Look out! There goes your time and money down the drain...

(3 Wrong Ways to Market your Restaurant + 1 right one!)

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I’m so sad when I see restaurant owners online literally pouring time and money down the drain on sub-par marketing.

I’ve seen a lot of ways restaurants try and market their businesses in the past 16 years in the restaurant industry. I’ve seen it online and in my inbox as well.

When it comes down to it, I see restaurant owners choosing 3 ways to market their business, which just don’t make financial sense.

(Stick around to the end and you’ll see 1 great way to market your restaurant)

Let’s get into it.

#1 Posting discount coupons on Social Media

E.g. Posting on Facebook, “Hey, here’s a 10% off coupon, come in and tell us you saw us on Facebook or Instagram.”

What’s the problem? Well, firstly, I’m not really going to make a special trip somewhere for only 10% off. I might if I was a regular customer there, but not somewhere new.

But say a new customer did come in. They show you the coupon on their phone, they sit down, enjoy their meal, and that’s the last communication you have with them. You have no way of following them up. And you don’t know whether they take up another coupon offer in the future or not.

The results are untrackable, and with no way to nurture the customer relationship.

#2 Print marketing, direct mailing

E.g. Sending out mailers

I have seen some success come from these campaigns. I actually had a client who did a huge

grand opening and they spent about $4,000 mailing out postcards. They did get people coming in and bringing the postcard, so we know it worked.

But $4,000 for one event is a significant investment. It’s also not really sustainable long-term. It’s expensive to send out postcards continuously. And there’s no way of segmenting your audience based on age, interests or life events like you can with social media marketing.

So the mailer is good, but it's expensive and you can't really target it nor can you track it. If they bring in the mailer, you still don’t have their contact information.

#3 Email marketing

E.g. you send an email out to your email list with a free offer

"hey bring this in for a free offer”

Email marketing also has some success. You can track when people open their email, but you also need to track when the coupon is used.

We went to a Mexican restaurant for my husband’s birthday because he had a birthday coupon. But, they didn’t even scan it to see whether it had been used already, they just said “Oh, you have a birthday offer, great.”

We have also seen places where we had to print out the coupon and they scanned it so they knew who had taken up the offer (i.e. which customers had engaged in their promotion). That was good, but it was tedious and annoying to print out the coupon.

But still, the open rates with emails are just so low. I mean, how many emails do you have unread in your inbox? Tons right?

So, what’s a way you can track your marketing, nurture your customers, give them deals they want and make more money for your business?

#4 Messenger Chatbot

E.g. the Chatbot does the work for you of inviting new customers, with a compelling offer, tracking the ROI and nurturing the customer relationship.

So many businesses are not making the most of Chatbots. I mean, I’ll ask a business a question and then nobody gets back to me for over 12 hours (or more), which isn’t great when you want to know about lunch opening times on the day. Those basic questions can be easily and quickly answered by a chatbot.

So how does a Chatbot work for marketing?

Well, that’s what we do. With the ROI Engine, we build a database of fans. We're not just getting you customers once. The goal is to follow up with them so that they come back again and again to your business.

The very first offer should be super compelling. It should be amazing enough that you may even lose a little bit of money on acquiring that customer, knowing that it's an investment for the future. We get them into your restaurant, you take the time to make sure that they have a wonderful, awesome customer service experience and then they're going to come back. But we don't just rely on the fact that it was a good experience for them to come back, we can remarket to them through Messenger.

We send them another offer.

They come back. We send them another offer.

They come back. They are now fans of your brand and become regular customers.

Let’s use one of my clients, a small family-owned mexican diner, as an example. When we launched their campaign, we didn't even use a paid ad but we just had a messenger Chatbot to get the offer out.

They had over $4,000 sales in 9 days.

Just from this one offer! All we did was to post the offer on their Facebook page, and connected a chatbot to deliver the offer.

Now the trackable part of this is when customers redeem the offer, they are asked to enter the total spent into the chatbot in order to get the next deal. That amount then gets added to the system and allows us to tally up all the results from your offer.

Trackable ROI on your marketing spend.

I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, which method I 100% recommend to businesses wanting to build their sales. 😉

When people ask me how I differ from other social media marketers, I like to say

“You know, you can't deposit likes in the bank.

We want to see more fans for your brand,

and more bills in your till."

That’s our focus at Victory Points Social.

Want to learn more? Book a FREE discovery call.

To your victory!

xx Tracey