Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Check it out. Marketing your restaurant is much simpler than most people would have you believe. Over the course of this episode, I want to introduce you to a couple of important frameworks that I first introduced in my book, the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. Mostly, it's about changing the way you think about marketing your restaurant and giving you something very tactical, very actionable for you to put into practice to increase revenue in your restaurant, to grow your restaurant, ultimately to make a more profitable restaurant. All of that ultimately 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 looking.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated to helping you build a more profitable and sustainable business. Every single episode, two episodes every week, I leverage my 25 years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and more sustainable business. I also have a group coaching program. It's called the P3 mastermind. We've grown this group from one group all the way up to four unique groups. Currently over 150 people enrolled in the program. We target consistent, predictable 20% returns. If you are stuck making single digit profit margins, it is worth A conversation 30 minutes, absolutely free. The way you start that conversation is to grab time on the calendar. Visit restaurantstrategypodcast.com Schedule grab time in the calendar. You'll chat with me or someone from my team and let's figure out if you're a fit again. RestaurantStrategyPodcast.com SL Schedule let's see if it makes sense for you to talk about the P3 mastermind, my coaching program. As always, you'll find that link in the show Notes.
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[00:03:31] Speaker B: I want to introduce you to a concept, an idea framework that I introduced in my book. So my book is the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. You can get it anywhere you want. You can go to therestaurantmarketingmindset.com you can go to Amazon, you can go To Barnes and Noble.com, you can find it in a lot of different places. I'm incredibly proud of that book. It is awesome. There are really great ideas. It looks great, feels great, sounds great. Amplify Publishing put it out. They did a phenomenal job with it. In that book, the very the entire first part of that book, I introduced a framework that I like to call the abcds of Marketing. And I want to go over this with you now because it's a specific way of thinking about marketing. So marketing is not all the stuff we do.
Marketing is about identifying problems, solving those problems in compelling ways, right?
In more compelling ways than any of the other solutions that are out there. And when we're talking about restaurants, let's face it, there are a lot of restaurants out there. Meaning people are hungry. That's the problem. They want good places to go eat.
That's the problem. And there are plenty of great places out there. That's the solution.
So there's already plenty of solutions out there for the problems that exist. So if you're going to say, hey, I want to open up my own restaurant, man, you better have a a good reason and a plan, a strategy for being successful.
The way I think about how to do that is through the abcds of marketing. Let me walk you through it. Abcd. It stands for Audience, Brand Competition and Differentiation.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: A, B, C, D. And so let's go through that.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: And let's make sure we really understand it.
Let me back up, let me back up once when we talk about marketing. Marketing is really about getting people to do two things.
Number one, getting people to raise their hands.
Number two, getting people to change their behavior, right? So when I say raise their hands and change their behavior, it looks something like this. You walk into, you walk into a busy, you know, you walk into a busy theater and you say, hey, everyone, can I get your attention? Can I get your attention? Everybody looks at you and you say, hey, let me see a show of hands. Who likes barbecue? And a bunch of people's hands go up in the air. You say, great. Everybody who raised their hands, follow me.
And then they follow you out to your food truck. That's right out front with great barbecue.
That's what we've done. We walked in and we identified who has the problem or the need that we can solve.
Who has the problem that we're uniquely qualified to solve. And then we got them to change their behavior, meaning they were in a room and we got them to leave the room. They were inside, we got them to go outside.
They were at one restaurant. We got them to cross the street and go to our restaurant. At its most basic, most foundational, that's what marketing is. It's getting people to raise their hand and change their behavior. Who wants what I have? Who needs what I have?
Great. Now follow me.
Now, is everybody going to identify themselves? No, not necessarily. Is everyone going to do what you want them to do, meaning go outside to your food truck? No, definitely not. That's why marketing restaurants is hard. That's why we have to be vigilant and tenacious about it.
But fundamentally, foundationally, marketing is not all the stuff you do. Marketing is the thing you need to make happen.
It's getting people to raise their hands and change their behavior. Now that leads us into this framework, the abcds of marketing. Again, a stands for audience. Let's start there. Audiences really interested in understanding the who of the equation.
Who has the problem that we are uniquely qualified to solve, right? Meaning who out there likes barbecue and is willing to try new barbecue or interested to try new barbecue or who is tired of the old barbecue options will come try my place. It's a brand new barbecue option.
Audience is interested in finding the who.
When we talk about audience, we have to talk about how we segment the audience, right? Because we can't afford to market to everybody in a given market. So let's use this, let's use this example of New York City, right? So I lived in New York City for 20 years. Now I live just outside of New York City. New York City is home to 8 million people. If I open up a sports bar in the middle of Brooklyn, I can't get all 8 million people to go there to start. The people from Staten island or the Bronx or Queens aren't going to be able to easily get to my sports bar in Brooklyn. It's just really difficult to get there. So it's inconvenient.
There's plenty of other people who can't afford my sports bar, right? Either they can't afford to go out, or they're not interested in spending their money on that kind of food.
Or there's plenty of other people who just don't like that kind of food or don't like that kind of experience.
People who don't like loud, noisy environments, who don't like burgers and wings and beer, don't eat meat, don't like sports, right? There's a whole lot of people. What we're doing is we're segmenting, we're figuring out, right? Big part of how we figure out who our product is for is to first identify who it is not for. So when we think about the audience, part of it is stripping away all the people it is not for and really finding our core audience. They call this the ICA or icp.
Ideal customer avatar or ideal customer Persona, right?
We figure out who is most apt to love what we have, who needs what we have.
When we talk about the abcds, A is really trying to understand who needs what we have.
Then B.
Brand.
Brand is really you, is the company, is the product, is the solution you're crafting, right? So A is for audience who has a problem where you're uniquely qualified to solve. B is for brand. Brand is the solution.
People are tired of the only barbecue option in town.
So we're gonna create a new style, a new option. It's different in a variety of ways, which we will get to.
Your brand is the solution. So you got to figure out who needs something.
You got to craft a solution that's the be your brand, your company, your experience. Your solution is how you serve your audience.
C is for competition, right? So competition you got to look around, you see, and you have to say, who else is trying to solve the same problem? We are.
Those are your competitors.
And you can compete with different restaurants in different categories, right?
I talk about competition a lot because, number one, competitors finding competition. It number one validates your idea. So you're like, hey, I'm not crazy. Other people also thought that this community need to be served in this way. And number two, most importantly, it gives you a category.
The whole key of marketing is being top of mind when it matters.
And so you're not competing, right? If you've got a barbecue place, you're not competing with all the restaurants in town.
You're competing with a certain kind of restaurant at a certain time of day.
So it's not like people are like, hey, do you want to go out and get salads? Or do you want to go get barbecue? That rarely happens.
The barbecue restaurant will be in the consideration set with a certain kind of restaurant, either segmented by, you know, geographically or the cuisine type by price. Bunch of different ways we can slot that out.
But A is about audience who has a problem you're uniquely qualified to solve. B, brand is the solution to that problem.
C, competition. You figure out who else is trying to solve the same problem you are. And that leads us to D. D is the most important. It's differentiation once you're in a category, right? So I've got a sushi restaurant, and I'm in a consideration set with five other sushi restaurants in this area.
How do I stand out?
Something we learn. You read it in marketing textbooks. They talk about value proposition. Value proposition is just a fancy way of saying, why does a consumer pick one over the other? Either this one is closer or this one is cheaper, or this one is famous, or this one has a unique dish, or this. Whatever it is, there are reasons why a consumer will pick one over another. So if you're in a category, again, if you have a sushi restaurant and you're in a category of other sushi restaurants, you. You gotta figure out you have to differentiate yourself, separate yourself from the others in that category so that people who care about that thing will choose you over the others.
There are a bunch of different ways to do this. This really has to do with positioning. So the best way to describe positioning is to really talk about luxury cars. Cause these are brands that everybody knows, right? So if I say, hey, I wanna go buy a luxury car.
There are a lot of luxury brands out there, right? There's Mercedes, there's BMW, there's Cadillac, there's Acura, there's Lexus, there's Tesla. There are options out there.
While they all compete with each other, they all own a corner of the market, right? Mercedes is classic luxury. BMW is performance.
Tesla owns electric. Volvo owns safety. Cadillac is the American luxury car. And on and on and on, right? They all own a corner of the market. And the things that people, the people that care about a certain thing will buy that certain brand.
So if you want a luxury car and you care a lot about safety, you will go buy a Volvo because they own safety. In the, in the mind of the consumer, Volvo is the safe car.
When you're in a category, you need to figure out how to separate yourself in within that category.
So you're in the consideration set. You and all the other sushi restaurants.
But our sushi restaurant is cheaper. Our sushi restaurant has unique combinations. Our sushi restaurant is a show, our whatever it is.
But there has to be something there. There has to be a there there.
Otherwise, and we've talked about this before, Otherwise you get into the commodity game.
The commodity mindset says all things being equal, the consumer will make their decision based on one of three criteria. Convenience, familiarity, or price.
And we lose if we try to compete on any of those three. Because it's a race to the bottom. You will never be the most convenient option to the most amount of people. You will never be the most familiar or the most famous to the largest amount of people. And you cannot be the cheapest option. That is a race to the bottom.
So when we talk about how we market restaurants, it's about getting people to raise their hands. So you figure out who wants what you have.
The analogy is you walk into a room and say, hey, who here likes barbecue? And everybody raised their hand. You say, hey, all of you guys follow me.
You get them to raise their hand and you get them to follow you. That's all we're trying to do when it comes to marketing our restaurants.
And the way we begin to think about establishing our brand is by thinking about the ABCDs of marketing. Here's the key. A, B, C, D leads to E. And E stands for everything.
Everything you do, every choice you make matters. It communicates something to a potential diner.
So again, if you got a fancy fine dining restaurant, the high prices, small food, low lights, tinkling music, well dressed staff, all of that communicates something about the kind of experience that someone can expect on the other side of the door.
So somebody who's looking to impress someone for a date, someone who's looking to host clients to the point where the client will understand that this was expensive, that somebody is really trying to lure them, their business in, it sends certain signals.
And that's true for high end, low end, everything in between.
A, B, C, D leads to E.
And you can choose to be overwhelmed or empowered by that.
I choose to be empowered by that.
That there's nothing that doesn't matter. That everything presents an opportunity to communicate something about who you are, what problem you solve, and why someone should be a part of your business.
So when we talk about marketing, that's the foundational work we all have to agree on. After a word from another one of our sponsors. I'm going to talk to you then about how we put that into practice, how we actually take action. Because despite everything you've heard, marketing restaurants is actually easier than you think. I'm going to explain more in just a minute after a word from another one of our sponsors.
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[00:17:11] Speaker B: Or to see.
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[00:18:17] Speaker B: A lot goes into marketing, but there's something very simple about what we're trying to accomplish. So let's recap real quickly. We talked about marketing, right? What is marketing really? It's about getting people to raise their hand and change their behavior. So again, you walk into a room, you say hey, who Here likes barbecue. Perfect. Everyone who raised their hand, follow me. That's what we're trying to do with pretty much everything we do when it comes to marketing our restaurants.
The way we provide a foundation for all the work we're about to do is by identifying those ABCDs of marketing. ABCD leads to E. Everything you do matters. Everything you do. Communicate something to a prospective diner. I wrote about this in my book the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. You can go to the restaurant marketing mindset.com you can get your own copy, or you can go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble or anywhere you find your books online. It is there.
I wrote about this a lot. That whole idea was in the very opening part one of that book. And I go into greater depth. So by all means, get the book. You will see a lot more. There are examples, there are case studies and all that.
There's a broader way of thinking about that, but the short cliff notes version is that the ABCDs of marketing, it's a framework for how we begin to think about and market our restaurants.
So then how do we take action?
Because the action is the important part. How do we actually put this stuff into practice? I want to introduce you to another framework that I developed that I again wrote about in the book. It happens much later in the book, but I talk about something called the triangle principle. I like to think about marketing as a triangle because there are really only three things you need to do to successfully market your restaurant. Attraction, retention and evangelism. It's basically customer acquisition, customer retention, and sparking. Word of mouth.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: That's all you.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: The only thing you have to do to have a wildly successful business is you need a system for getting new people to walk in the door. You need to then turn those new people into repeat customers. And you need a system for getting people to come back with greater frequency.
And then you need a way to get everybody to go rave about their experience.
Attraction, retention, evangelism. Again, I wrote about it in my book the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. So if somebody told you, oh, you got to send emails, you need to worry about SEO. You got to run ads, you got to do mailers. You got to do all of this. Fine, maybe, probably.
But if you're doing that stuff without understanding the purpose behind it, you are sunk. Having a purpose is a goal. Having a purpose allows you to measure it.
When you measure, when you measure, you can tell if it works or not.
Remember the old. The old. The old adage, right? What gets measured gets managed.
So I talk a lot about systems and goals. It has a lot to do with the way I coach restaurant owners.
A goal is simply where you want to get to. Point A is where we are. Point B is where we're going.
A system is just a repeatable set of actions. We're going to do the following things to achieve the stated goal. We're going to measure it, and we're going to determine whether what we did worked or whether it didn't work. If it worked, do more of it. If it didn't work, scrap it and figure out something else to do.
But by having a goal, it allows us to measure and see if we hit that goal.
There's a lot of you guys out there who just do stuff and don't know whether it's working. There's the old joke, right? I know half my marketing works. Problem is I don't know which half you have to measure. And it's never been easier to measure than it is right now.
So back to the triangle. Attraction, retention, and evangelism. The key to this triangle is that we do it in reverse order. We do it in reverse order, meaning evangelism, meaning sparking, word of mouth, then retention, then attraction. We do it in reverse order because attraction, customer acquisition is the hardest, the most time consuming, and the most expensive of the three.
Also, we want to think of this as a flywheel.
So if you know a flywheel, it's a small cylinder within a big cylinder, and it takes a lot of effort to spin the outside cylinder, but then once the outside cylinder gets going, it spins the inner cylinder. And so what happens is that you spin, spin the outer one, and the inner one just goes, goes.
And then eventually it'll slow down. And you've got to put a lot of energy and effort into getting the big one to go again. And then it'll get the little one to go, go, go, go, go.
So a little bit of effort on the big one keeps the little one spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spin. Your business is the little one.
Customer acquisition is the big cylinder.
Again, it's time consuming, it's difficult to do, and it's expensive.
So we have to be really judicious with how and when we do it, the little cylinder in the middle then of the flywheel is evangelism and retention. The idea being, let's make sure, because you already have people coming in, let's make sure that everybody who comes in definitely will come back and will definitely go talk about us, right?
So when I talk about word of mouth and I'll ask rooms filled with you know, when I'm at trade shows or different conferences, I'll say, hey, what's the most powerful marketing tool we have? And they say, oh, it's word of mouth. I say, great, give me your strategy. Give me your plan for sparking word of mouth. And everybody looks at me like, I'm, like I'm speaking Greek. And they say, well, that's not how word of mouth works. It just happens more organically. Meaning people come in, they have a great meal, and then they go tell their friends and family about us. And then those people will come in.
I said, I don't know that that's going to happen.
We have to put our thumb on the scale. We have to make sure that happens.
So what are you doing to make sure that people will go talk about you, that they will take photos and videos and post them online so that lots of other people will see them? What are we doing to make sure that people go rave about you on Yelp or on their Google reviews?
There are things we can do that will make those things happen. So if we say, I want people to go take photos, take videos, post them, rave about us, text their friends, and leave us online reviews, then we have to do things that will make those things happen. We have to ask for those things.
We need a system for making those things happen.
If you don't have a system, you need a system. This is one of the big things we work on in the P3 mastermind, helping you build this three page marketing plan, a customer acquisition plan, a retention plan, and an evangelism plan.
So if you're ever interested at any point, you set up a call with me, restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule. You'll chat with me or someone from my team. We'll talk about what we do in the program today. I'm just telling you guys, if you don't have a plan, you need a plan. You need a plan to make people evangelize for you. You also need a plan for getting people to come back. So that's getting them on your email list, getting them on your text list, getting them in your loyalty program, giving them bounce back cards, doing something that will get them to do the thing that moves the needle in your business, Them coming back moves the needle in your business.
You build a plan for that. And then finally, then we can focus on customer acquisition. Because if everyone who comes in is definitely hit the trip wire and will come back and we'll definitely hit the trip wire and take photos and videos and rave about you and go leave online reviews.
Well, then every new person who comes in is more valuable to us because they're going to do the second and the third step.
Once we have the second and the third step dialed in, then we can focus on the first step. Then I'm willing to spend money and put in the time and effort required to get new people to come in the front door.
But not until we've got a plan for two, which is retention, and three, which is evangelism. Remember again, we work it in reverse order.
What do we do to get people to evangelize for us? What do we do to make sure people come back? Then we figure out a way to convince people to come in.
And there are so many things we can do to make them come in.
We can focus on our SEO so people discover us. We can run Google search ads. We can run meta ads on Facebook and Instagram. We can run TikTok ads. We can do direct mailers. We can do fundraisers and charity nights and street fairs and on and on and on billboards, print, radio. There's so much we can do. But not until we have the other diet. The others dialed in. Those two frameworks will change your business. If you understand the ABCDs of marketing, if you want to refresh it, go back and listen to this episode again or get my book, the Restaurant Marketing Mindset.
And then the other framework is this triangle principle.
Make sure we're being deliberate, intentional about the way we make things happen. It's all based on systems and goals. What do we want to happen? What are we going to do to make sure that happens? And then we measure it. Did it happen or did it not happen? If it happened, you do more of it. If it didn't happen, you go back to the drawing board. You figure out something else that'll work. That's it. That's how you market anything at all in the world and especially in the restaurant industry.
Listen, I appreciate all you guys being here every single week. I hope you're enjoying this new format. Spread the word. Tell your friends. I love having you guys here. Help me keep building this community. If you have any questions, you know, reach out to me. Chipclose.com c h I p k l o s e dot com Appreciate you guys. I will see you next time.
