Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We talk a lot about marketing. Certainly on this show, every single week we dedicate an entire episode to it. And I think we spent a lot of time on tactics, on specifically solving the problems that exist now, how to market in the year 2026. But I want to take you back and I want to talk about the only two things you actually need to do when it comes to marketing your restaurant. I want to fly all the way up, right and get a bird's eye view of your business. And I want to build a really strong foundation of only two things you need to do. That's what we're gonna talk about on today's episode of Restaurant Strategy.
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.
Foreign.
Thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is the Restaurant Strategy podcast. We put out two episodes every single week. Operations on Mondays, marketing on Thursdays. As you know, I wrote a book called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. I run a membership site called Restaurant Foundations. I give talks all over the world and I run a group coaching program. It's called the P3 mastermind where I work with independent restaurant owners and operators, people who are looking to grow but struggle with profitability. If that sounds like you, if you are stuck in single digit profits and you're ready for 15, 20% or more than, set up a call. Restaurantstrategypodcast.com Schedule There is no pressure. We bring on about 10 to 15 new members every single month. It's an incredible community. If not you, it will be someone else. But my question is, why not you? If you are ready to make a consistent predictable 20% to the bottom line and you figure out what you're talk top line is and you do the math in your head and you figure out what 20 would mean in your bank account, meaning in your personal checking account this year. That's the power of the work we do. RestaurantStrategyPodcast.com Schedule grab time on the calendar. You'll chat with me or someone from my team, we'll ask you some questions, you'll ask us some questions and let's see if you're a good fit again. Restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule and yes, that link is in the show notes.
Avi, 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. Yeah.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: 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 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?
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.
[00:03:06] 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.
Now, on today's episode, I told you we're gonna cover two things. The only things you really need to worry about when you're marketing your restaurant all the way back on episode one, I defined marketing. I gave you a definition for marketing.
We talk about it from time to time. I don't think I talk about it as much as I probably should. So we're gonna do that. I'm gonna give you my definition for marketing, and I'm gonna show you a framework for marketing with greater specificity and greater intentionality. And I've talked about this over the years, but it dawns on me that a bunch of you are new to the show, that you haven't been listening for the last four and a half years. And I'm glad you finally found your way here. Glad you found us. Let's talk about marketing, how we market our restaurants better. First of all, the thing that drives me crazy, the reason I really started this show, is because I kept having conversations over and over and over with restaurant owners. And I would say, okay, right? They. They would need my help. They. They'd bring me in for a meeting to talk about their marketing, to help. Talk about helping them fix their marketing. And I would say, okay, so tell me about your marketing.
And one of two things seem to always happen. Number one, they said, oh, okay, so we post four times a week to Instagram, five times a week to Facebook. We do stories, we do reels, we blah, blah, blah. They tell me about their social media. And social media is not marketing. Social media is a tool available to the marketer, but not even closely.
The most the most powerful tool.
It works and it's important and we need a presence on social media. But it is not the most effective or the most powerful tool we'll get into what is.
So when I ask this question, tell me about your marketing. Usually I would get somebody, say, saying, talking to me all about their, their social media. Or they would say, well, we don't do marketing because we're not some big company. We don't really have a budget. That's why we're bringing you in to do the marketing. Right?
Both of those are wrong. Number one, social media is not marketing. Number two, you can't afford to not do marketing. So let's get really clear. If you sell something to other human beings, you must do marketing. You have to figure out which human beings you can sell to, and then you've got to figure out how to convince those human human beings to buy from you instead of someone else. That, in a nutshell, is marketing. In fact, when I talk about my definition for marketing, and this is the first big thing I want you to get from me today. What is marketing? It's really defined by three questions. What's your product? Who is that product for? And how do you reach them?
Understanding what you sell, who is most apt to buy that, that, that product, that experience, that service, and then how you tell them, how you raise awareness, how you convince them to take, you want them to take, to become a customer, to place an order online, to make a reservation.
So what is marketing? It's defined by those three questions. What's the product? Who is it for? How do you reach them?
Once you answer those questions, and you have to answer those questions, once you answer those questions, then we can get more intentional with what we do, when we do it, how we do it. But the. But by answering the definition questions, that's your why, right? Too often, too often restaurants fail because they just never answer those questions. They just say, well, I'm going to create really good food and people are going to love it and they're going to come and pay for it. But that's not necessarily true, especially now. And this doesn't matter what kind of market you're in. Big city, small town, it doesn't matter. People everywhere have more options than they've ever had before in the history of the world. Right? Markets are saturated.
Markets are saturated. There are too many good options out there. You can't just say, we're going to create something great. And then of course, people will come in because it's great.
Number one, they don't know. It's great if they've never tried it, right?
You got to convince them to come try it. And then even if they come in and they try it and they say, man, that was great, unfortunately, there are so many other places out there that are also great.
So the system is broken. If that's your plan for success, if that's your marketing plan, create good food, cool vibe, great service, take care of people, and of course they'll come back. You are sunk. You're sunk. From the beginning, anybody that's been listening to the show for any period of time knows that that's sort of how I feel.
We need to be more intentional about what we do and how we do it. So again, those three questions, what's the product? Who is it for? How do we reach them? That's the definition for marketing. That's how you define your market. That's how you define how you're going to begin selling. That one really important point I want to make here, right? Those three questions. Tucked in the middle there is the guest, the consumer, the customer.
What's the product? Who is it for?
Literally the customer. Our guests are at the heart of our definition for marketing. Two ways to market, right? Either, either you create a product and then go try and find customers, or you do it in reverse. You go look for a bunch of customers who need something and you create a product for those people.
Too often in the restaurant industry we do the former. We create a product and then spend all our energy trying to go get customers, trying to go find customers, raise awareness with customers, convince customers to come try us.
But we're out of the way. We're not the food they're used to eating.
We're asking them to switch from something they already have to ours. It is a losing proposition.
That's why so many restaurants fail in the first couple of years, because they get enough attention, they get enough customers to just barely get by.
But after two, three, four, five years, it's exhausting and it is exhausting.
There's a better way of existing and I want to show you how to do it. You begin by looking for a need. A market is a group of people or a neighborhood a part of the world.
That's how you identify a market. You look for someone who needs something and then you go create the thing they need.
That's the what's the product and who is it for? It's the first two questions in our three part definition for marketing. What's the product, who is it for?
Meaning who needs something?
Who has a problem that we're uniquely qualified to solve? You figure out who's got a problem, you go solve that problem, and then how do you reach them? That's the thing that changes all the time, right? So the first two really never change. What's the product? Who is it for?
We opened a steakhouse in this town. Steakhouse is for people who want steak or for people who want to celebrate or for people who want to entertain clients. Right? The who it's for is pretty well defined.
The service, the product, the experience that you're providing to solve their pain point will not change. You're not going to change to a seafood concept and then a Mexican concept and then a sushi concept. You're not. You opened a steakhouse. You open a steakhouse to solve a certain problem for a certain kind of people or a certain group of people, and then how do you reach them? That's the thing that will change all the time, because tactics change, channels change, the world changes.
The way we reached people 20 years ago is wildly different than the way we do today.
And the way we reach people seven years ago is wildly different than the way we reach them today.
So tactics are always changing.
What doesn't change is the problem you're solving and the way you solve it.
Then you just have to simply tell people that you're the solution to the problem. And again, two ways to market. Either you come up with a product and then go try to find customers, right? Go convince people to get your product, or you look for a group of customers, potential customers that need something, and then you create a product for them, you solve their problem. Then if you do that, which is what all the best companies in the world do, not just the best restaurants, but the rest, the best companies in the world, they look for a problem and then solve the problem. Then simply all you gotta do is tap people on the shoulder and say, hey, you know that problem you have? Yeah, I saw that you had that problem. I got a solution for you. Come check it out. Come try it out.
That's how you begin fixing your marketing. It's why most restaurants fail, because they don't do that. Really. This is a conversation in product, market fit, and then in positioning, understanding what do the people in the market already have, what dining options are already there, for example, because then you got to come in, you got to figure out how you fit within that market.
And then this idea of positioning, how you stand out, how you differentiate yourself, basically what I'm asking you to come up with is a reason for you to exist.
There's already four bagel places on a block. Why are you going to open a fifth?
There are already four bagel places in this town.
Maybe you go the next town over. I don't know. Maybe in that everybody in that town comes here simply because there's nothing in that town.
You got to understand. Or if you insist on opening a bagel shop, you got to figure out what you do. In my town, I live in a small little suburb outside of New York City, we've got two bagel shops right in town, and they're different.
One's got a grill, the other one doesn't, right?
Really? One has a hood, one doesn't.
So one does breakfast sandwiches. And they sort of excel at that, right? Bacon, egg and cheese, sausage, egg and cheese, those kind of breakfast sandwiches. And the other one's pretty much bagels and cream cheese, bagels and lox, bagel and butter, and buying bagels by the dozen. They're differentiated. That's why they're both able to succeed and coexist together.
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So lots of restaurants can succeed side by side. That's why you see so many restaurants all lined up together, right? The same thing with car dealerships. That's why all the car dealerships are all together, because they know that people are out shopping for cars. They want to be where everyone's shopping. So they'll come and try this car, this car, this car. Even though there's more competition, they know they get more customers because people will come to that area because they know there are lots of options out there for them to shop for cars. It's the same thing with restaurants. It's the same thing with bars. Same thing with gas stations. You look around the world, it's counterintuitive why you'd put yourself next to more competition, but there's a relationship between Competition and collaboration. You simply need.
You simply need to differentiate yourself.
You rarely see two Toyota dealerships next to each other, but you got Toyota and Honda and Nissan and Hyundai and Subaru. You'll see that all next to each other. Or you'll see Lexus and BMW and Mercedes.
So you need to do the same thing. You need to differentiate yourself. If you're going to enter a market, you've got to understand why you deserve to belong in that market.
Once you figure that out, then you get to the good stuff. So then how do we market with greater intention?
My answer to that is that we start with the end in mind.
Rather than talking about all the stuff you do, talk about all the things you need to accomplish.
So I talk about this in my book, right, the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. I've talked about it on here before. You can go out and get it anywhere. You get books. You can go to therestaurantmarketingmindset.com, you can go to Barnes and Noble, you can go to Amazon. Of course, you can go get my book. I love that book. I'm very proud of the content in that book. But in that book I talk about something called the triangle principle. Triangle principle simply says there are really only three things we need to do to successfully market a restaurant.
The three sides of the triangle are attraction, retention, and evangelism.
You got to get them in, you got to get them back, and you got to get them talking. Really, we're talking about customer acquisition, customer retention, and word of mouth.
So rather than talking about all the things you're doing, let's talk about what you actually need to happen in order to be successful. We need to acquire new customers.
How do we do that? The triangle principle. And suggests, and I'm suggesting here to you today to be intentional, right? I always talk about creating a three page marketing plan. Attraction, retention and evangelism. Three pieces of paper.
Write attraction on the top of the first one, retention on the top of the second one, and evangelism on top of the third.
What do you need to do in order to acquire new customers? There are a whole bunch of things you can do.
You can run Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram ads. You can do direct mailers. You can do charity nights with the local little leagues. You can do street fairs.
You can put little flyers in people's windshield. Although that drives a lot of people crazy. So I don't know that I'd recommend that.
But you get my point. There are a lot of things you can do to raise awareness for your brand. Right. You can put billboards up. You could rent ad space on bus stops, on benches. There's a lot of stuff you could do.
But you have to understand what you're trying to accomplish.
We talk about this in the Mastermind I run all the time. We talk about it all the time, about how we start with the end in mind. What do you want to happen? What are you going to do to make that thing happen?
That's a system and a goal. The goal is what you want to happen. The system is what you're going to do to make that happen.
And then we simply measure it so you can tell me what worked and what didn't work.
That's how we can really get into talking about roi. Return on investment.
What are you investing?
What is that returning? What is happening?
That's if you're focused on the goal. We want to acquire new customers. We're going to send a direct mailer out. We spent $1,000 on postcards and postage to send direct mailers out to all these people. In this zip code, you put some offer, it says, bring this back on your next meal and get 20% off. Well, then every time somebody comes in with that mail or you say, hey, I got this in the mail, I get 20% off. Absolutely. Print out the check. Staple that thing to the check and measure the promo cost and the net sales. Right. Sales net of the promo.
So how much did you spend on the mailers? How much did you spend on the promotional. Right. The discount.
And then how many total sales did you generate? You subtract your investment from the return, and that's how you get your return on investment. Your net.
It generated net X number of dollars.
Most restaurant owners I talk with don't do that.
They don't think in terms of the result, and so they don't measure the efforts.
But you're on a hamster wheel. You're just spending money rather than investing money.
So I've talked about this before, right? People say, how much should I be spending on my. On my marketing every month? You shouldn't be spending anything. You should be investing a certain number, and there isn't a specific number. When people say 4%, it's BS what you really care about is the return.
I spend $1,000 on this direct mail campaign, and it generated roughly $7,500 in net sales.
That's a successful marketing campaign. Once you get it to 4 to 1 or 5 to 1, meaning return to investment, then you know it works. Then you can just spend More if you know you spend $1,000 to generate 7,500.
Well, if you spend $2,000, you'll generate 15,000. It stands to reason. That's what I care about. When you measure the effort and the return, then you'll be able to tell if the. If the effort, if the action worked.
The only way to tell if it were. The only way to tell if it worked is to say, what did you want to happen?
This is what I want it to happen. This is what I did to make it happen.
Did it happen or did it not happen?
If you want to change your marketing, you do this.
You focus on those three questions, right? What's your definition for marketing?
Mine are those three questions.
What's the product? Who is it for? How do you reach them?
Then you'll understand how you fit within your market.
The next piece then you do is you adopt this marketing triangle, this triangle principle that there are three things you need to accomplish. There are specific things you do to accomplish each of those goals.
It's multiple things can't just be one way. You have to have multiple ways that you accomplish each of those goals.
And when you figure out what you're doing, you measure the results as much as humanly possible.
If stuff works, you double down. If it doesn't work, you scrap it, figure out something else.
If you do that, your marketing will change basically overnight because you will no longer be spending. You will only be investing. You will be investing in the things that you know you can measure, and you'll know within a month or two whether the effort worked or not.
You change your marketing by understanding that you exist for a reason or you must have a reason for your existence.
If not, you don't need to be here.
If not, you don't need to exist.
So you need a reason to exist, and you need that to be very clearly articulated. You need your market to understand why you're there.
And then the other piece is that you need to be really intentional about what you do and how you do it, about what you're trying to accomplish.
Again, what am I trying to accomplish? What do I want to make happen? What am I going to do to make that happen?
Then you measure it. Did it happen or did it not happen?
Those two pieces will fundamentally shift your marketing overnight. So people ask me, what can I do? What can I do to fix my marketing? That's what you can do to fix your marketing. And in fact, it's not. In fact, it's not a fix. It's a total overhaul.
And Then you're going to look at some of the stuff you're going to do, that you're doing. You're going to go, I don't know if that works. I don't know what that's supposed to accomplish.
All you need to do is get new people in the door, need to get those people back and back with greater frequency. And you need all of those people to rave about their experience, to leave reviews, to take pictures, to post those pictures and videos, and to text their friends and tell everybody about the experience they had.
And there are specific things you do to make those things happen.
So you begin by starting at the end and saying, what do I want to happen?
And then you go back and say, what am I going to do to make that happen? And then you measure it. Did it happen or did it not happen?
That's it. That will single handedly shift your business. I talk about that a lot in the book. Again, the link is in the show notes therestaurantmarketingmindset.com in case you don't want to use that link, just put that in there. You can get it or you can go to Amazon and get it. I'm really proud of the book and I think you're going to get a lot out of the book. Do me a favor, don't buy one copy, buy two, three, four. And give them out to other people in your organization. When you read it together, when you go through it, you'll start shifting your views together. I love that book. I appreciate you being here. I appreciate the time you give me, the time you give your business. Applaud yourself for leveling up. If you want to change your marketing, this is how you do it. You, you come up with a product market fit, you understand why you exist or why you need to exist in the market. And then you bring greater intentionality to everything you do and you measure it so you know whether you made the thing happen or whether you didn't make the thing happen.
