What is GOOD Marketing?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: So let's get into it. What is marketing? And more important to that, let's talk about what is good marketing. I'll remind you that I started off this podcast, episode one, defining that what is marketing? I'm gonna do it again and we're gonna go a little bit deeper. Cause we're gonna talk about how you bring specificity and intention to your marketing to actually make it good. 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 STR Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. I am your host here of Restaurant Strategy Podcast. We put out two episodes every single week. Operations on Monday, marketing on Thursday. Guess what's Thursday? So we're going to talk about marketing whether you know it or not. I give talks all over the country. I wrote a book, it's called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. I host a group coaching program called the P3 mastermind. And I also run a membership site. It's called Restaurant Foundations. If you've got a growing restaurant group and you are looking how to grow top line revenue, how to manage expenses, how to manage your labor, how to do things better than you are doing them now, the Restaurant foundation site might just be for you. It's absolutely free for the first 30 days and then you pay the regular. The regular fee of $97 a month. You cancel whenever you want. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes that will show you how to get access for free for a month. So if you go in, you swipe all the resource files, all the templates, the spreadsheets, the ebooks, all of that, and then you watch all the videos and you want to just cancel after 30 days. Fine, you win. Obviously. What I hope is that you'll stick around for a while because we're always adding new content. We do quarterly masterclasses, we do ask me anything sessions. There's tons reasons to stick around, but you don't have to. You cancel whenever you want. I'm going to put a link in the show notes for you to get Restaurant Foundations for free for the first 30 days, $97 a month after that, go check it out. 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? [00:02:26] 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 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 plate? 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. [00:02:59] 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 we're going to talk about marketing. We're going to define it, right? I do this every so often because I think it's good to recalibrate to get us back on the same page. What is marketing? And then I want to talk about what is good marketing. So what is marketing? I'll remind you way back when, episode one of the Restaurant Strategy podcast, the title was what is Marketing? Because I think marketing is so foundational, so fundament to the success of a restaurant. So what is marketing? The way I defined it then, is the way the same way I define it now? It's three sentences, right? Three questions. What's your product? Who is it for? And how do you reach them? That's it. What's your product? Meaning what do you have to sell? Who's that product for? And then how do you reach them? Figure out how to convince them that they should buy from you as opposed to any of the other alternatives out there. That's it. That's the. That's the definition that I started using seven or eight years ago, and I've not changed it because I think it's that good. What's your product? Who's it for? How do you reach them? That is what marketing is, right? Marketing is not social media and email and business cards and postcards and direct mailers. It's not. Those are channels available to the market, or they are tools available to the marketer to help market their restaurant, but on its own. Posting on social media is not marketing. Marketing is about having a foundational plan in place, understanding who you're trying to reach, who you're trying to serve, what they need, and how you can convince them that you have what they need. That is marketing. That's what marketing is interested in. Now, advertising, right, is about, you know, broadcasting your message, is about getting your product in front of as many people as possible. That's part of how we market with intention. But marketing on its own is interested in those more fundamental questions. You know, I said I wanted to answer the more important question, which is what is good marketing or what does good marketing look like? For me, it's about bringing specificity and intention to the table. And I think too often we don't. We take the spray and pray approach. We just try to like, put our stuff out there as much as possible. Meaning let's post on. Let's post on social media a couple times a week or every single day and that'll work. But if without understanding the way that the social media platforms work and how those algorithms are built, it lacks intention. If you're just going to post every day and hope that that brings people in, that might have worked in 2008, 9, 10, 11, that might have worked. But now reach is so greatly diminished on those platforms, for example, that it will not accomplish the task that you're saying it wants to accomplish. Marketing is harder and easier than it's ever been ever, ever, ever in the history of the world. Harder, meaning there's a lot more noise out there. Easier because it is at your fingertips. Create a safer, more efficient kitchen and better protect your bottom line with restaurant technologies. Its total oil management solution helps minimize the dangers that come with traditional oil management such as oil burns, spills and slip and fall accidents. The end to end automated oil management system delivers filters, monitors and recycles your cooking oil, taking one of the dirtiest jobs out of the kitchen and no upfront cost. Control the kitchen chaos with restaurant technologies and make your kitchen safer while maximizing efficiency. Visit rti inc.com you can email customer care@rti inc.com or call 888-796-4997 to get started. All of those links will be in the show notes. So I want you to understand marketing is answering those three questions. What's your product? Who's it for? How do you reach them? Good marketing is about bringing specificity and intention to the table. It's understanding all of the marketing channels available to you and it's getting really clear on, on the end in mind, right? What do you want to accomplish? What do you have to do to accomplish that? Talk a lot about that. That systems and goals, thinking, right? What do you want to accomplish? What do you have to do to accomplish that, right? What are you trying to do? Systems and goals. A goal is a set of actions or a repeatable set of actions. So we do the following things to try to achieve the stated goal. That's how a system works. We systematize everything we do because if it's repeatable, it's replicable. If it's replicable, it's scalable. Meaning we can go from one restaurant to three to five, to 10, to 500 to 5,000. If we come up with a repeatable system to achieve the stated goal, it will work. So how does that apply to marketing? Marketing for me is a triangle. So I talk about the marketing triangle, right? The triangle principle. There are really only three things you need to accomplish to successfully market a restaurant. Number one, you have to focus on acquisition, so attracting new customers to your brand. Number two, it's retention, right? Keeping those customers coming back. And the third one is what I call evangelism, which is really about sparking word of mouth, right? So attraction, retention, evangelism. How do we get people in? How do we get people back? How do we get people talking? The beauty is that acquiring a new customer is the goal. And the things you do then to acquire a new customer, a customer, are different than the things you would do to bring back a customer, right? The channels available to you, the strategies we would employ, they are different. So this is how we bring specificity and attention to our work, thinking in those three terms. Attraction, retention, and evangelism. I need a steady stream of new diners to walk in the front door, and then I need a system in place, right? Jim Collins talked about the flywheel in his book Good to Great, right? So I want to know that every person who comes in, there's a system in place. There's a plan in place to get them to come back for a repeat visit. And I know I'm collecting their information and I'm prompting them to either post a photo, post a video, leave an online review, go tell somebody else about us, right? That's evangelism. So if I have a flywheel built, meaning everybody who comes in, I know we'll come back, and I know we'll go talk about us. Well, great. Now I can focus on customer acquisition. Because if I got a leaky bucket, right? Meaning if I don't have a plan to get them back, and I don't have a plan to get them to go spread the word about me, well, then I'm spending a lot of money to get somebody to come in one time. But if I can get them back on average three to five times a year, well then maybe it would be worth then spending the money to get them to come in because they spend the money to acquire the customer. But then the lifetime value of the customer is such that it's worth me spending the money to get them in the first time. And I know they'll also go spread the word about me. Well then that's a no brainer. Then I can come up with a number, right? A number that would be worthwhile for me to put behind my acquisition. I know it cost me on average $100 to bring a new customer in the front door, okay. But I know they're gonna come back three to five times over the course of the year. And I know everybody is going to leave an online review or post something on social media. Well, then that magnifies my work. That's the kind of specificity that I want you to bring to your marketing. So email serves a specific purpose. Your Facebook page, your paid ads on meta, your Google my business profile, your paid ads on Google, your direct mailers, all of these things are accomplishing something very specific. You simply have to understand what each of those things are trying to accomplish and be really clear with what you're trying to do. And then what you do to try to do what you need to do. That's good marketing. Marketing are those three questions. What's your product? Who is it for? How do you reach them? Good marketing is about understanding that marketing triangle. That triangle principle, acquisition, retention and evangelism. What do we need to do to bring people in the front door? What do we need to do to get them to come back and to increase the frequency of their visits? And then what do we need to do to make sure that everybody goes and raves about us to their family and friends? That's it. When you do that, well, that's how you have an insanely profitable restaurant business. Now, I will let you know that the P3 mastermind, that's the group coaching program that I run, has expanded. Right. Same, same fee to be a part of it, right? That has not changed. But what you get for being in the program has been upgraded. So now instead of one call a week, you get two calls a week. The second call is a dedicated marketing call. So we've got a one hour marketing call every single week that walks you through every single thing you need to do to successfully market your restaurant in the year 2026 and beyond. And then we have a dedicated two hour operations call. Every single week to help you dial in, forecasting, budgeting, your food, costing all of the, your scheduling, everything that the operation is interested in. So now it's the killer. One, two, punch. How do you market your restaurant and then how do you run a profitable operation? And everybody in the program gets those two calls every week. One hour marketing call, two hour operations call. In addition, we get quarterly masterclasses. You get a two hour ask me anything session with me every single month. I'm always bringing in guests. So you compound them with questions. There's so much good things that are happening with the program. If you've been on the fence, let this be the year you jump in and run a profitable restaurant. We target 20% profit, which means if you got a $2 million restaurant, I think you should be making $400,000 a year, $400,000 into your pocket, into your checking account. If that sounds good, if that sounds different than what you got going on now, then set up a call and let's just have a conversation. There is no pressure. We've got almost 150 people in the program right now. As I'm recording this, we bring on 10 to 12 new members every single month. We will find people who are great for this program. But if that sounds like you, maybe you can be great in this program. RestaurantStrategyPodcast.com schedule. You see the calendar there? You grab time on, on our schedule and we'll set up call, 30 minutes, we'll ask you a bunch of questions, you'll ask us a bunch of questions and, and let's see if you're a good fit. If it is, we'll talk about how we move forward. And if not, so be it. RestaurantStrategyPodcast.com Schedule as always, that link is in the show notes. I appreciate you guys being here. Thank you very much and I will see you next time. Sam, It.