[00:00:00] Speaker A: When it comes to marketing restaurants, there are two things I want you to understand. Number one, there is no silver bullet right there. There is no one thing you can do that will change the course of your restaurant. Rather, it's a series of little moves you make. And number two, all of those little moves are interrelated. They're interconnected. It is about getting organized. So on today's episode here, right at the beginning of the year, we're going to talk about how you get yourself organized in marketing your restaurant for 2025. Don't go anywhere.
There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking.
Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. Happy New Year to the beginning of 2025. My name is Chip Close. I am your host. This, of course, is the Restaurant Strategy podcast. We put out two new episodes every single week. Episodes that help you level up and increase the profitability of your restaurants. It is the one thing. It is the thing that matters more than everything else. Everything else, the good food, the good service, the cool decor, all the great stuff you do is in service of the bottom line. The point of a business is to generate profit. Product profit, to make value, to create value for the the owners, the operators, the investors, the partners. That is you. If you want to level up and you want a better, more profitable restaurant, you are in the right place. I wrote a book, it's called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. I give talks all over the world. I run something called the P3 mastermind. If you want more hand holding, more personal guidance, the best way to learn more about that is to go to our website Restaurant Strategy Podcast.
Watch a quick video, grab some time on my calendar and learn more about the program. The one request I want to make of you here at the beginning of the year is to please, please, please. If you get any sort of value out of this show, please take a minute and leave us a review. On Apple Podcasts, that platform, more than anything else, helps us move the needle in this business. If you get value out of it, simply go there, leave us a five star rating and review. Just let people know what you've gotten out of the show and why you think they should tune in. That more than anything else would help. This my small business AI, you love to go out to eat. So as a guest, what's your biggest pet peeve? When you're trying to choose a place to eat.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: Yeah. As the father of two children, I can't leave the house for less than $30 an hour. My wife has celiac. So when we're going to make a. A dining decision, I live and die by that menu. I'm in there researching what's available, what can my wife eat, what can we share, what do I get to eat off of her pleat? Um, and so that menu is just a crucial part of all decision making for me as a consumer. It's why at Marquee, we focus so much on our menus, our menu integration, so that as operators, your menu that lives in your point of sale that you want customers to see is available and up to date everywhere.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: To learn more about Marquee, go to marquee.com m a r q I I.com to learn more about this and all of the incredible features they have.
Okay, so today we're talking about marketing. Specifically, I wanted you to get two points. Number one, it is. There's no one thing you do to market your restaurant. It's a series of little moves, right? It's all these little things you gotta button up. There are a million tools. There are a million different channels at our disposal. And you need to make sure they are all working in coordination with each other. It's a series of little moves. I like to think of it like a hotel, right? So I lived in New York City for 20 years. We have the. The Plaza Hotel, right? The Plaza is right at the corner of Central Park South. It is like a mecca. It's the middle of the world. And. And what happens is they got all these doors all over the place. The front door, a bunch of side doors, the back door. When you are a guest at the Plaza Hotel, you can walk in any way you choose, right? And a really great restaurant is just like a really great hotel, and the Plaza is a great hotel, right? They don't really much care which way you come in, obviously. I think they. They hope you come in the grand main entrance and you get the bellhops and all of that. But I don't know, maybe you're going to come in the side door. Maybe you check in at the front door, but after you go out to dinner, you come in the back door. Maybe after you go to a show, you come in the side door. The bottom line is they need to make sure that every door is beautiful. There's doormen at every door, right? And you are greeted the way that you would be at the Front door. It's the same thing when it comes to marketing your restaurant, your people, right? Your guest or your prospective diners will discover you from a lot of different ways. Maybe they'll read a review. Maybe they'll find you on Yelp. Maybe they'll trip upon a listicle where you're listening to listed as the top 10 brunch restaurant. Maybe their friend is going to tell.
Tell them about you. Maybe they then go check out Instagram. Maybe there's a million different ways they could come to you. And you got to make sure that you are buttoned up in every place. Maybe the place they discover you is on Yelp. You got to make sure you have a really great presence on Yelp. Good reviews, great pictures, a great rating that you're. You're responding to those reviews, all of that, right? Maybe they find you on. On Google. You got to make sure your Google my business page is optimized, right? Maybe they find you on. You got to make sure that that presents your restaurant the best way possible. There isn't one set door that they take to get to you. They take all kinds of side doors, front doors, sunroofs, back doors, basement doors. They come in and find you in a bunch of different ways. And so you have to make sure that whatever way they come in to get you, however they discover you is taken care of. Is all telling a cohesive story, right? Now, the key to that, to understanding that there are tons of different channels and tools at your disposal, is you have to get organized. And that's really what I'm hoping to talk about today. You have to get organized. The best way to get organized, right, is to look at your year. Beginning of the year, planning is huge for me and it should be huge for you, right? Planning from an operations standpoint and also planning from a marketing standpoint. Now, I wrote about this in my book, the Restaurant Marketing Mindset, but there's a relationship between operations and marketing, right? They keep passing the baton back and forth and back and forth, right? You can't market a bad restaurant if a restaurant is bad food and bad service. You can't. You can't put out enough photos and videos that are going to. They're going to trick people into coming. Eventually they're going to come. You're going to trick them once and they're going to go, that place sucked. We're not going to go back there, right? So operations and marketing, right, go hand in hand. You need a great experience to tell people about, right? If you tell people it's great. And it's not great. You're not going to be in business very long. Of course, we know that. But it's worth mentioning, it's worth pointing out. So when it comes to marketing, right, it's the same thing as it does with, with operations is at the beginning of the year, you've got to do proper planning for the year ahead. Now, I want to specifically talk to you about the importance of a marketing calendar and how a marketing calendar can help coordinate all your efforts. And I'm giving this marketing calendar away for free. The way you get it is to email me personally, Chip close dot com. My name is spelled C H I P K L O.
That's right. You have to write me a personal email and personally request it and I will send it back. I respond to each and every email I get, chipclose.com and I will send you my 2025 marketing calendar. It's the basically a template I've used for, I don't know, 15 years marketing restaurants. It's a way to get all of your different channels organized. Right now, you don't need mine. You can put together your own. You can go rip one off, you know, off the Internet. I don't care. It doesn't matter. What I care about is that you take the time to get yourself organized. Now, how do we begin this? How do we begin this task? You begin by looking from the opera, from an operations perspective and looking at your year, your 12 months, your 13 periods, however you arrange it, and looking for the high points and the low points and the midpoints, right? There are months where you're crazy busy. Depending where you are, what market, what kind of restaurant you are, you will be busy at certain points of the year. Likewise, depending what market you're in, what kind of concept you are, there will be slow points during the year. Guess what? There is an ebb and flow. There's a seasonality to every single one of our restaurants. I don't know any restaurant that is consistently packed every single night of the week, every month of the year. They're not. There's an ebb and a flow to this, right? What you need to do from an operational perspective is look at your year and look at your high points and your low points. When you look at your low points, right, Those are the areas where you need to come up with some sort of promotion, where you need to do something to create a push to get people to come in. But just as important and not to be forgotten are the high points because the high points are where you don't have to work very hard at all, right? So if you run a fine dining restauran, the holidays, December is going to be huge because people are taking out clients, people are celebrating with their office parties, people are going out to celebrate with friends. They're going out for Christmas Eve, for New Year's Eve. People will come to you without you having to request that people come. But when you've got all those people who are used to coming to you just for a high holy day, let's say there's an opportunity to convince them, right? To make sure we get data and convince them to come back at a later point, at a point when it might not be as intuitive, when they may not be thinking about you. Let's say in January and February and March, there are things we can do in December to help us in January, February and March. We just simply have to acknowledge the fact that there's an opportunity to be had. For example, I always use this example I was doing. I was working at Gotham, right? So Gotham in New York now closed, sadly. But Gotham was open for 40 years before they closed. And back when I was there, we ended up doing holiday brunches, right? So the Sundays between Thanksgiving and Christmas and really that restaurant never did brunches in much of its history. But we decided to do it for the holidays, right? But what we did is we said there are probably people coming out just for these brunches that don't usually come out and join us. So we did basically a bounce back program. We gave them a gift, gift certificate. We had these beautiful like envelopes made that got them two free glasses of Tattinger champagne. The following month they bring those back, no questions asked. Anytime in January, they didn't have to do a minimum sped. They could just come in, sit at the bar, get two glasses of champagne and go on their merry way. We didn't care. The idea was if that brought them in the front door, then our servers, our bartenders, our managers, it was their job to try to get additional sales. Somebody comes into the bar, says, I'm just going to get these two glasses of champagne. It's the bartender's job to say, absolutely. But might I recommend this appetizer or these two appetizers just as a little something to nosh on while you're enjoying the champagne? You know, it's their job to bring the menu. So yeah, I know you just wanted the champagne, but just take a look at the menu, right? There's a lot we could do. Once we get the butts in the seats. We didn't get the butts in the seats. There's nothing we can do. But once they're there, we can be personable, we can be hospitable, we can be charming salespeople. And we were. We did. And so we gave those out to everybody who dined with us. So we would do these brunches. We would do 200, 250 covers on a Sunday afternoon. And we gave out 200, 250 of these. Right. Over the course of the four Sundays. It's about a thousand of those we gave out. And we got a whole bunch of them back. And a lot of them came back from people who wouldn't have otherwise thought to join us. We gave them an excuse. We put our thumb on the scales, right? Good food, good service. Of course they'll return to us. Yeah. But maybe not quickly or maybe not at all. But if we put something in their hand that gave them an excuse to come join us, well, then we just. We just tip the scales in our favor ever so slightly, right? So even at a fine dining restaurant, Michelin Star, we found an elegant way of doing this, right? That's what I mean.
[00:11:43] Speaker C: Right.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: December, we were crazy busy at Gotham. We didn't have to do much at all, all to convince people to. To come in then, right? They just naturally came in. We were one of the most popular restaurants in the entire city. So when we had them there, it was our opportunity, our job to give them something that would get them back at a time when they didn't necessarily think of us. So when you look at your calendar and you plan out your highs and your lows, and you look at where your revenue is going to, how your revenue is going to come to you, and when it's going to come to you over the course of the year, you look at your low points and say, this is the. These are the places, the times that we have to fix. And then the areas, the times when people come in all the time. For example, in Gotham, November, December, no problem. Guess what? May, June, right? No problem. We had all these high schools and colleges all around us. We had so many graduations and all of that. No problem, right? There were points of the year where we didn't have to worry about it. Meanwhile, fine dining in January, everybody's blown all their budget. Everybody's, you know, just sort of tightening their belts. They're not drinking their diet. They're. They've flown south for the winter, right? July, August, everybody's out of the Hamptons, right? Rather than being in the city at a fancy Michelin star restaurant, they're out in the Hamptons enjoying their their huge home out there. There were times of the year when we had to actively do stuff and there were times of the year we didn't need to do stuff. So the beginning, the first part of this is that you have to map out your year. So, so do that. Take the time to do that and look at where your opportunities are. This is where you have tons of people coming in. What can we do with those people to get them to come back in? And these are the times where we really got to pull teeth to get people to walk in the door. Is there anything we could do to get them to walk in the door? Now after the break, we're going to talk about the calendar, about how you get yourself organized at all this. Once you do that first part, you have to do the all important second part. All of that in a second. After a word from another one of our sponsors, In Kind is the largest and only dual sided app based marketplace offering low cost capital investment for restaurants paired with exclusive dining rewards for restaurant goers. To date, In Kind has provided over $200 million in capital, giving restaurant operators alternative funding anywhere from 10,000 to $10 million to its over million users. In Kind is a free app to pay your restaurant tab and earn rewards, all while dining out to the over 1,800 US restaurant owners who have been funded by In Kind. It is the source of capital that takes a lot of the pain out of starting and running a restaurant, ultimately helping their dreams come true and showing that accessing capital for your restaurant does not have to require paying back lenders, splitting profits with investors or pledging your assets. Enjoy 15% back at rest thousands of restaurants and access exclusive dining perks and offers by downloading the In Kind app. You do
[email protected] or visit in kind.com to see how In Kind can benefit you as a restaurant owner and operator. Restaurant strategy listeners can redeem a special offer by using the link in kind.vip/restaurantstrategy. As always, you'll find that link in the show notes.
Okay, so now we're talking about this relationship between operations and marketing. We're talking about getting ourselves organized for the year ahead because it's not any one thing you do to get or to get to market your restaurant right? It's a series of little moves when it comes to marketing. I'll remind you what I wrote about in my book, the Restaurant Marketing Mindset, I think about marketing as a triangle.
[00:15:16] Speaker C: Right?
[00:15:17] Speaker A: Triangle is stable. It's compact, right? It's. It's all encompassing. It's enclosed within itself. The reason I think about a triangle is because there are three sides. I think there are really only three things you need to do to successfully market your restaurant. Number one, you have to focus on customer acquisition. I call that attraction, right? What do you do to. To get attention, build trust, and ultimately convince people to come in and try you as opposed to any of the other restaurants they already know and love, right? So attraction has to do with customer acquisition, retention, right? What do you do to retain your customers? People come in, they try you, okay, they had a good meal. What next? What are you doing to actively get them to come back and to dine with you with greater frequency? And then the last one really has to do with word of mouth. That's the third part of this marketing triangle. Word of mouth. To me, I call evangelism, right?
A restaurant grows the same way that a church grows, right? And I always say, this church doesn't grow because the pastor walks through town and shakes enough hands and convinces people to come in, right? A pastor stands in the pulpit, right? Stands up, delivers the sermon. And the people in the congregation are moved. And some of them are so moved that they can't help but talk about it, right? And they tell somebody about, hey, you know, I heard this really good, this beautiful thing in church. And somebody says, oh, wow, that sounds really great, maybe I'll come next Sunday. And that's how church grows from 100 to 500 to 1,000 to 10,000, to millions of people. Because little by little, people are moved. And they can't help but talk about what they heard, talk about what was said. All right, so the three sides to the marketing triangle. Customer acquisition, customer retention, and evangelism. What do you do to get people in the front door? What do you do to get them to come back? And what do you do to get them to go out and evangelize for you to go spread the word about what you're doing? The thing is, you need a plan for each of those three things. And when I put together marketing plans for clients and when I work with the members of my P3 mastermind, we basically put together a three page marketing plan. It's focused on all those things, right? What are you doing to get people in the front door? What do you do to get people back? What do you do to get people talking? But then we have to do one additional layer of organization. And that really has to do with putting together a marketing calendar. So the marketing calendar template, and I'll remind you, you just email me chipclose.com and I will send you my template. It's all built for 2025. You'll find there are 365 rows, right? And about a dozen columns. Each of the columns tracks a different marketing channel.
[00:17:39] Speaker C: Right?
[00:17:40] Speaker A: So email and in store collateral and direct mailers and meta ads and Google search ads and on and on. On. Each column is a different, is a different channel, a different tool available to you. And every row in the calendar, 1 through 365, as you guessed it, it's every day of the year. The thing is, when you've done your operations planning, right, and you look at your highs and your lows, the first thing you're going to look at is say, okay, how can I dull the lows? How do I make it so that the low isn't as low as it has been in the past? Can I run a promotion? Can I do, can I run ads? Can I, is there something I can do that would boost our revenue at that all important time at the time when it dips down?
[00:18:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:18:20] Speaker A: Likewise, you're going to look at your high points. You're going to say, okay, what can we do here that can bleed over into the low points?
[00:18:26] Speaker C: Right?
[00:18:26] Speaker A: Just like the example I used talking about Gotham and the holiday brunches and using that surge, the surge of people that we had coming in to get people back in January, February, March, when we most needed it.
[00:18:37] Speaker C: Right.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: It's very crucial to get yourself organized as many columns as you have channels. So if you do SMS texting and you do email and you do Google search ads and you do Instagram ads and Facebook ads and TikTok ads and direct mailers and on and on. All of those different columns are a separate channel. And you're going to talk about what you're going to do on when, right? So if you're going to send an email, when are you going to send, literally what days are you going to send them? Start mapping them out.
[00:19:05] Speaker C: Right.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: When I map out my marketing calendar, I usually recommend that people go and plop all the major holidays on there. Now if you download mine, you'll see that all the major holidays are already on there. So you know where they are.
[00:19:16] Speaker C: Right.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: If there are additional holidays, meaning something specific for your town, I think like a Patriot Day, right? Patriots Day in Boston, most other cities don't celebrate it, but it's a big deal in Boston, right? A lot of people are around the downtown area that if I had a restaurant in downtown Boston, I would probably do something for Patriot Day. That's a day when people are around and looking to eat. So you're going to add to this thing, right? If you do a restaurant week in your town, you're going to add that to there, right? That's just going to, hey, that. We run that for these two weeks or whatever it is, whatever sort of promotions, whatever things you do should go on there, right? Just start with your holidays, what you do. For example, I'll use the example of Gotham, right? So at Gotham, we were promoting Christmas Eve, we were promoting New Year's Eve, right? During the holiday season, we had to promote those holiday brunches. We were promoting gift card sales, we were promoting our line of chocolates, we were promoting our pantry items. We would do these gift boxes called Gotham Selections. It was like a gift box of oils and spices and chocolates and all kinds of really beautiful things, right? And there were beautiful self contained gift boxes that we sold, right? There was a lot to promote, there was a lot to talk about. So I had to really carefully map out our marketing channels and say, okay, in email, when are we going to talk about all these things? How are we going to talk about them? Because I didn't want to just send a newsletter with all of this stuff, right?
Click here to book for Christmas Eve. Click here to book for New Year's Eve. Click here to buy your chocolates. Click here to buy your gift cards. Also, don't forget about our gift boxes. On and on. No, each email needed, each promotion. Each thing we had to talk about needed a separate email. So I had to get myself organized. So I wasn't sending emails every day or twice a day. Now there came a time, right, let's say the 15th to the 20th, where we were sending an email every day. Well, we had lots of stuff to talk about. Last minute Christmas Eve reservations, last minute gift cards, and on and on, right? You got to get yourself organized. Likewise, if Easter is big for you, if Mother's Day is big for you, fine. If St. Patty's Day is a big deal for you, if New Year's Eve, whatever it is, plop them on the calendar. So, you know, oh man, there's a lot to talk about between Thanksgiving and New Year's, for example, at Gotham, that was the case, there was a lot to talk about and we had to be really judicious about how we use certain channels for example, right? The example I'm using is email, right? We couldn't send so so many emails. We had to be really clear with, with what we were sending and when, because guess what? We also had to fill like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, like other days during the month of December. So we had to promote other things, not just the special stuff we were trying to promote. First thing you do, when you get your marketing calendars, plop all the the holidays, and then you work backwards from there, you say, okay, what am I? Okay, am I going to need to promote Restaurant week? Am I going have to promote Patriots Day? Am I going to have to promote Memorial Day or, or Mother's Day or any of the other things that are a big deal at your restaurant?
[00:22:11] Speaker C: Right?
[00:22:12] Speaker A: The next thing you do then is you start mapping out your low points, right? Just highlight them and say, okay, this month and this month, for most people, it's like two months out of the year, maybe three months out of the year, maybe not altogether. Right Again, for Gotham, it was like the six weeks after the new year, and then it was like the six weeks before Labor Day. Those were our really bad times. It all added up to three months of sort of like low sales. That's where we needed love. And so we said, okay, if we're going to do something, it's going to have to be here. There's no reason to just run wine dinners or run promotions every time, you know, all year round. Let's focus them on the times when we really could use that additional revenue. And it helped. It focused all of our efforts when we did that, that. So the first thing you do is map out the holidays. Second thing you do is map out the low points. And what you do is you start looking at all the marketing channels that are available to you. And I hope what you'll see is that you have so much to work with, right? You are not without agency. There's a lot of different strings, a lot of different levers you can pull to properly market your restaurant.
[00:23:17] Speaker C: Right?
[00:23:18] Speaker A: SEO is a channel. SEM, Search engine monetization is a channel. Meaning Google search, ad ads, right? Direct mailers are a channel. Facebook, Instagram, organic posting, that's a channel. The paid piece of social media is a channel. TikTok, both organic and paid is a channel. YouTube, both organic and paid as a channel. Text messaging, email, different channels in store collateral check inserts, postcards, business cards, flyers. You know, all of these are different channels available to you, right? Scripts, Scripts for your servers, your service are the most contact with people. So I would build scripts at certain points during the year. So we would always do this. We've talked about gift cards before. There would be a script for gift cards between Thanksgiving and New Year's.
[00:24:03] Speaker C: Right?
[00:24:03] Speaker A: That was part of my marketing channel. My servers were a marketing channel and I had to make sure we knew what the promotion was and what their basic script was. Of course they could make it their own. We want them to make it their own. But we had a basic script so that they knew what we wanted them to do. They knew when, during the steps of service they were to talk about these certain things.
[00:24:24] Speaker C: Right?
[00:24:24] Speaker A: Same thing when we were selling chocolates, for example, when we were doing. And this is for every restaurant that I've run marketing for. You need to do the same thing. You need to look at all the channels you have available to you so you don't just start doing things willy nilly so you can be really focused and intentional about what you do. I think when you get this download, when you get this marketing calendar, you will see, your eyes will open. At least I hope it will, because it's a way to get yourself organized so it doesn't feel like, like overwhelming anymore. Like, I don't know, I mean, there's so much stuff we could do. I just don't know what works. Any of it can work, but it's got to be coordinated and it's got to be intentional. How are you using all of the channels and really understanding that all the channels work in concert with each other? So that's what I wanted to talk to you about today. You got to get yourself organized operationally. That's going to help you with your marketing, with what you do, when you do it, how you do it.
It beats discounting, it beats the cheap promotions and all of that, right?
This will help you think more creatively and do cooler things, I promise. Rather than just running a, you know, half price wine Wednesdays or taco Tuesdays or, you know, whatever it is. I think we're better than that. I think you're better than that. I think you know you're better than that. That's what I want to talk about. Getting yourself organized for 2025. Listen, if I haven't said it yet, let me say it now. Happy New Year. This year is going to be great. I know, because 2024 was awful. It was a very difficult year. It's not just you, it's all of us. It was a very difficult year. And if you're listening to this and it wasn't that difficult for you. Congratulations. I promise you, you are the outlier. You are in the minority. It was a very difficult year and I think, you know, let's turn the page on it. 2025 is going to be excellent. But in order to make it excellent, you have to get yourself organized. You have to be deliberate about what you're doing, why you're doing, and how you do all of those things. You can do it. I can do it. I'm here twice a week. We're going to help you do it better, more effectively, more efficiently. I appreciate you guys being here. One final reminder, please. If you do one thing for me, one thing, if you get any sort of value from here, leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcast podcast. Five stars. And just let people know what you get out of the show, what you like about it, how it's helped you. Just let other people know why they should tune in. And again, the final reminder, if you want a copy of my 2025 marketing calendar template, I will give it to you absolutely free. But you have to send me a personal email. Chip close.com c-h I p k l o s e.com thank you very much again. Happy New Year and I will see you next time.
