DinerCentirc BLOG | Succeed with Rewards, Social Media and Mobile Marketing | Restaurant Marketing | Rewards, Social Media, Text Marketing, Email Marketing, Direct Mail

2 Reasons Your Restaurant Marketing Efforts Should Be Multi-channel

Posted on February 20, 2012 by chrisleo

As the saying goes, “Everything in moderation”, is the best rule of thumb to live by. Believe it or not, the same holds true for your restaurant’s marketing efforts as well. Although, it’s not for the exact same reasons you would imagine.

Running a restaurant can be grueling, to say the least. Whether you are a manager, marketing manager, owner, or anyone else that has to “run the show”, there are never enough minutes in the day. Marketing generally is the first item to fall victim to busy schedules, even though it is technically one of the most important aspects of your job.

Because you are busy, it can seem easy and compelling to just pick a single path for marketing your restaurant. This is ill advised, because, in the end, you will be missing connecting with a portion of your diners completely, and additionally not effectively reinforcing your brand and your communication with other diners. Simply put, different people respond to different things. People are also inundated with media. Because of these things, you need to reach them on different levels, at different times of day, to build the strongest relationship possible.

While I could make an argument that print media (e.g. welcome to the neighborhood postcards, etc.) are also effective, I’m going to focus on the three main elements of our DinerCentric Restaurant Marketing System, which also happen to be the most popular marketing vehicles in other marketing offerings, from other vendors, as well. Those three things are email marketing, social media marketing and text message marketing. All of these things, combined together, can make your marketing very powerful, meaningful, and guaranteed to be absorbed by your diners and potential diners.

Here are two great reasons you should consider a multi-channel, cross platform marketing strategy, when promoting your restaurant:

#1) Leverage One Form Of Marketing To Expand Or Enhance Another

I have written about this in the past. It’s so important though, and we see so many people ignoring it, it warrants a mention here again. If you aren’t leveraging one form of marketing, to build up and get another form well established, YOU ARE BLOWING IT!

For instance, does your social media seem to be trumping the size of your email database for your diner club? One easy way to remedy this situation is to invite your fans on your social media pages to join your email club. This is very important, because it gives you one more place you can communicate with your diners, and an additional great way to reinforce your brand and keep it at the top of mind, with your diners.

NOTE: When you do this, it is very important to be sure to include a link to the sign up page, so it is easy for your fans to do.

#2 People Respond To Different Types Of Things At Different Times Of Day

Social media is “interactive marketing”. Email marketing, is more “reactive marketing”, and text message marketing is more or less “on demand marketing” All types of marketing are important, because there is no “one size fits all” type of marketing solution that reaches everyone.

For instance, I might be at work all day, have my web browsers up constantly, and consistently be looking at and checking up on my social media accounts. BUT, when I get home, I might want to just plop down on the couch, read my e-mail, watch TV and just “veg out”. Additionally, if I’m between work and home, out and about town, having fun, I’m most likely not going to be checking my email at all, or looking at my social media pages, so the only thing I’m likely to notice would be something like a text message from your restaurant.

If I’m the type of person described above, and you are trying to reach me only via one of these vehicles (e.g. you only market to your diners via email), the chances of you getting your message in front of me and getting me to absorb it, are most likely slim to none. However, if you used a mixture of all three efforts and timed them out strategically to be deployed, odds are much greater that you would catch me at the right time and your marketing would therefore be that much stronger.

Multi-channel marketing requires a bit of planning and strategy, to successfully deploy. But if you take the time to plan, up front, you will be rewarded handsomely. Are you curious about the best times to contact people with these various marketing vehicles? Are you actively participating in one of these forms of marketing and want to beef up your efforts by adding the others? Contact me today, and I would be happy to give you advice, and help you in any way I can.

Like our blog? Subscribe to receive our posts via email, below:

Posted in Marketing 101, Restaurant Marketing | Tagged diner interaction, diner loyalty, diner rewards, dinercentric, email marketing, restaurant marketing, restaurant social media, sms marketing, social media, social media management, text message marketing | Leave a comment

3 Ways To Increase Revenues Using SMS (Text Message) Marketing In Your Restaurant

Posted on February 14, 2012 by admin

Lately I’ve been reading many great articles about restaurant websites and why you should have a mobile enabled version of your website, for when visitors browse your restaurant on a smartphone. The general consensus of these articles is that you should seriously consider having a mobile version of your site. I agree wholeheartedly with this.

While I may agree with this, I find it important to point out that since people are using mobile devices, specifically smartphones, more and more frequently as their constant way of being “connected”, having a plan that includes SMS (text message) marketing is key to the success of your diner rewards and loyalty programs.

“Great”, you say. “But what do I send them via text message, and how do I get them to pay attention?”. That is a very valid question. Fear not though, we have three great examples of ways you can market to your diners using text messages.

1) Butts in seats pay the bills
Whether you like to admit it or not, at one point or another, every restaurant has a slow day. Text message marketing is the perfect cure for an empty reservation book. With a little thought, you can craft an offering that will make people want to come in after work. For instance, maybe a special happy hour offering (e.g. half off appetizers, a martini special, etc.), maybe a dare (e.g. come to the restaurant and tell the bartender a joke and get half off an appetizer), or maybe just a no strings attached discount (e.g. bring a friend in to eat with you and we’ll pay for one of the meals).

The point is that you can easily get in front of ALL your diners, no matter where they might be and grab the opportunity of getting them to stop in your restaurant that day, by using text messaging. Once they get there, more likely than not, they’ll stay for a couple of drinks, or bring some friends with them, or even maybe stay longer than they originally planned (i.e. happy hour with friends turns into dinner with friends). Whatever the case may be, these are diners that you were not going to see that day, so any of them coming in will help contribute to your bottom line.

2) Use text messaging as a way to encourage cross platform interaction
One of the more interesting uses we have heard our clients use our DinerCentric text messaging platform for is to get diners to interact on their Facebook Fan Pages. This is actually a blessedly simple promotion and it works wonders:

-The restaurant sends a text out to all their diners with some sort of trivia question, puzzle or contest question. The text message also includes a short link to the restaurant’s Facebook Fan Page, where the diner can respond

-Diners go to the Facebook Fan Page, and put their answer to whatever the question was, on the wall of the restaurant’s page.

-The restaurant then picks a winner (e.g. the first three people to respond, the best answer as voted on by the kitchen staff, etc.), and notifies them publicly on the fan page that they are the winner

-The diner goes into the restaurant to claim their prize, and everyone wins.

I told you it was simple. You can use this type of promotion a million times, in a million different ways. The only limitation to this is your imagination. Every time, you will win with this type of promotion, because you are interacting with your diners.

3) Use Text Messaging to enhance your emails
I know this sounds a little strange, but utilizing text messages can actually make your email marketing easier for your diners to redeem at your restaurant.

For instance, our DinerCentric Marketing System comes with an option that will allow restaurants to send out emails to diners, and in that email is a button the diner can click to “grab the offer to their cell phone”. The diner clicks the button, enters in their cell phone number, and that offer is instantly text messaged to their phone.

When the diner goes to the restaurant, they simply need to show their phone to the server, and they are awarded the offer or discount. It’s easy, convenient, environmentally conscious and “high tech”.

Those are just three examples of ways that we are helping our clients use text message marketing to build business in their restaurants. The truth is there are dozens and dozens of ways, and as I said before, the only limiting factor in all of this is your imagination.

Do you need some help figuring out how to turn your rewards and loyalty programs around? Is your marketing scattered and all over the place? Email Me and I would be happy to hear what you are up to and give you some great advice to get you on the right track.

Posted in Text Message Marketing | Tagged custom restaurant marketing, diner loyalty programs, diner rewards programs, dinercentric, restaurant marketing, sms marketing, text message marketing | Leave a comment

Flyer & Poster For Our Client Firehouse Grill & Brewery

Posted on February 11, 2012 by chrisleo

Check out this flyer our design team just designed for one of our Restaurant Clients, Firehouse Grill & Brewery, for St. Patty’s Day.

Gonna be used in 4X6 postcards, as well as 18X24 posters and 4 foot by 9 foot banners

Posted in Client News, Graphic Design, Restaurant Marketing | Tagged 2012, Club Flyers, Firehouse Girls, Firehouse Grill & Brewery, Graphic Design, March 17, Posters, restaurant marketing, St. Patrick's Day | Leave a comment

7 Ways To Integrate Social Media AND Email Marketing, When Promoting Your Restaurant

Posted on February 6, 2012 by chrisleo

Have you been trying to figure out how to integrate Social Media into the email communications you send out for your Restaurant? Fear not! It’s actually far easier than you think.

Each, taken on their own, are effective. Put them together though and you will have something very powerful. Email marketing and social media go together perfectly, just like peanut butter and jelly

Now before you get in a huff and say, “But isn’t email dead and ineffective?”, just take a second and consider this fact:

According to a recent survey, performed by StrongMail, this past December, ”More than two-thirds of business leaders (68%) say they plan to integrate social media with their email marketing efforts in 2012″.

Certainly that is not a statistic that you can ignore. That said, I will grant you the fact that there are countless stories out there of companies that are pairing back their email marketing budgets and devoting those resources to other media efforts, such as social media. But the reality is you can’t kill your email initiatives, and the mere fact that I bet you have checked your email at least five or more times, today alone, proves this point.

Why Integrate?

Why would you want to integrate your email and social media anyways? What could there be to gain from this? There are many things you can gain from this:

1) Extend the reach of your email marketing. Social media will extend the reach of your email marketing. When one of your diners likes your email message and wants to share it with their social networks, social media sharing buttons allow them to easily do this. This makes your email marketing viral.

2) You get easy to view metrics on who the big influencers (people that share your restaurant’s messages the most) are in your diner club. Basically every email provider on the planet offers you these metrics. If your ISP or your email marketing solution doesn’t have this functionality, get a new service provider.

3) This integration allows you to expand your reach and pick up more diners. When your message goes viral, anyone that sees your message can link into your diner club sign up page, easily, because your marketing is integrated BOTH ways (People reading the email can easily get to the social media sharing and people viewing the shared content on their social media sites can easily get to your club sign up form).

Integration makes your marketing efforts nice and neat. Besides that, why limit your diners to a single way to interact with you and your Restaurant Brand? Why not give them multiple options?

Okay, you got me. So how do I do this?

This wouldn’t be a very good article, if we didn’t give you tips on how to integrate this, now would it? So fear not! We have a handy list of ways you can integrate your email and social media, making your marketing stickier, more viral and therefore more powerful.

#1- Include Social Media Icons That Link To Your Social Media Pages In Your Emails

This is referred to as a “Social Connection”. What that simply means is people can click on an icon in your email message and be directed to that page. In other words, it’s like telling someone to “like us on Facebook”.

I know this sounds like a “non-tip”, but you wouldn’t believe how many people we see that are not doing this. It is the EASIEST thing you can do with your social media/email integration efforts, so, like Nike says, “Just Do It”.

#2- Ask You Diner Club Members To Connect And Share

This form of integration is what is known as “Social Sharing”. What that means is that your diner can click on an icon and immediately share a portion of, or all of your content, on their social media wall, timeline, etc.

#3 Send Dedicated Email Campaigns To Your Diners

Sometimes, you might want to send a dedicated email campaign, trying to build up, specifically, one of your social media sites. For instance, perhaps you send a message to your diners, letting them know that they can get breaking news on events and promotions going on in your restaurant, by following your restaurant’s twitter page.

#4 Provide Incentive To Your Diners

Much like the tip above, if you want to drive diners to a certain social media site, offering specials or promotional incentives to your diners can help attract more followers or fans.

For instance, using landing pages on your Restaurant’s Facebook Fan Page is a great way to offer incentive. The landing page can say something like, “Like this page and instantly get a coupon for a free appetizer”. When the diner clicks the “Like” button, with a little bit of programming, you can have the page instantly refresh to the coupon.

#5: Promote Your Diner Club (Email Club) Sign Ups Via Your Restaurant’s Social Media Pages

Does your social media seem to be trumping the size of your email database for your diner club? One easy way to remedy this situation is to invite your fans on your social media pages to join your email club. It is very important to note that when you do this, be sure to include a link to the sign up page, so it is easy for your fans to do so.

#6: Include Code In Your Emails To Allow People To “Retweet” Your Messages:

Another great way to merge your social media and email is by making it easy for your diners to retweet your email message to their twitter page. This requires a little bit of HTML coding, but it is the perfect way to help make your Email Marketing viral.

#7: Put a Diner Club Sign Up Form On Your Facebook Fan Page

One of the greatest things about Facebook Fan Pages is that you can add a tab to the page that will allow your Facebook Fans the ability to sign up for your Diner Rewards Club.

While this does require some custom programming, changes to Facebook’s inner workings have made it much easier to accomplish this.

These are just seven of my favorite ways to integrate your social media with your email. The truth is there are probably 10 or more other ways one can accomplish this as well. This may sound like a lot of work, but the good news is there are many third party vendors that can assist you with these things. Every one of the things I mention in this article is offered as a standard part of our DinerCentric restaurant marketing system, for instance. No matter how you do it, the integration of social media with your email marketing is key to the success of your marketing initiatives.

”More than two-thirds of business leaders (68%) say they plan to integrate social media with their email marketing efforts in 2012″

Posted in Marketing 101, Social Media | Tagged dinercentric, email, email marketing, facebook fan page, social media, social media management | Leave a comment

Is your Restaurant’s Facebook Fan Page Healthy? 4 Ways To Find Out

Posted on January 30, 2012 by chrisleo

Facebook recently rolled out some new metrics that are going to make your Restaurant’s Fan Page Rock! The new insights are going to help you grow your fans and your fans interactions in ways you never imagined possible.

Obviously it’s important to monitor your facebook statistics, but the new metrics make it even easier to monitor your Facebook Fan Page’s health and well being.

Since we are a Restaurant Marketing Company , I figured for this article, I would use one of our newest client’s Facebook Fan Pages, Wicked Chicken, as an illustration.

The first thing you have to do is open your facebook insights. You will see the “insights” link, in the menu bar on the left, under your fan page profile picture. While there are tons of things you can look at in the insights section, we’re just going to focus on some of the most important things that you’ll want to look at, to judge the health of your fan page.

What Are Main Insights?
Clicking on the “insights” link will immediately take you to the main insights page. This page will show you all your activity for the last month.

When you click on the individual columns, you can sort the posts by descending value in the column.

Here are the main things you want to look at:

Reach is the number of unique users who saw your post.
Engaged Users is the number of unique people who have clicked on your post.
Talking About This is the number of people who have Liked, commented on or shared your post, or responded to the question or event.
Virality is the “Talking About This” number divided by the “Reach” number.

The most important of these columns and the things you want to pay the most attention to are Engaged Users and Virality.

You will also know what type of post you’re viewing by the icon next to the post.

Green quotations: Status update
Film: Video
Note with a pin: A link or an application that posted on your behalf.
Square that looks like an outline of a person in a picture: Pictures

In the above graphic, when we sorted by Engaged Users, we can see that the top two posts are photos. So we know that if we want to focus on getting more engaged users, we should post pictures. See what types of posts are working for you on your fan page by sorting the columns in this chart.

What Exactly Is Reach?

When you click on the Reach section, you first see a chart of demographics of people who have seen any content about your page within the last week.

Below that are the How You Reach People graphs. The one on the right shows the Unique Users by Frequency in a rolling one-week time frame.

The statistic to watch here is the number of people you are reaching more frequently. This is your core audience and who you should focus your attention on.

If you are not reaching people multiple times with your posts, you may have to adjust your strategy. Experiment with posting more often, focusing on getting more engagement so that your post comes up more in your fans’ news feed. You may need to do something more involved like quizzing people about facts about your restaurant, making special offers, running a contest, or Facebook ad to reconnect with your audience.

The next graph shows Page Views and Unique Visitors and below this graph is one of the most interesting areas of Insights, the External Referrers.

Watch where people are coming from. If the only external referrer is Google, you need to get the word out about your page.

In the example below, the Wicked Chicken fan page was most visited from links on their restaurant website. This probably isn’t as viral as one would like, so we need to find ways to spread the brand. Find ways to work your Facebook page address in multiple areas across the web.

What Are Likes?

The next area to check out is the Likes area. This area breaks out your fans by demographics, which can be useful for future ad campaigns. The area to watch in this section is the Where Your Likes Came From graph.

In this particular page’s graph, we can go back and track the posts on the wall to see what happened during the spikes.

On December 28, we were running a facebook ad campaign, which probably accounted for the spike in new “likes”. On January 13, we only had one post go up, but it was related to beer specials and not the food. Perhaps that turned off some fans. You need to pay attention to what’s working and what’s not. This section is a great place to do this.

What does the “People Talking About This” Mean?

The People Talking About This number is publicly displayed on the left sidebar under the number of Likes. This figure is a great measure of actual engagement.

It includes all the following activities that happen on your page over a one-week rolling period:

Liking a page
Posting to a page’s wall
Liking, commenting on or sharing a page post (or other content on a page, like photos, videos or albums)
Answering a question posted
RSVPing to an event
Mentioning a page in a post
Phototagging a page
Liking or sharing a check-in deal
Checking in at a place (if your page has a place merged with it)

The best part of this statistic is that you can see it on any page—meaning it’s public information! Now you can tell if a page is interacting with people. Big fan numbers don’t mean that the page is healthy. This is very important to remember! The People Talking About This statistic is the one to watch. Watch your competitors’ numbers to monitor what is working for them. For an accurate picture, take the People Talking About This number and divide it by the total number of fans. Healthy pages have percentages between 1% and 5% (or more for great interaction). In our example above, you will see that Wicked Chicken’s page, although not with tons of fans, has an interaction percentage of 10%.

It’s important to remember that if people aren’t interacting with your page, you will drop out of the news feed. You DO NOT want this.

The new Facebook Insights have improved how you can track the health of your restaurant’s fan page and you can immediately see when you need to make some adjustments to your social media strategy. Try new things, monitor what’s working and what isn’t, and take your restaurant’s Facebook page to the next level!

I hope this gives you some great ideas on how to use the new Facebook Insights to monitor and grow your audience. Is your page healthy? Do you want a second opinion? Contact us today and we’d be happy to have our DinerCentric marketing team take a look at your page and give you some free suggestions and advice.