In this article you’ll discover:
- How to overcome the skepticism of some diners and make them your diners for life.
- Why learning everything through trial and error will leave you discouraged and penniless.
- The new definition of marketing that is likely costing you thousands of dollars.
- The secret to guaranteeing that you have prospects beating a path to your door.
- How much profit each diner will bring into your restaurant.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve noticed that the economy has changed and getting listings and buyers is harder than ever before…
Have You Noticed?…
- Prospects are more skeptical.
- Ads and promotions that worked in the good ole’ days, don’t do diddly-squat now.
- It’s costing you more and more just to break even…and you feel lucky for even that!
- Your diners are wanting you to do more work for lower and lower loan origination fees.
Long story short, it’s tough out here…
But why?
You’re probably violating one of the new rules of running your restaurant in this new economy!
And what exactly are the new rules?
New Rule #1 Of Restaurant Marketing
The customer has the only vote that counts. Period.
- One of the biggest marketing mistakes restaurant owners make is not understanding and addressing customer needs.
- Most restaurant owners NEVER ask their customers for feedback about what they did or didn’t like about their restaurant.
- The biggest breakthroughs in your restaurant usually come from your customers, but you must get the information like:
What motivates the guests to choose my restaurant over my competitors?
What's most important to them when choosing a restaurant?
Do they want the lowest price or the best tasting food for a good price?
New Rule #2 Of Restaurant Marketing
- You must test everything in your restaurant in order to improve upon it.
- Instead of guessing, test it out in a ad or on a diner and get their feedback. Don’t underestimate how powerful this is.
- You must test every component of your marketing pieces. If they don’t at least pay for themselves, stop doing it.
- The only way to test something is to require the prospect to take a specific action upon seeing the ad.
- This is called direct response advertising. It allows you to measure and track the effectiveness of all your marketing.
New Rule #3 Of Restaurant Marketing
- Prospects need a unique, persuasive and compelling reason to choose your restaurant over your competitors.
- Every diner always wants to know what's in it for them.
- Don't waste your time with the normal self-promotional and bragging image advertising.
- Your marketing message must be specific to your prospects needs, wants and problems.
- You need a unique selling proposition (USP) that tells people exactly why they should choose your restaurant.
New Rule #4 Of Restaurant Marketing
- Stop trying to attract anyone and everyone to your restaurant. You should only focus on attracting the best type of diner to your restaurant.
- You must pick a specific type of diner that you want to target and then tailor all your advertising to that type of diner.
- In your restaurant marketing campaign, you should never try to list everything you offer. Pick one.
- Everyone needs to eat but not everyone will appreciate your food and dining experience. That’s a fact of life.
- Your ads need to be specific and compelling to draw a specific type of diners
New Rule #5 Of Restaurant Marketing
- Diners must enjoy both the food and environment of your restaurant. Get either one wrong and you’re guaranteed to struggle.
- Make sure you’re staff isn’t slow to serve food or rude to guests, because if so, guests won't stick around to give you another shot.
- Don’t compromise on food quality and taste to lower the cost.
- Don’t ever compromise on giving the best customer service.
- Always strive to give the best dining experience for your customers at all times.
- Ask your diners about what they would recommend you do to improve your restaurant .
New Rule #6 Of Restaurant Marketing
- You must take scheduled time away from your restaurant to improve and implement the things that are important to your customers.
- In order for you to view your restaurant from your customers perspective, you must take time to step away from your restaurant and look at it from a diner’s perspective.
- Your restaurant is not your life. Your restaurant and your life are completely separate things.
- The key is to step outside your own shoes and begin to come up with new and exciting ways to get more diners and get your current diners to continue to come back.
New Rule #7 Of Restaurant Marketing
- You can’t do everything all by yourself, because it dramatically limits what you're able to accomplish.
- If it's only you, then when you run out of time, money, energy, ideas, etc...then, there's nothing and nobody else to help you.
- Don't fall into the trap of working harder, but getting less and less results. For example, do you earn twice as much if you work twice harder? No.
- You must get your staff properly trained and implement technology where it’s appropriate to help you make dramatic increases towards your goals and results.
New Rule #8 Of Restaurant Marketing
- Stop reinventing the wheel every single time because of a lack of effective systems.
- If your restaurant is not built on proven systems that you can easily teach your staff, then all you have is a job that requires you to start over from the beginning every single day.
- You need a system for:
- ...attracting new diners
- ...collecting their contact information.
- ...provide customers with superior service.
- ...to turn customers into lifetime customers.
- …getting your customers to refer others to your restaurant.
“You’re in a very different restaurant industry from twenty, ten or even five years ago….”
You’re in a very different mortgage market from twenty, ten or even five years ago….It’s time to do things very different in this new mortgage market….
This Is About New Beginnings
- New Marketing Strategies
- New Overall Restaurant Focus
- New Direction For Your Restaurant
- New Energy From Your Support Team
- New Outlook On Your Marketplace
- New Staff (If Needed)
This Is About Building New Business Habits
- Learn from your competitors success and failures.
- Always, always, always asking and listening to your diners and prospects.
- Take the best ideas from different industries and apply them to your business.
- The ability and desire to change quickly in response to market opportunities and changes.
Let me ask you a question…
Why Are You In The Restaurant?
The purpose of ANY business (including the restaurant) is not to provide jobs for the public. The first responsibility of ANY business is to make it’s owners and investors rich. - Dan Kennedy (Author)
Face The Music…
The market’s changed. The goals and desires of buyers and sellers have changed. The economy has changed. The question is, Why haven’t you changed your marketing, advertising and business systems?
Sign of The Times
The Old Way:
- Being the slave of your restaurant and working 14-18 hours a day.
- Submitting to every whim of every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes into your restaurant because you’re desperate for money.
- Stuff as many dishes on your menu as you can because you’re trying to be a one-stop shop restaurant.
- Wasting tons of money on image ads that brag about how great your restaurant is.
The New Way:
- New diners “finding” your restaurant every day.
- Knowing exactly what ad or marketing effort generated every diner who visits your restaurant.
- Collecting your diner’s contact information so you can notify them of your restaurant’s specials.
- Using technology to attract new diners 24/7.
- Delegate as much as possible so you can spend your hours working on improving your restaurant instead of working for your restaurant.
- Enjoy your life and have greater peace of mind knowing you have leveraged the best system to help you get the best possible result.
- Enjoy what you're doing because you're having fun helping qualified diners.
- Only work with prospects you want to work with you and do things your way.
Let’s go deeper…
What’s the one thing that will determine whether or not your restaurant succeeds or fails?
- Food Quality?
- Customer Service?
- Good Staff & Support Team?
- Lowest Prices on the Block?
- Best Location in Town?
WRONG!
“Your ability to consistently attract new diners and convert them into loyal customers. That is the number one determinant of your real restaurant success. – In other words MARKETING!”
The Secret To Success
The sooner you become the marketer of your restaurant instead of the doer of your restaurant, the faster your income and restaurant will grow!
What Is The New Definition of Marketing?
Marketing is anything that you would do or can do to get diners AND keep diners.
Everything is marketing…and marketing is everything to your success.
- Display ads
- Newsletters
- Websites
- Sales letters
- Direct Mail Packages
- Brochures
- Yellow Page Ads
- Classified Ads
- Scripts
- Letterhead
- Business Cards
- Signs
- Billboards
- Loyalty programs
- Every interactions with customers and prospects
- EVERYTHING!!!
When you realize that everything is marketing… your restaurant looks totally different to you. You see obvious mistakes when you consider how your diner or prospect might view situations, events or documents. You also see a ton of opportunities for improvement or chances for sales. However, ALL marketing strategies MUST be held accountable to produce profits. You must know the effectiveness of each ad, letter, flyer, postcard etc. Your marketing must be a system that's predictable and able to be duplicated. Every dollar that you spend must come back to your bank account with at least 5 new friends to join him. When done correctly, there is no better investment in your restaurant than marketing. Everything else is a cost.
You must know your Return On Investment (ROI) at all times. But How?
Direct Response Marketing.
What Is Direct Response Marketing Advertising?
Direct Response Marketing is marketing designed to generate an immediate response, where each response (and purchase) can be measured, and attributed to individual advertisements.
Why Direct Response Marketing?
- It’s personal, specific, clear and simple.
- Makes it easy to use multi-step marketing to answer questions and overcome objections through marketing
- Two-way (Get’s the word back)
- Results in a long-term relationship
- Easy to know and track your R.O.I
- Allows you to know exactly what the value of a lead and customer is.
Make It Plain & Simple
1. Start by understanding the benefits your prospect wants and offer them it in your ads.
2. Communicate these benefits in an attention-grabbing, compelling and motivating manner.
3. Make an offer that has universal appeal to your defined target.
4. Make a soft offer that is non-threatening for prospects to respond to.
5. Make it easy and non-threatening for prospects to get further information and to leave their name and address.
6. Implement tracking mechanisms in your ads that you can test while tracking.
The Direct Response Difference
Starts with an attention grabbing headline that makes a bold and simple to understand claim, promise or offer. Headline qualifies who the remainder of the message/ad is written for. Has ONE clear and simple goal to get the prospective diners to step into your outlet to get what they want and need.Presents a clear call to action. “Tell the waiter this phrase…”, “Go to this website…”, “Bring this coupon in on this date…” etc.
What Is The Lifetime Value Of Your Customers?
Lifetime value is how much a customer will purchase during his lifetime of working with you. By focusing on LTV, a restaurant owner gets a much more realistic picture of the value of keeping customers loyal.
- What’s the average amount of your fee from each closing?
- How often do they purchase another house or property?
- How much do they spend over the course of their lifetime with you?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions then you are at a HUGE disadvantage.
Lifetime Value Of A Customer
If on average every diner spends $1,000 over the course of their lifetime with you. How many diners would you try to get in your sales and marketing funnel? How much would you be willing invest on marketing to get one customer if each customer was worth $1,000 to you? The real power and breakthrough in your restaurant will occur when you harness the knowledge of your lifetime value of your diners and use it to implement direct response marketing in all your advertising.
Summary--> Never forget the new rules about getting diners for your restaurant.
--> Every contact or exposure with a prospect or existing diner has the potential to be marketing.
--> Only use direct response marketing in your lead generation campaigns.
--> Get a diner today to have a diner for life.
--> Calculate the lifetime value of your diners.
