this action (or inaction), in both cases these customers will leave your restaurant with a negative memory (it's unfair, I know, but that+ 's life). So they will be less likely to come back to your place.

Or you can think more strategically and take this negative event as an opportunity for you to think long term. What if you could compensate these customers so that they leave your place really impressed with the way you handled the situation? Imagine that you approach the table and tell these people: "I apologize that you are not having an excellent dinning experience today. I want to make it up to you so here you have two gift certificates (and you handle one to each couple) valid for a free meal. I want you to come back to my place and try again. I promise you that next time will be much better for you."

Now, how do you think that these people will react? Deep down they know that there wasn't anything specially wrong with your place or your food, and however, you still acknowledged their feelings and tried to compensate them for something that you didn't do wrong. I can guarantee you that this small investment that you made (two free meals), will pay you back a hundredfold in free advertising and referrals from these people. They will tell all their friends and family how gracious you are and how wonderful your place is.

If you think about compensating unhappy customers as a long term investment, you will remove any personal feelings from the situation. You will be more inclined to be generous with them, and they will leave your place with a really good feeling about your restaurant and your behavior. This is a win-win situation for both parties.

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Changing Your Restaurant Marketing is Difficult

I’ve just read another great blog from Seth Godin called:”Priming the pump of efficiency”. You can read it here:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/priming-the-pump-of-efficiency.html

Basically Seth states that changes are difficult and often involve an initial setback before they produce the desired outcome. Have you heard the saying: “Things will get worse before they get better”?

This is what Seth is talking about.

For example, if you change from your old manual booking system to a new computerized one, you will probably run into initial setup and learning issues. Your staff will complain about having to learn yet another system, you will sometimes get lost and blaming the new system when something doesn’t work as you expect, etc.

However, after a while, you will be able to do things that you couldn’t do before with your old system such as printing profiled lists of your customers, or just emailing them to notify about a special event or promotion, etc.

The same thing applies to your restaurant marketing. You are very familiar and comfortable with the traditional marketing venues: ads in newspapers and magazines, coupon books with discounts, ads in Yellow pages, etc. However, these traditional marketing vehicles are slowly dying and extinguishing, just like the dinosaurs, and you are probably wasting your marketing budget on them.

You see? Your customers are now mainly looking online. They don’t open Yellow Books anymore. If they want to go to a restaurant, they browse the Web and read restaurant reviews from other customers. They look at restaurant websites to get a feeling for the place. They read the online menus to see if they like them, and check prices to see if they can afford it. They are, most likely, also making reservations online right there in the restaurant websites that have an online booking option. Do your website has one?

So what are you doing about it? If your answer is nothing, then you better start thinking about moving your marketing online, fast. Your competitors are surely doing it...

Once you make your mind and start marketing online, tweeting your specials and promotions, creating a Facebook page to share with your clients, making your website attractive, and specially useful, to your prospects and clients, you will probably see that it will take a while before you can harvest the results of your initial investment.

But make no mistake. You can’t just afford to ignore moving most of your marketing online. Not only is much more efficient and inexpensive than your traditional printed marketing, it is also “trackable”. You should always invest in marketing that you can track and test.

And if there is any final doubt, the World Wide Web is the place where most of your clients are now. You must also be there if you want to reach them!

Happy marketing,

Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.
www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Investing in Restaurant Marketing

Marketing is one of the key ingredients in your restaurant success. It is the vehicle that lets people know that your restaurant exists (if they've never been there), or reminds them that you are a great place to go and have a great experience (if they've visited your place before but forgot about you).

However, marketing can also be an incredible source of expenses and a bad return of your investment if you are not careful how you expend your marketing budget.

You should think about marketing not as an expenditure but as an investment so you should treat it with the same care that you would treat your regular investments. For example, you wouldn't invest your money with a financial institution and then never check back the results of your investments would you? I don't think so.

However, many restaurateurs invest money in marketing blindly. They buy advertisement, ads and promotions, and never bother checking if they make a profit in all these marketing investments.

Think about marketing as you would think about your investments. Study the possibilities and track and analyze the results of your marketing investments. If a marketing investment is positive, keep on doing it. If not, cut your loses and move your money into a new, more profitable marketing investment. By doing this, not only you'll know that your marketing works, but you will see a tenfold increase in your restaurant sales and performance.

Happy marketing,
Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.
www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Restaurant Marketing Strategies: Are You Wasting Your Time?

Restaurateurs are busy people. Always running around solving problems, paying bills, meeting with people, making sure that everything is ready; every single day...

So being busy is part of the job description, but the question is: Are you being productive? There is a big difference between being busy and being productive. You see? You can run errands the whole day and keep your hours busy doing a million things that, at the end of the day, don't add up to your bottom line.

Being busy is just filling in the time that you have available. Being productive, on the other hand, means moving in the direction of your goals. And I guess that this is where the problem lies. Many restaurateurs, unfortunately, don't have a clear and define goal. They don't have a vision and a strategy to take them there so they just work, day by day, hoping to make a lot of money and bring back many happy clients.

If you want to succeed in your business, and use your time efficiently, you need to have a vision and you need to create a strategy to take you there. This is the only way for you to know that each and every day, you are moving in the right direction and working on tasks that will take you there.

For example, your vision may be to work fewer hours so that you can spend more time with your family. Then your strategy should be to hire bright, honest, and hard working staff that you can start delegating on, and your daily accomplishments should be to delegate a new task that somebody else can do equal or very often better than you.

Or perhaps your vision is to expand your restaurant and open some other restaurants so that you end up with a multi-unit. In this case, your strategy should be to systematize and document your processes: from written recipes and cooking techniques, to interaction with your clients, from the moment they make a reservation to the time that they leave your restaurant. You must have clear and documented processes if you want all your restaurants to work and perform consistently.

You see where I am going? Without a clear vision and a defined strategy, you may spend your day running around and wasting your time in tasks that somebody else could you do for you. You should know what your strategies are and spend most of your time working on them. Everything else won't take you anywhere, and it will leave you exhausted, frustrated, and working 16 hours a day without really accomplishing anything worth it.

Sit down, take a few hours os uninterrupted time and thing what is your vision, what you ultimately want to accomplish with your restaurant in, let say, 5 or 10 years from now. Then, once you have this figure out, write the strategy that it will take you there. Finally, share your vision and strategies with your staff and your family so that everyone is crystal clear about it and there is no doubt.

Now you are ready, each day, to work on tasks that will fulfill your strategy and, ultimately, your vision.

Would you have perfect productive days this way? No, you don't. In the restaurant business there are a thousand daily interruptions and fires that need to be dealt with, but you will have a good sense of accomplishment each day that you make progress, even if it's just a little, and move into the right direction.

Having a vision and a strategy is like having a compass that points you the right direction. Sometimes you won't be able to go in a straight line. There will be mountains that you must go around and rivers that you must wade, but eventually, you know that you are moving towards your final destination.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.
www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Restaurant Marketing Strategies: Should You Give Away Free Food to Attract New Customers?

I was reading today in the news how KFC, Quiznos and some other fast food chains are giving away free food to attract media attention and capture new customers.

Should you, small or medium size the restaurant owner or manager, do something similar to compete with these chains? The short answer is NO, you shouldn't, and I will tell you why.

Your marketing goal should always be to convert prospects, and occasional customers, into long term repeated clients. Anything that you do towards this goal is good, and it moves you in the right direction. Anything else will make you waste money or just attract customers who are probably just interested in getting the cheapest meal they can get anywhere without any loyalty to a specific restaurant.

Giving away meals to attract people without a long term vision or marketing goal is not a wise strategy. Yes, you may get lots of people going to your restaurant to take advantage of the free food, but this doesn't mean you will make any profit, or that they will become future clients of your restaurant. What you should do instead is to implement a formalized referral system, where you select your best clients and give them special gift certificates that they can share with their friends and families. In this way, although you are giving away important discounts, you are doing it with a purpose: to bring new prospects to your restaurant. To bring quality people who have been recommended by their friends or family members. If you follow this strategy your restaurant will also gain instantaneous credibility, since people believe more the recommendations of people whom they appreciate and trust than any other form of advertising.

You should always have a long term marketing strategy instead of trying to jump into whatever marketing trend is fashionable presently. In this way, you will know the direction and the final destination where you want to take your restaurant. Yes, your circumstances and the economic reality can change, and you may follow different roads to reach your destination, depending of your needs, but if you have a master plan, a strategy, and a vision, you know that you will be going in the right direction, and eventually you will reach your goal.

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.
www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Offering a Consistent Experience to Your Restaurant Clients

One of the things that people really like and expect in a business is consistency.

Think about it. Imagine that each time that you want to buy a book in Amazon.com you'll find a different User Interface or a different buying experience. You soon will get frustrated and abandon the site.

The same thing happens with restaurants. I don't know how many restaurant reviews I read where the theme was always the same: "My husband and I went to the XXXX restaurant for the second (or third) time. We had a great experience in our previous visit, but this last time was horrible. The service ignored us, or the food was very late, or not good enough, etc. We won't be going back any time soon..."

Does this sound familiar to you? Because people expect consistency, if they had a previous great experience, they expect to have a good experience every single time that they go to a restaurant, and they get very disappointed if they don't.

For the same reason, if their first experience is not good, people expect that each time they go to the same restaurant, they will have the same experience. Consistency is also in the mind for the negative.

So what can you do to provide your clients with a consistent excellent dinning experience? To start with, you must have good and properly trained staff working for you. Turnover is one of the major causes of inconsistencies since new people need to be trained and have a ramp up curve. High turnover is a sign of employee unhappiness with the working environment.

Also, you must have clear processes defined.

From the moment somebody picks up the phone to make a reservation to the goodbye when they leave your place, you should have clear and defined policies about how to greet and treat your customers, how and when to handle and deliver the food, etc.

If you don't deliver a consistently great dinning experience, your business will be leaking customers and you will have to deal with bad reviews in social media networks and restaurant review sites. You don't want to do that.

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco
©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Restaurant Owners: Would You Go To Your Own Restaurant?

This sounds like a ridiculous question. "Of course I would. My restaurant is great!" would be probably your first initial reaction.

But, I want you to think a bit about it. The question is not "Would you rather stay home and cook, or come, and have dinner at to your restaurant."

The question is "Why people should go to your restaurant instead of going to any of your competitors?"

This changes the perspective, doesn't? Now you need to start thinking, and that's good. I guess I should also ask you: "Do you know your competitors?" Have you taken the time to visit their restaurant and have lunch or dinner there as a regular customer? Have you observed their place? Their food? Their service? What's good about it? What could be improved?

By knowing what works well, you can get ideas to improve your food, or service, or operations. By knowing what can be improved (or what you do better than them), can help you focus on the strengths of your restaurant.

Once you are familiar with your competition, ask yourself: What does my restaurant offer to my clients than my competitors don't? In other words, what makes your restaurant special and unique?

This is what is called a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and if you don't have one you better start thinking about it. You see? If people who go to restaurants don't think that you have anything special to offer, then they will go to a restaurant that has. It doesn't have to be anything really fancy. Perhaps you have a special menu item that nobody else offers, or perhaps you have live music and your competitor's don't... you get the idea.

Once you have identified what's unique and special about your place, make sure to let everybody know (and I include here your employees as well). You must live and breath your restaurant USP if you want your customers to believe it and go to your place because of that.

In my Restaurant Marketing Strategies Book I dedicate a whole chapter to explaining and helping you create a powerful USP step by step. I would encourage you to check it out if you don't have a powerful and believable USP.

Happy meals,

Jose L Riesco

©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Are You Leveraging Your and Your Staff's Strengths?

Most of the companies and businesses focus on improving their employee's weaknesses.

I should know, I worked in a large corporation where each fiscal year we would have a performance review where I had to write my yearly accomplishments as well as my areas for improvement.

Of course, "areas for improvement" means to write down whatever you are not doing particularly well and the company wants you to improve.

Now my question is this: Nobody is perfect. There is no one single employee who can excel in all areas (yes including the CEO's of the companies), so instead of losing perfectly good time and energy trying to improve something that you suck at, why don't they focus on promoting for you to improve what you do best?

I don't know if Picasso was really good keeping his books or Bill Gates is able to empathize with a sad person, but you know what? I don't care and you shouldn't either.

We should just care that Pablo Picasso was able to create amazing paintings and spent his live improving his painting skills while Bill Gates has incredible business skills that now applies into helping people to fight diseases.

The point that I tried to make is that if somebody was forcing Picasso to improve his accounting skills or Bill Gates to improve his interpersonal skills, it would've been probably a waste of time. None of them would become great at it and it would've detracted them from became better at what they do best.

The same applies to your employees. When you hire people to work at your restaurant, don't try to hire all your employees with the same skills. Of course, servers and hostess need to have good social skills and be people friendly since they will be facing your customers, but perhaps is more important for your bussers to be detail oriented and for your Chef creative (even if he doesn't like shaking your clients hands).

But these are the basics, then each one of your employees probably has special abilities that can help you improve your business. For example, I know the case of a waiter who was an incredible sales person but quite sloppy at cleaning and organizing the tables silverware and china. This restaurant was small and sometimes didn't have a busser to do this job. The owner of the restaurant didn't appreciate that and fired him because the rest of the waiters were complaining that he didn't do his job after the customers were gone.

Now, you can hire bussers for the minimum wage. Wouldn't be better to pay few hours to a busser to clean after this waiter, and give the waiter a commission for extra sales instead? He was excellent at selling but not a very organized person so the owner of the restaurant tried (and failed) to make him work in his weakness instead of filling his gap with somebody else and freeing him of his duties cleaning to focus his energy on cleaning.

Same thing with other skills. I bet that if you are hiring young people you have some of them with computer or technical skills. Are you leveraging them? Or are you paying somebody else to do a job that your own staff can do for just a few extra dollars an hour?

Try to leverage your strengths and your people's by giving you and them assignments where they can excel, not only they will be happier, but your place will escalate to a higher level of performance and satisfaction.

This by the way is an excellent method as well when you hire new people. Try to hire people who complement (and not overlap or compete) the skills that you already have available in house.

Happy leveraging,

Jose L Riesco

©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

Boost Your Business With A Restaurant Newsletter

With any restaurant, customers are the cornerstones to success. In order to fill tables frequently enough to make a profit, you have to attract new customers and retain loyal ones. While restaurant atmosphere, quality of food, value for the price, and a friendly and knowledgeable staff are important components for a good running business, long-term success requires a solid combination of sales, marketing, promotions and public relations.

A restaurant newsletter is an ideal way to boost your business and develop a relationship with customers. It can be done in electronic form and sent to email lists and posted on your restaurant website, in print form to be mailed and given to customers at the restaurant, or a combination of both.

The look of your restaurant newsletter should reflect the image of your restaurant. If you are a formal dining establishment, you newsletter should look upscale and sophisticated and be written with flair. If you are a casual, family restaurant, then your bulletin should have a fun and friendly look and be written in an upbeat, casual tone.

In any type of printed or online materials about your restaurant, relevant information should be provided somewhere, whether in a box off to the side, as part of the title box, or as an informational line at the bottom. Pertinent information includes name of restaurant, street address, phone and fax numbers, hours of operation, website address and email address.

The content of your restaurant newsletter should be less self-promoting and more customer-focused. Inform customers about specials of the month, charitable events you are hosting, the new seasonal menu, and changes in chefs, a story behind a recipe, new features in the restaurant and industry trends.

Frequency of a restaurant newsletter is important. If you overdo the communication, customers will view it as advertising rather than information. A monthly publication is probably best if you have a lot going on, but if you change menus seasonally and don’t hold many special events or fundraisers, then consider a quarterly one.

A good restaurant newsletter is one that customers can quickly read. Write brief articles and use short sentences. Catchy headlines and dividers to separate articles also help. Be sure to break up text with white space. Include only one or two small images, whether of food, staff, or other appropriate photo, so as not to jam a persons email box.

With any restaurant newsletter, be sure to provide links. If you’re doing a printed publication, include the links so customers can visit when they have available computer access. And remember to include instructions on how to subscribe to your newsletter list, as well as a forward to a friend link. You might want to consider offering an incentive to new subscribers and to current subscribers for referrals. Encouraging feedback by asking a question or taking a poll is also a great feature to include in a newsletter.

Jose L Riesco

©Riesco Consulting Inc.



www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!

How Microsoft's New Search Engine Impact Your Restaurant

In case that you don't know yet, Microsoft is releasing a new search engine called Bing next week. So why should you care?

Because it will have direct implications about how people look for information, or should I say, how they receive the information.

This applies specially to restaurant information. Bing is specially good at packaging and presenting information in a more meaningful way.

Take a look at this Bling's screenshot below (Notice that it says Kumo instead of Bling because Kumo was the internal Microsoft beta name for Bling)



You can see that when a user looks for a restaurant, it receives all the information, including the kind of cuisine, average price, reviews and a scorecard.

This should be great news for your restaurant if your customers are happy with your food and service and they write great reviews. It won't be so great if you are missing any of the essential ingredients (and I am not talking about food here) to make your restaurant stand out from your competitors.

So what can you do? Actually nothing related to influencing the search. The only think that you can do is to make sure that your restaurant is top notch in all its aspects: great food, impeccable service, nice and clean facilities and some great ambience won't hurt either.

If you provide your customers a memorable dinning experience, they will rave about your place and write great things about your restaurant. If not, your place will be penalized and no matter how much you spend in advertising, trying to improve your image, people will read what other people write about your restaurant.

In these days where social networking and social opinions are more important than ever, focusing on the basics and exceeding your customers expectations are the best strategies that you can have.

You can check a preview of Bing here: http://www.bing.com/ComingSoon

Happy meals,
Jose L Riesco

©Riesco Consulting Inc.

www.myrestaurantmarketing.com

Follow me in Twitter:www.twitter.com/jlriesco

CLICK HERE TO TWEET!