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Andy Lynes in his latest blog in Big-hospitality: www.bighospitality.co.uk talks about the success of some restaurants using Twitter to promote their businesses.
You can read his blog here: http://www.bighospitality.co.uk/item/3072/23/5/3
Twitter, with more than 6 million unique visitors (UV) a month is the fastest growing Social Network Site. In the attached table you can see how it grew from number 22 to number 3 in a year (and this data is 3 moths old!):
Although Twitter can't compete (yet) with Face-book or MySpace in the sheer number of users, it has an advantage that the other two social media sites don't have: immediacy
When you send a Tweet (a Tweet is a short Twitter message, up to 140 characters), your followers immediately receive it. This gives you a great opportunity to broadcast pertinent information to them.
For example, are you having a slow lunch day?
You can tweet your followers a message announcing that if they go to your restaurant within the next hour, and tell your servers that they saw this offer in Twitter, you will give them a free dessert, (or a 10% discount, or whatever attractive offer you want to make to attract people).
In this way, not only you can capture new customers in slow days/hours but you can also track Twitter's results. You will know how many of your new customers are coming because of Twitter, (they will tell you!).
And the best of all, it's that you will do all of this in a very inexpensive (Twitter is free to use so you'll only absorb the cost of the discount) and interactive way. It surely beats mailing coupons (with the high cost of printing and mailing) and gives you the freedom to totally adapt it to your hourly needs.
But Twitter is not just a US phenomena. Its popularity Worldwide is spreading very fast. In this chart you can see the breakdown of the top 10 countries. So if you restaurant is in any of these countries
you better start Twittering to them.
Some other useful information is to know who is using Twitter. This site: http://www.istrategylabs.com/twitter-2009-demographics-and-statistics/ shows very interesting Twitter statistics broke down by sex, age, ethnicity, kids/no kids households, and average income and education. Very interesting information if you use Twitter (or are planning to use it) to target your audience.
So my question to you is: Are you using Twitter to reach your clients (or followers) to promote your restaurant?
If not, you are missing a great a free tool. It totally makes sense that you use this tool to reach to your customers; after all, they are already using Twitter!
Since I know that technology can be sometimes intimidating, and there are so many ways to use Twitter (including many to waste an incredible amount of time with this tool), I am creating a report called: "How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Restaurant". In this report I explain step by step how to setup a Twitter account, how to use free tools to create a targeted list of followers, how to communicate with them and how to maximize the power of Twitter to promote your restaurant. I included lots of screen captures to help you with the whole process. I think you'll love it, and the best of all, it will be very inexpensive.
I will announce here when it's ready.
Have a great day,
Jose L Riesco
© Riesco Consulting Inc.
www.twitter.com/jlriescohttp://www.myrestaurantmarketing.com
Every time a new person walks in the door, your front of the house personnel (hostess or servers) should have been trained by you to approach them and ask them if this is their first time in your restaurant.
"Is this your first time in our restaurant? Well let me tell you about us..."
Ask your staff to pitch about the restaurant, about you, how did you started, where did you get the recipes, anything that it's personal and differentiates your restaurant from your competitors (and by the way, this is the perfect place to pitch your Unique Selling Proposition to your potential and future clients.)
The purpose of this buyer education is to create brand loyalty. Once your clients build a relationship with your restaurant, they are more likely to visit your place than your competitor's.
By knowing more about you and your business, you personalize their relationship and their loyalty with your restaurant.
This is why it's also a good idea to have an online (or printed) quarterly or bimonthly newsletter so that you can give your clients interesting information about your place, your staff and your cuisine.Jose L Riesco
© Riesco Consulting Inc.
www.twitter.com/jlriescohttp://www.myrestaurantmarketing.com
Last week I was listening to my local NPR (National Public Radio) station. They were interviewing Seattle Times food writer Nancy Leson about the closing of Trattoria Mitchell, a 32 years old restaurant located in the old Seattle neighborhood of Pioneer Square.
She was describing how sad she was that this old restaurant was closing because she fondly remembers her first dinner in that restaurant with her boyfriend when she moved to live in Seattle.
Yes, restaurants create memories. They are not just places where people go to fill in their tummies or have a drink. They are places where people go to have a conversation with friends, to share a good meal with people who they like and appreciate, to have a good time...
This is why it is so important that you focus your energy in creating great memories for your customers. Once you can provide your clients with emotions that they associate to your place, you will have won their hearts and souls forever.
This is also why it is so devastating when they don't get the experience that they are looking for. If instead of a good memory shared with people that they care, they get a bad experience, in their minds that bad experience will multiply a hundred times. They will exaggerate small issues that for you are perhaps not that important and will become your worst critic.
They are not thinking logically, they are thinking emotionally and emotions provoke very strong feelings. You must try to mitigate any negative feelings by compensating your clients so that they come back to your place again and give you a second chance to give them an emotional experience.
Only this way you will have repeated clients willing to give you their money on exchange for a good time at your place.
Never let a customer leave your place unhappy. They won't come back and won't forgive you for giving them a bad experience.Jose L Riesco
© Riesco Consulting Inc.
www.twitter.com/jlriescohttp://www.myrestaurantmarketing.com
The Seattle Post Intelligence, one of the two still remaining daily newspapers in the Seattle area, just published the following (bad) news:
"After 146 years of delivering news, the Seattle P-I faces becoming what it has chronicled: history. The Hearst Corp., said Friday that it has put the paper up for sale, and it will stop publishing unless someone buys it in 60 days."
This is not the first and won't be the last newspaper to bite the dust. And what does this have to do with your restaurant you may ask?
Plenty, please bear with me and keep on reading.
This is the sign that more and more people are looking for their news online (actually the Seattle PI is thinking about having a Web only presence) and buying less and less newspapers and printed magazines.
PC Magazine was another casualty of the Web. They've stopped printing their magazine (to which I was a subscriber) in January 1st this year and they have an only Web presence now.
The reason why the printed media is becoming extinct is because their main source of revenue: advertising is dying.
Most newspapers and magazines can't cover costs by selling them to their readers or subscribers. The revenue making piece is (or was) their advertising. Since more and more advertisers are taking their business online, the traditional media is getting less and less revenues from their printed versions.
Consider the damage that online classified ads such as Craigslist (free for everyone to post and read most of the ads) has done to newspapers where people used to pay quite a lot to run an ad. All the sudden people are not paying anymore for posting printed ads since they can reach an even larger audience and change the ads on the fly (or retract them once they sell the items). And the best part is that they can do all of this for free!
Now, going back to your restaurant. This should hint you several important trends for your businenss:
If you ares till spending money in printed ads (in newspapers, magazines and yellow pages, for example), you are probably wasting your money and reaching less and less of your potential customers.
- You must have an online marketing plan with as many as the following offerings as possible:
- A streamlined and excellent website
- An email list of your clients where you send them updated information about your restaurant
- Presence in Social Networks such as FaceBook or MySpace
- A Twitter account where you send updates, discounts and interesting news to your followers
- Online booking system
- etc.
Your customers are online. They go online to look for news, for reviews and for recommendations about restaurant. You better be online as well to check what they are reading and commenting about your place.
There are things that you can do to improve your reviews and ratings but above all, you must always keep your clients happy and provide them with excellent food and service. Compensate them for any mistakes or issues and don't even give them a reason to write a bad review about your place.
An online bad review will mean a loss of potential customers who will read the reviews and decide to take their business elsewhere.
Reviews are also a great direct feedback. Try to respond to it and take action so that you won't repeat the same mistakes again in the future.
So there you have it.
Always be alert about the continously changing marketplace and try to be one step ahead of your competitors. You need to adverstise and market where your customers are.
Statistics tell us that most of them are online now so you should be there as well.
Happy sailing,Jose L Riesco
© Riesco Consulting Inc.
www.twitter.com/jlriescohttp://www.myrestaurantmarketing.com
Hello everyone,
Today, after a long and hard work, I finally managed to finalized and upload to my website 20 videos (actually there are 3 extra ones but these don't count) with questions and answers about restaurant marketing.
You see? For several months now I've compiled questions and concerns that restaurateurs, just like yourself, asked me when they subscribed to my free Restaurant Marketing Strategies Newsletter and Book Summary.
Then, I've categorized the questions and selected the top 10 questions that restaurateurs asked me. To answer the questions, I've created 10 short videos (2 to 5 minutes each).
But I still wanted to do more to help you with your marketing, so I decided to create another 10 videos with the top questions that restaurateurs should ask me about Restaurant Marketing and my answers to these. These 10 additional Questions and Answers follow the chapters of my Restaurant Marketing Strategies Book.
So the total number of videos is 20 and the best of all is that they are all free for you to get.
That's right; you just need to go to my website www.myrestaurantmarketing.com and enter your name and email and you will get right away the first video as well as my Restaurant Marketing Strategies Book Summary.
You will also get subscribed to my Restaurant Marketing Strategies monthly newsletter.
I hope that you find the videos useful. Again, they are all free for you.
Happy Sailing,Jose L Riesco
© Riesco Consulting Inc.
www.twitter.com/jlriescohttp://www.myrestaurantmarketing.com
