Marketing, by my definition is positioning a product and/or service for sale to the public in such a way that …

1) …they notice it,
2)… a desire is created and
3)… action is taken to purchase the product or service.

For your restaurant think of the marketing mix of five “P’s”:

Product
Price
Place
People and
Promotion

(Kind of like the five D’s of dodgeball for those of you who saw the movie

However, the first four P’s can be grouped together under the heading of Repeat and Referral Generators- Promotion is taken care of AFTER and only AFTER the first four P’s are mastered.

For example,
Product- Your product is your food. The higher the quality of your food, the greater your odds are for repeat and referral business.

Price- Price is not defined by how high or low you go, but rather whether your dining experience was a value relative to the cost of the dinner. The higher the value, the greater your odds are for repeat and referral business.

Place- Your “place” is anything and everything tangible from the time I enter your driveway until I exit. The windows, the bathrooms, the condiment bar, the silverware, the uniform shirt on your waiter, the missing letters on the menu, the light that’s out on your sign, etc. The better your place looks, the greater your odds are for repeat and referral business.

People- Teach all your people on the importance of details and treating EVERY customer as they would treat a family member visiting on Christmas Eve in their home. Teach your people to make real, human connections with your guests. Teach your people to casually discover where they are from, where they work and what would they like to see at your restaurant that you don’t already have. Don’t hire anyone who doesn’t possess these skills.

The Fifth P, Promotion- The fifth P comes necessarily last, and should not come at all until you have the four P’s above working well in your restaurant.
Why successfully promote and bring new trial to a restaurant with bad food?
Why successfully promote and bring new trial to a restaurant with no perceived value for the price?
Why successfully promote and bring new trial to a restaurant with dirty floors and sticky table tops?
Why successfully promote and bring new trial to a restaurant with people who are rude or (even worse) apathetic?

Successfully promoting a bad restaurant only speeds it’s demise. Get your first four “P’s” in order, then call me- we’ll “go to town.”

I love to eat out and I love sushi. So my wife and I end up in a lot of little sushi restaurants all the time. This week we were at two different sushi places. And as I was gobbling down my mackerel and albacore it dawned on me that I was holding a huge marketing lesson in between my chopsticks.

WHAT?!

The first place we ate at we had to wait for over 40 minutes to get our table. (I know, a reservation would’ve been a smart move!)

The food was good – but it wasn’t sensational. However, the place was hopping! And it was really fun to have dinner there. The second restaurant we ate at last night had a total of 12 guests. We got our table right away and the food was amazing! On the top of that, they had a dinner special (on a Friday night?!) so we ate way too much sushi and paid less than $25 for the two of us.

In the first restaurant our waitress gave us great recommendations what to order, so we also ended up having some drinks. She suggested a desert, but we just couldn’t eat any more!

The second place the service was a bit lame. We had two people serving us and I couldn’t figure out which one of them was really our waiter. They never made any recommendations, didn’t ask if we wanted any drinks, and as soon as they saw us finish eating they brought us the bill. BUT the food was better and cheaper…

Clearly one of these places was didn’t have the Midas Touch!

So where is the marketing lesson? Here it comes…

How come one of those places charges five times the price (Restaurant 1), sells food that isn’t the best (not bad, but NOT the best), and is bursting at the seams with patrons, while the other is barely making ends meet while providing awesome food at rock bottom prices?

I’ll give you the answer. But first, let me tell you that this “economic discrepancy” doesn’t apply only to sushi restaurants. In fact, most service professionals suffer from the same problems.

Remember this- people choose your restaurant over your competition because of how they FEEL about your entire environment. It’s not just about the food quality, it’s not just about the price, it’s not just about the location, IT’S ABOUT YOUR STAFF AND THE EXPERIENCE THEY DELIVER.

All of your servers, managers and owners need to make me feel like you give a damn and actually make a connection with me. Everything else is secondary. If I sense that you don’t care about my experience- all bet’s are off. If I sense apathy, if I have to wait at the door too long before being greeted, etc.- I will LOOK for reasons not to like your food.

The key is not getting better at what you do, but getting better at marketing and selling what you do! Because that’s what brings the cash and makes you successful and prosperous!

So, back to the sushi diners…

You see, one of those places sells commodity – sushi. The other sells value – the total experience of dining out! It’s too bad that the place selling better
food will soon go out of business because the only way they know how to try to get new business is to lower the price.

Just a little bit of marketing know how could make a world of difference, but they would rather just learn how to make their great sushi even greater!

Here are a few lessons (and questions) for you:

Does your marketing (in store service) sell commodity (what you do) or value (what your clients get out of what you do?

Does your marketing (in store service) distinguish you from competitors in ways other than just pricing?

Does your marketing (in store service)  automatically convert first timers into repeat customers?

Are you regularly checking in and touching tables to see how satisfied they are with what they have bought from you and using their feedback to make improvements?

And do you constantly look for new ways to serve your customers better but developing and recommending new food items, deserts, etc?

This is only a quick assessment of how well your marketing is doing. If you answered YES to all of these questions – congratulations! But don’t rest on
your laurels! Your competitors are working hard to steal your clients.

And if you couldn’t answer YES to these questions, you need to consider investing in your marketing know how. That’s the only way you will ever make your business grow!

Marketing on a local level must be a process.

Almost all of the restaurant owners, operators and managers I work with in the trenches discuss marketing as an “event” or a “series of events”, designed to produce instant sales and instant gratification.

They search for the magic bullet.

The promise of this magic bullet comes as a trojan horse from the advertising sales reps that hammer them with terms like “saturation”, “shelf life” and other such sales tactics. Sometimes the magic bullet suggestion comes from an advertising agency hired to boost sales quickly. These agencies like to throw around concepts such as “branding” and “image building.”

These magic bullets begin to get expensive. And any results that come in are very short-lived.

Eventually the truth sets in…you can’t purchase a magic bullet for marketing your restaurant, nor is there a short cut to this magic bullet.

Ah, but notice- I didn’t say there isn’t a magic bullet for marketing your restaurant.

Here’s your magic bullet- Commit, right now, to building a marketing plan for your restaurant that operates as a process. Stop marketing and advertising by the seat of your pants. Create a local marketing action plan that is based on a logical strategy of identifying targets, networking those targets and measuring the results.

I didn’t say it would be easy, nor did I say it would be quick. But if you draft this plan correctly, the tactics will become a regular part of your weekly routine and the results (more customers) will be just as predictable.

We help a lot of clients with our IntriMail Email Marketing program. This consists of designing EMail blasts and sending those out at strategic times to promote events, display lunch menus and generally just keep in touch.

But the purpose of this message is to open you up to a new idea that we are launching for a client right now- Email Drip Marketing. As a way of staying in touch with all the local business owners, fundraising connectors such as Principals, Superintendents, etc., let’s take a look at what email drip marketing is and how it can be effective for you…

One to one Direct Email Marketing

Drip marketing is a one-to-one marketing method rather than a one-to-many method of communicating with prospects. This is often confusing to would-be-marketers who don’t understand the difference between a drip campaign and an e-zine or e-newsletter campaign.

What makes a drip email campaign so effective is the fact that it consists of a series of pre-written emails sent out in the timing and sequence you choose. Each subscriber gets a series of emails in the same sequence, usually based on the date they subscribed. An email newsletter, by contrast, is sent to everyone on the list at the same time.

Both methods of marketing have their place in the e-mail marketing world, but the advantage of a drip series is that the information presented can be designed to refer to the previous one. A newsletter, on the other hand, is more difficult to do that, because a user who joined a list today did not get the message sent to the list last week.

Ideally, an e-marketer should have a platform that can do both. This way, a message can be sent to everyone that is seasonally-based, like this:

Hi John,

With the snow melting and Spring coming around, you might be considering putting your home on the market. With tax refunds going out, many home buyers become motivated to go home shopping this time of year, and if you’re wanting to get your home sold, now is the time to get it done.

I’d love to talk more about it and discuss how much you may be able to get for your home.

Sincerely,

Jack Black
Anytown Real Estate Agent

Or sequence-based, like this:

Hi John,

Thanks for downloading my free report on Selling Your Home For Top Dollar in Any Market. Let me know if you have any questions at all about how I can help you get the most from your real estate investment.

Tomorrow I’d like to send you a free Checklist For Preparing Your Home For the Market. My clients have found this very helpful.

I’d love to get your home sold at top dollar for you when you’re ready!

Sincerely,

Jack Black
Anytown Real Estate Agent

Email relationship building

The competitive advantage of communicating frequently using a drip campaign is hard to overstate. Despite public dislike for email marketing messages, studies have shown that more frequent communication is more effective than less frequent communication as long as permission has been granted for the email.

A reader who has opted into a list chose to receive that content. Sending to them once a week or even once a day is actually better than sending once per month, because the relationship and trust can be build faster.

While the goal of most email marketing is of course to sell something, any good salesperson knows that sales increase exponentially the stronger the relationship. A publisher who takes that time to build a relationship with readers through email drip marketing will be rewarded over the one who doesn’t.

Let me know if you would like to lean more.

Just got off a l-o-n-g conference call with a Local Store Marketing client. He has a casual food restaurant in North Carolina. The town he is located is very limited economically. They just lost a large auto manufacturer and all the wages that went with it.

The only real economy that’s left is mostly tourist’s passing through on their way to the coast. Not the greatest place to own a restaurant. After working with the restaurant for a few months on conference calls, I was able to slowly, but steadily improve sales. Actually got a 15% improvement.

But slow and steady growth isn’t good enough when the building owner is ready to call your note from two years prior of being behind in payments. So, the owner and I worked out a deal to cover my expenses and some of my time for me to pay a visit.

The first evening in, on a Thursday, I visited five of his competitors- three of them were crowded, one was jam packed.

Finally I walked into his restaurant to no greeting. A female bartender just looked at me while I stood behind the “Please Wait To Be Seated” sign. After 3 more minutes I approached the bartender and asked if there was a host on duty, and she said, “I think so.”

I sat myself.

After a few more minutes, a server appeared to take my order…. and the poor experience continued.

The next afternoon, I called my client from my hotel and invited him to lunch at the competitors restaurant that was busy the night before. We met at the door at 11:30 am and walked in. The host greeted us immediately and said there may be a slight wait, but offered to grab us a drink while we waited.

We were seated and the excellent service continued… the server asked if we worked in the area, and if we had been in before.

All the while, my restaurant owner was complaining about the auto manufacturer leaving town, and the corrupt city officials, and the poor service he received from his franchisor and about nine other things.

All the while, customers were filing in and out of the restaurant we were in.

I suspect that if I met the owner of the busy restaurant- his disposition would be a bit “sunnier” than my client’s. My guess is that he or she understands Local Store Marketing.

Moral: Reality is what you make it.