How to Market in Reverse

Speaker 0 00:00:01 So I'm gonna guess that you are doing your marketing the wrong way. You're doing your wrong way because you're working forward instead of working in reverse. Marketing only works when done in reverse. You've gotta start with the end in mind, figure out what you wanna accomplish, and then build a plan, a strategy to get you there. And too often when I ask people, right, I ask operators, Chuck, uh, talk to me about your marketing. They tell me about all the stuff they do. And while stuff is great, it often, uh, ignores or I see a lot of operators ignoring the most important piece, which is to figure out what are you trying to achieve. So in today's episode, I'm gonna show you how to market in reverse, which is the right way to do it all today on restaurant strategy, don't go anywhere. Speaker 1 00:00:46 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. Speaker 0 00:01:17 Hey, everyone, my name is Chip Clo, and this is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated solely to helping you building a more profitable restaurant. We cover marketing, we cover operations, we cover everything in between each week. I leveraged my 20 plus years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and that more sustainable business. I also work directly with operators all over the world through my P three mastermind program. What are the three Ps they stand for? Profit, process and progress. So if you've got a busy restaurant that struggle to generate consistent, predictable, 20% profits month after month, then set up a free 30 minute strategy session. We'll get to learn more about you and your restaurant. You'll get to learn more about the program, ask questions about the program to see if you're a good fit for the program. To get started, visit restaurant strategy podcast.com/schedule. Speaker 0 00:02:06 As always, you will find that link in the show notes. Now, have you read the 2023 State of the Restaurant industry report from the National Restaurant Association. There's a lot to digest in that 41 page paper, but that's where you can lean on, spot on, spot on was the, uh, presenting sponsor of that report as a top rated restaurant technology company. Spot on leads from the front. Not only are they helping restaurant operators make sense of the changing landscape, but they're working directly with restaurants to overcome challenges with innovative solutions. Their handhelds in QR ordering can help, uh, you turn more tables while actually creating a better guest experience. And on the backend, their labor management tools can save up to 20 hours per week on tasks like scheduling, payroll and tip distribution. And when it comes to rising costs, spot ons reporting gives you the real-time data you need to make informed decisions about your menu, your employees in your operations. Speaker 0 00:03:01 Best of all spot ons, direct online ordering, puts you in control of your takeout and delivery operation. Without the third party commissions, they've got all these tools in one integrated system backed by a customer support team that actually answers the phone. Learn more by visiting spot on.com/chip. You will find that link also in the show notes. Now, today we're talking about marketing, and I said at the top right, your marketing is probably broken. And I think that's true for 90% of the operators out there. Certainly not all, but the majority, the only way to do marketing, and the the only way to, to successfully market your restaurant is to do it in reverse. Rather than talking about all the stuff you do, I want you to think about all the stuff you want to happen. You figure out what you want to happen, and then you put a plan into place to help you achieve that. Speaker 0 00:03:48 That's what a strategy, uh, that's what a strategy is. A strategy is, is a plan, a blueprint for achieving your goals. Why? The name of this show is Restaurant Strategy. So today we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about how you do it, and I'm gonna help you get organized so you can do this more successfully, more effectively. So, loyal listeners of the show will know that I often talk about my marketing triangle, something I call the triangle principle. There are three sides to a triangle. I think there are three sides to successfully marketing any restaurant. The three sides are attraction, retention, and evangelism, right? We gotta get people in, get people back, get people talking for the life of me, as long as I've been doing this, it's the only thing that matters. And yes, we can talk about user, uh, you know, user interface and, and, and user design and, and website and seo. Speaker 0 00:04:36 We could talk about, uh, open rates and click rates and, and finding really, uh, you know, attractive subject lines and, and the right thing to post on social media so that we, we game the algorithm. We can talk about all of that. But seo, uh, review, uh, re reputation management, uh, your website, your blog, your, your email strategy, your social media, all of those are just tools available to the marketer. And, and for those who have been following the show for a while, you know, I say this a lot, those are not marketing, right? Social media is not marketing. Your website is not marketing. It is a tool available to you, the marketer. Marketing really is about finding a market, figuring out who has a problem that you're uniquely qualified to solve. I've said this before, uh, on this show, I say this all the time. Speaker 0 00:05:22 Uh, when I'm on stages in front of hundreds of restaurant owners and operators, there are two ways to market. Either you come up with a product and then go try to find customers for that product. That's mostly what we do. Or the more successful way to do it is to find a market, an audience who has a problem that you're uniquely qualified to solve. If you know your town, your market, your neighborhood, if you know your people, right, your target audience, you, you should know who they are and what they need, what they struggle with. And then your business is just about solving a specific need for those people. That is true for restaurants. That's true for, uh, locksmiths. That's true for me as a restaurant coach. I, I feel like I understand what people struggle with, what restaurant owners struggle with, or I figure out something that they struggle with, that I'm uniquely qualified to solve. Speaker 0 00:06:10 With all of my, uh, time spent in this industry, there's certain things that I figured out. And so that's who I help me when the, the product I offer my coaching, it's a specific audience with a specific problem that I'm uniquely qualified to solve. It's true for, again, for my business. It's true for locksmiths, it's true for a taxi driver, and it's true for your restaurant, whether you've realized it or not. So when we talk about marketing, remember there's two ways to market. Either we come up with a product and then go try to find some, uh, customers, or we figure out a customer base, we figure out people who have a problem, and then we craft a solution. We create a product that will solve their problems. That the latter way is by far the much, uh, more successful route. And that's what you have to do. Speaker 0 00:06:51 That's what the marketing triangle, the mar, the, the just triangle principle that I developed a couple years ago. That's what it's all about. Three sides of the triangle. Attraction, retention, and evangelism. You gotta find a way to get people in right to, to raise awareness, to convince them to come join you for the first time. And then you need to find a way to get them back and to get them to, to come back in with greater frequency. And then finally, you gotta get them to spread the word about who you are. That's the way to market. And, and, and again, like I said at the beginning, you gotta market in reverse. We're gonna talk about that in just a second. But I wanna dig a little bit deeper on this marketing, uh, triangle. This triangle principle that I've talked about for, uh, that I've talked about for a couple of years now. Speaker 0 00:07:30 Attraction, retention, and evangelism. Get 'em in, get 'em back, get 'em talking. But here's the secret to the marketing, uh, triangle. You do it in reverse. Everyone loves to focus on, uh, getting new people in the door. But your retention rate, your conversion rate of, of turning a first time diner into a regular is pretty low. When you actually look at the data, it's somewhere between like 10 and 15%. Only 10 or 15% of your people will ever come back a second time. And obviously an even smaller percentage will come back five or 10 times over their life. So let's be really clear, we wanna start with the people who are already there, because the people that are already there already, uh, discovered you, learned about you, uh, you built trust with those people enough so that they decided to come join you. So they're already there. Speaker 0 00:08:20 Attraction, retention, and evangelism, that's the triangle. And we do it in reverse order. That's the secret. We start with evangelism because the people that are already there, we gotta make sure they have such a phenomenal time that they can't help but talk about it. They can't help but text their friends, text their moms, send pictures, take pictures, take videos, post those videos online, and go leave a review. Right? Then, those people that had such a great time that they left your reviews, they took pictures, they posted pictures, we gotta make sure they come back. Then if you get your, if you, if you guys know Jim Collins, Jim Collins wrote a book called Good to Great, uh, it was back in 2001. It's, it's like, um, it's like a bible for a lot of business owners. It is a bible of sorts for me, cuz the ideas in there are so profound. Speaker 0 00:09:03 But one of the big ideas that he introduced to the business world, uh, and we are business owners, one of the biggest things he introduced to the business world is this idea of the flywheel, right? So the flywheel is a device where it's two chambers, right? It's an outside, uh, wheel and it spins the inside wheel. So you, you, you take a great deal of effort to spin the outside wheel. The outside wheel eventually gets the inside wheel going, and once there's enough momentum cent, uh, centri force just keeps it going. And that inner wheel just spins and spins and spins and spins and spins. There's very little you have to do to keep that inner wheel spinning. So what we want to do is come up, we want to build a flywheel. So if we already have people coming in, let's make sure the people that are already coming in, the people that are already your customers, uh, know how to go talk about you, go spread the word about you, understand the shorthand, the vocabulary with which to speak about you. Speaker 0 00:09:53 And the next thing is we gotta make sure they come back. So if you put a system into place to make it for making sure that they come back quickly and frequently, well then it doesn't matter. Every new person you drop into the top of the flywheel, your flywheel's already working, they're already gonna come back, they're already gonna talk about you. So every new person, but if you haven't figured out the retention and evangelism piece, you're gonna be spending a lot of time, effort, and money on the first piece. This attraction piece. Here's the thing, here's the secret. The reason we put it last is that attraction is the most complicated, the hardest to do and the most expensive piece of this triangle. People coming in who already wanna have a great time, making sure they have a great time enough so that they go leave a review, that they go take pictures and videos and post them, that they go spread the good word about your brand. Speaker 0 00:10:41 That's not all that difficult to do. You already did the hard part of, uh, trying to raise their awareness, build trust, and convince them to come in. Again, it's really hard to raise awareness. It's really hard to, um, to, to get them excited and, and to, you know, to spark their curiosity and, and, and have them do research and build trust enough to have them come join you. That's that attraction piece. Much easier to make sure the current people are having a great time, that the current people know that they come back. There are all different tools that we can use to try to achieve these goals, but like I said, we work in reverse by looking at the goals we're trying to achieve. So we focus on evangelism, then retention, finally attraction because it's the most complicated, the hardest to do and the most expensive. Speaker 0 00:11:26 But again, when we do this, when we get into this marketing triangle, this triangle principle I talk about, right, what we can do is we look at the results, we look at what we want to happen and we build a plan for achieving that goal. That's where I wanna spend the rest of our time talking on today's episode in just a second after word from another one of our sponsors. Now today's episode of Restaurant Strategy is also brought to you by seven shifts. Seven shifts is a team management platform built specifically for restaurants. Great restaurants are built by great teams and seven shifts is your secret weapon to better understand your restaurant, to hit labor targets and to keep your entire team connected with drag and drop scheduling in-app communication, task management, tip management and more. It makes restaurant work a whole lot easier. From back of house to front of house franchise owners and larger corporate teams, seven shifts has benefits at every single level. Speaker 0 00:12:18 Plus it integrates with the other systems your restaurant already uses, like POS and payroll. Turn your team into your competitive advantage. Restaurant strategy podcast listeners get three months absolutely free. Get started at seven shifts.com/restaurant strategy. That's the number seven s h i fts.com/restaurant strategy to get three months free and join over 30,000 restaurants using seven shifts today. As always, you will find that link in the show notes. Now, in today's episode, we're talking about how you should market in reverse you market in reverse by figuring out what you want to happen and build a plan for making that thing happen or those things happen. I introduced you to something I call the marketing, uh, uh, the marketing triangle, attraction, retention, and evangelism. We gotta get people in, gotta get people back, gotta get people talking. The secret of course, is that we work that in reverse. Speaker 0 00:13:11 The people that are already there love you, found you, trust you, uh, certainly trust you enough to decide to spend their hard-earned money with you. So now just get them talking. Make sure they have such a phenomenal time and good food and good service is not enough. Make sure they have a phenomenal time and they know how to spread the word about you and make sure they come back. Make sure they know they're welcome back. Make it easy for them to come back. Don't trust that they had a great meal, right? Had good food, had good service, and they will come back. I don't trust anything. I am a marketer in the year 2023. I say this to rooms filled with operators all the time. I like to put my thumb on the scale, put my thumb on the scale cuz I don't trust anything. Speaker 0 00:13:51 I don't trust that they had such a good time that they will come back. I want to do specific things that will get them back. We can certainly talk about all those tactics, but you just have to make sure, uh, make sure you're committed to it. Then, then finally we make sure we find a way to raise awareness. We, we build trust with new, uh, prospective new customers and we find good ways to convince them to come join us again. It's by far the hardest part to do. So if you've got 50 covers coming in every night, a hundred covers, 200 covers coming in every night, you have largely figured out the hard part, but I'm guessing you're not focusing enough on the retention piece and the evangelism piece because the people that love you should know that they can come back, that they should come back and ways to come back and, and that you want them back and they should know how to go spread the word about you. Speaker 0 00:14:38 So again, attraction, retention, and evangelism. And like I said at the very top of the show, the way to market successfully is to do it in reverse. You have to figure out what you want to happen and then you gotta put a plan into place to achieve that goal. We've talked about systems and goals before, right? We set a goal, we put a system into place to help us achieve that goal. A system is just a repeatable set of actions. When you put a system into place, you can then track and measure your efforts. And this is what we don't do enough, we don't do enough of in our industry. We do stuff and we never, we never watch, we never follow to see if it actually works. We either trust that it works or or don't believe it's gonna work or, or I don't know, or we just go into the next thing. Speaker 0 00:15:20 But if you want a specific thing to happen, then you need to do a specific set of things to make sure that that thing happens. So for example, when we talk about evangelism, uh, an easy piece is reputation management. We know that Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google, Facebook, uh, reviews, all of these are very powerful, not just because of the social commentary piece of it, the the trust factor, but also from an SEO perspective. The more five star reviews you get, the higher your rating, right? Google will show it to more people. If you're under five stars, you're not getting shown to anybody, right? Google has all but said that. So we know that reviews are an important part of, of what we do nowadays, right? Online reviews. So if we know that and we know that getting five star reviews will help our business because it will, then why don't we have a plan for getting more five star reviews? Speaker 0 00:16:09 I always talk about this. Here's something you can absolutely steal. I always recommend, um, all my restaurants create a business card. On one side is the Yelp logo and a QR code that takes them to your Yelp page. On the other side is a Google logo and a QR code that takes them to your Google My Business page. If you find out, don't give them out to everybody. Don't ask, don't solicit reviews, don't give away free drinks, don't none of that. That's not the spirit of this, right? That's not what Yelp wants. That's not what we want. Ultimately what Yelp wants is that people who love it to let them know what they love, why they love it, so that they can find other places, right? Yelp wants what we want. Google wants what we want as business owners. So what I recommend is you get a thousand of these business cards made. Speaker 0 00:16:52 It'll be a quarter of a penny to get one made. So get a thousand of 'em made. You'll spend pennies to get this done. Put them in your pocket and tell your managers. Your goal is to find is to give out one card a night, one card. That's it. So what they have to do is look for the table that is loving their experience, that is having a great time. That gets it. That gets what you are all about. Find that one table. Approach the table just like you would anyway, right? Hi, I just wanted to check in, make sure you're enjoying everything. Oh my god, it's great. Yeah, it looks like you were enjoying it. I just wanted to come over. You know, I thank you for coming out tonight. Thank you for having such a good time. And I wanted to ask you a quick favor. Speaker 0 00:17:33 So reviews, online reviews really help us. And it seems like you love it here. You get what we're all about, you get what we're doing. I'm so thrilled you're enjoying yourselves. Would you guys take just three minutes, leave us a five star rating and a review and tell everybody what you love about this, why you're having such a good time. Um, it would just help us reach other people like you cuz people like you love this place. Let's help, uh, help us find other people like you. It would help us immensely if you did that once a night. And that is in the spirit of these reviews, right? You did that once a night. You'll get 35 star reviews, 30 rave reviews every single night. Now you're gonna get mediocre reviews and you're still gonna get bad reviews. You are not for everybody. You are gonna, you are gonna screw up a table that is inevitable. Speaker 0 00:18:18 So you will have some of those filtered in. But if you're adding 35 star reviews every single month, you will start seeing a difference in the bottom line. You will see it. I promise you, you will see it. This has happened for, uh, for tons of my clients. I have them all do this and they do something like this. Every single restaurant I work with. So when we talk about attraction, retention, and evangelism, we talk about evangelism. This need to help people spread the word. We've just made it very, very easy. We've told them, we've shown them how to spread the word. We've made it very easy. And we're not asking them. We're not, uh, we're not, um, you know, we're not, we're not begging them to do it. We're not bribing them to do it. You give no discount and you give no free drinks, no free dessert, nothing. Speaker 0 00:19:01 You simply ask them, you say, it looks like you're having a good time. Would you please let other people know what a good time you're having? That's it. And I'm telling you, every single table you ask, if they're really having as good a time as you think they are, every single table you ask will do what you ask them to do. So when we talk about, again, attraction, retention, and evangelism, let's come up with a plan for every step of the way. That is one piece. How do we get more five star reviews on Google and Yelp? That is one way to do it. But what you gotta do is come up with 10, 12 things in each of these three sides. How do we raise awareness? These are the eight ways we ra raise awareness for our brand. How do we help peak curiosity for people? Speaker 0 00:19:45 How do we build trust with people? There are a bunch of ways you do it. How do we convince people to come join us? There are specific things you do in each of those three categories. Attraction, retention, and evangelism. There is a specific set of actions you do to achieve a specific goal. Good food, good service is not a plan, it's just a prerequisite. If you're gonna open a restaurant, you better have good food and good service cuz the markets are too saturated. There are too many great restaurants all over the place. That's gotta be a prerequisite. That can't be part of your plan, part of your strategy for long-term survival. What you need is a plan to raise awareness. What you need is a plan for convincing people to try you for enticing them. Make it easy for them to wander in one night, to to choose you over another place. Speaker 0 00:20:30 You have to make it easy for people to come back. You have to give them opportunities, excuses, reasons to come back and join you. And you've gotta physically literally invite them back. There are a lot of different tools. We have to do that, right? We have our managers, our service staff, our uh, our email strategy, our SMS texts. We have pushed notifications. If you have an app, you've got a website, you've got other tools, you've got, uh, advertising paid, social advertising. They're all different ways that we can try and get people to come in, get people to come back and to get people to go spread the word about what we're doing. You just need to be specific about it. Now, when you come up with it, you set your goal. I want to get 35 star reviews every single month. I'm gonna do the following things to try to achieve that. Speaker 0 00:21:16 And then you measure it. You can just track how many reviews did you get in the month of May? Was it 30? Was it less than 30? Was it more than 30? It's very, very easy. You can measure that. Everything you do, especially now as the world's gone digital, the best part about the digital world, the b the digital landscape, is that we can measure our efforts. So you figure out what you want to do, you put a series of plans into place to specifically try to achieve that goal. And then you measure the results. If it's working, you keep doing it or you do more of it. If it's not working, you scrap it, go back to the drawing board and come up with something else. But there's not just one thing you're going to do to try to achieve a goal. There are several things you're gonna do. Speaker 0 00:21:57 So again, how do you get people to leave reviews on Yelp and Google? I gave you one idea. How do you get people to post things on social media? How do you get people to tag you? How do you get people to, uh, to to, to talk about you the next day? They're all different ways to do that, right? This is when you go shop at Gucci or uh, Louis Vuitton or Amez, they give you a beautiful bag. EZ is a great, uh, is a, is a great example is cuz they have a bright orange bag. If you go shopping in Hermez, they put your stuff in a bright orange shopping bag and you walk the rest of the day within Hermez, a bright orange ermez shopping bag. They've made it easy for you to evangelize for the brand. You are walking around saying, I love this brand so much that I spent an ungodly amount of money on whatever is in this bag. Speaker 0 00:22:44 And it was totally worth it. I'm so excited for it. Right? I know people who plan really nice, uh, lunches or dinners after they go shopping just so that they can walk into some fabulous restaurant with those bags. It's crazy. I know. But for some people this is, uh, what matters to them. But Ermez has made it very easy to go evangelize, to go spread the word about what you do. The problem is right When you go to Ermez, you buy a belt, you buy a scarf, you buy a blouse, you buy whatever, and then you can go show that off for, uh, for years to come. But we go to a restaurant, we put the food in our body, it's gone. It says disappeared. It's very difficult to go evangelize to show off what we do. So we have challenges here. We have to make that easier. Speaker 0 00:23:26 We have to make that obvious. I don't know how to do it for your brand. Every brand, uh, does it in a different way. It's why places have merch, t-shirts and, and hats and stuff like that. So why people have, uh, cool to-go bags. We went to a restaurant in Paris a couple years ago and they gave my son a little, uh, candy bag with a balloon tied to it. So they got a helium canister in the back. But you know what, when we were walking around Paris and we were walking from the restaurant back to our, uh, Airbnb, there was a, there was a balloon, there was a four Seasons balloon walking down the walking down the street. And you know what it did? It said, Hey, the Four Seasons knows how to take care of kids. If you want a really nice meal and you've got a kid and you're afraid he won't be, uh, comfortable here, we know how to take care of kids. Speaker 0 00:24:01 Which was absolutely true at our meal when we dine there at the Four Seasons at the restaurant, uh, one of the restaurants in the Four Seasons in Paris. And now we were broadcasting it in our own way cuz my son was only too happy to carry the balloon home. There are specific things you do to accomplish specific, uh, specific set of goals. And if you're just focusing on all the stuff you do, and agencies are really bad about this, agencies are horrible. They'll show you all the stuff they did. Well, I posted on Instagram four times. I did three tos, I did two reels. I posted four stories every single day and blah, blah, blah. They're not telling you what, uh, to what ends. They're telling you everything. They did all the busy work, but they didn't tell you what they accomplished. And I tell this to agency people all the time. Speaker 0 00:24:43 I coach with, uh, agency owners, with social media marketers and things like that. And I say, you want to create the results. And it doesn't matter how you achieve the results. If a business owner, if a business owner is achieving the results they want, honestly, they don't really care if you spend an a half an hour on their brand this week, or eight hours or 30 hours on their brand this week. You're achieving the, the goals, the desired result. They don't care how much, how much time went into it, how much effort. You're the professional. And you should know how, how, how you could accomplish the biggest amount of, uh, results. Get the biggest impact with the littlest amount of effort. That's what all of us want to do. Cause if you can do that, you can work with more clients, you can make more money, you can grow your agency ultimately helping a lot of different businesses. Speaker 0 00:25:28 The same is true with your restaurant. You have to figure out what you're trying to achieve and then build a plan for achieving that goal. A specific set of actions to try to achieve that goal. And then you have to measure them. If it works, keep doing it. If it works, do more of it. If it's not working, scrap it and go back to the, uh, go back to the drawing board. That's what I wanted to talk about. How the only way to market is to market in reverse. Again, my name is Chip Close. This is Restaurant Strategy. If you wanna learn more about my P three mastermind, I, I speak with restaurant owners every single week, sometimes 15 or 20 of you guys every single week. And I love it. It's the best part of my week. Best way to get started is to visit restaurant strategy podcast.com/schedule. Speaker 0 00:26:05 I'll get to learn more about you and your business. You'll get to learn more about the program, see if you're a good fit for the program. There's never any pressure to join the program, but, uh, I think you might find, uh, that the things you're struggling with are the things that we know how to fix. If that's the case, I'd love for you to join us and at the very least, we'll have a really lovely 30 minute conversation. I love getting to know more about the listeners out there. Appreciate you guys being here, making time, taking time out of your week every single week. I hope you get value from this show, from this episode. Spread the word. Make sure you're letting people know about this show and what you're getting out of it. I appreciate you guys and I will see you next time.