Secret Sauce - The Restaurant Marketing Podcast

It's a management truism that gets measured gets managed, that goes for Restaurant Marketing as well.

Last podcast covered the trends and the megatrend for indie restaurants.  We look at the trends for restaurants we see in 2018. 5.  Experience Design – VR experience at Restaurant Lume, Saved by the Max in Chicago and now LA.  These are examples of restaurants that are doing a great job with designeing an experience.  Where there is experience, there is margin! 6.  Zero waste – decrease food costs and environmentally responsible.  Consumers are looking for more opportunities to dine at eco friendly restaurants. 7.  Meal labelling – In an effort to improve health, consumers are a lot more interested in the ingredients that are in the meals that they are eating and the carbs and fats in the meals, allowing them to make better choices.  8.  Health – Flexitarianism and a growing trend towards people’s changing tastes as they look for a more healthy diet.  People will still want to have a great experience, but decouple it from being a ‘naughty treat’.  How can you improve the healthy benefits of your food.  Sub ni

The changes we are seeing are: Changing / Evolving consumer tastes - looking for new experiences. Workforce management - the skills shortage is will drive significant change as restaurants look to manage their teams better in the face of declining numbers of people choosing hospitality careers. Profitability will be the mega trend for the next 5 years.  More restaurants are saying that it has never been harder to run a profitable restaurant. Profitability is becoming increasingly important with increasing costs in a lot of areas and some tech companies becoming increasingly aggressive in the fees that they are charging.  Culture driven dining will become increasingly important with Restaurants looking for better ways to hire and retain the best staff in order to create the experiences for consumers that they need to create in order to be competitive.  More technology in Restaurants, especially as there is more tech available that is no cost or low cost that can make a big difference for a small business.  Ord

6 - Marketing is all about discounting.  A lot of Restaurants already discount, especially if you are doing lunch or breakfast meals.  We look at dynamic yield pricing for Restaurants. 7 - We are killing it on Instagram, (or Twitter or Snapchat) - we don't need any other marketing.  Marketing must, Must, MUST be tied to revenue and too many people think that having 100,000 people following them on Instagram, but you can't meet payroll with Instagram followers or likes.  8 - Our third party provider does all of our marketing.  Restaurants using people like Menulog, Dimmi, OpenTable, Just Eat, GrubHub, think that they are doing marketing on their behalf.  The 3rd parrty providers do marketing on their own behalf, not yours, especially,  9- We can't afford a $1,000 a month marketing budget.  We have restaurants doing 1,000 seats a month.  With Dimmi that is $1,000 a month!  We recommend spending $3 - $10 a day on Facebook marketing.  We are also looking at a results driven marketing campaign as well.  Too many p

Wouldn't you be sad if your Restaurant was missing out on $100,000 a year in revenue because you believed a couple of these myths.  We discuss what we hear from Restaurants vs what we actually seeing as working for Restaurants around the world. We look at Restaurant Dark Kitchens and how they are starting to change the way that food is delivered to Restaurants. 1.  SEO is a monthly ongoing cost - what is this all about?  Restaurant Keyword Optimisation - can be a can of worms and often it comes down to a monthly report only a lot of the time.  Some restaurants are paying thousands of dollars every month for no real services. 2.  If your Restaurants name comes up number 1 when someone searches for it, you have great SEO.  There are 2 types of people out there and you are only reaching 1 group (the much smaller group) if you are only getting traffic when people type in your Restaurants name.  We discuss the secret of SEO and how you can use that secret to dramatically grow the number of people going to your res

We talk to Wally from Mama's BBQ Chicken and Salad Bar and the process he has used with Facebook Live videos to turn around his business. The Chicken Shop wasn't doing too well, some weeks needing to put money in to keep it running.  This is a problem that far too many Restaurant owners are all too familiar with. To try and turn things around, Wally started doing some Facebook Live videos.  More people started watching and he started dancing on the videos.  Over time his followers built up and he now has over 2,000,000 views for his videos. He has been on TV multiple times and dramatically turned around the his business.   He has grabbed the slogan 'Flavour, flavour, flavour', after mentioning it in one of his videos and seeing the reaction that people have had with it. No script - just Wally's passion for his food, his business and his customers.  This and Wally's epic dancing skills :) have created content that has gone viral with very little marketing spend.  Very few of the videos are boosted, which is a

  Processes - How do your team know what it is that they are meant to be doing and how do you ensure consistency across visits for customers.  Work out where the problems are and create a system around that procedure.  This is a part of winning back more of your time.  There will be less questions for you and less time fixing up mistakes. Restaurant Business Plan - Lets review the Business Plan that you had before you opened and update it with the reality that is your restaurant.  Look at the numbers and start to think about how you are going to make them work.  Once you identify your current numbers and what you need, that will start to create some of the action steps that you need to take. KPIs - what are the numbers that are important for your Restaurants?  Customer numbers, average check size, food costs, delivery vs pick up orders.  These come out of your Business Plan and help everyone on the team understand how they are tracking. Finances - you need to understand the finances because if you don't you a

This is a self first aid program for Restaurant Owners to help you build the restaurant that you always wanted and that you can be proud of. We are focusing on small iterative steps that are low or no cost for Restaurants  How do you know if you need to do a Restaurant Rescue? Are you happy coming to work each day? Are you proud of the restaurant? Are you spending enough time with your family? Are you taking holidays? Are you making enough money for the hours you work? Is this the Restaurant that you thought you would run when you started the Restaurant? If are working 60 -70 hours a week and not loving every minute of it, then you need to think about Restaurant Rescue. Once you've made that decision, you need to write down the kind of Restaurant you want to run. How many hours do you want to work? How much money do you want to make? What kind of reputation do you want to have? This is your Restaurant Gap Analysis.  What is happening now and what do you want it to be.  This is the first step to start on y

We look at how Restaurant Innovation can help you build a more profitable Restaurant business. What is the link between Innovation and Creativity. We look at the Triad   Technique, Inputs and Creativity and how that feeds into creating an innovative menu, an innovative restaurant and an innovative business. We look at the approach to the ingredients that Shaun uses with sourcing ingredients.  How does the selection of ingredients interact with the menu and the guests? We walk through the process of how Shaun creates one of his amazing dishes, the Sea Corn Taco.  What is the problem that he is trying to solve with it?  What techniques did he use and how did it evolve to being the item that can open the Menu? How can technology change the dining experience?  What is Lume doing with Virtual Reality? We talk about the work of Charles Spence. We look at failure in the Restaurant.  So many people shy away from failure on the menu and in the Restaurant, but it is a critical part of the Innovation process. We talk ab

The team at Marketing4Restaurants.com have been busy creating our first courses for Restaurant owners. We are about to open the Marketing4Restaurants University.  We are creating a series of online courses to take you by the hand and skill up you and your team on how to run your own Restaurant marketing campaigns.  This is a really exciting development. We cover what is the story for your Restaurant, what it impacts and why you need one and how to create one.  We go through so examples of Restaurants with great stories. Is the story for your Restaurant tie in with your Restaurant Business plan? We look at Paymasters whose story is about great food.  The same with Aangan in Melbourne.  These are Restaurants based on great food.  Too many Restaurants have a story based on great food, when in reality the food isn't that great.  Not having great food isn't a big killer, unless that is what your story is.   Jestine's Kitchen has an amazing example of the kind of story that can work really well.  It has a great rep

We talk to Restaurant Sales expert Robbie Doyle from Buy Grow Sell.  We look at the tactics that you can use and how you can best plan for the restaurant sale so that you can get the best sale price for your Restaurant. We discuss: When should you start to think about selling your Restaurant? How to prepare to sell your Restaurant? How do you work out the sale price of the Restaurant? What kind of buyers are out there? Which one is the best one to attract? How can you maximise the price that you get? How to select a broker? What are the risks in selling a Restaurant? There are lots of tips on how to maximise the sale price for your Restaurant in this podcast.  If you have any questions, reach out to Robbie and he will give you some great advice to help you understand the process.

The Restaurant industry is often a very tough  Today we interview Chef Shaun Quade from Restaurant Lume, and how his journey with mental illness has interacted with his journey to opening Australia's most creative Restaurant. This is an important subject for anyone who is travelling with mental illness issues (which is a lot of us), and also really important for anyone working with or employing people with mental health issues.  The outcomes of mental health can be incredibly tragic, so this is a very important topic to talk about. The impact on mental health is exacerbated in the Restaurant industry because of a lot of the factors particular to hospitality, the high paced work environment, the incredibly high standards that restaurants strive to attain and maintain.  For owners, these pressures are multiplied by the pressures of running a business, payroll, finance issues and managing people.  We talk about the impact that reviews platforms have in some of the issues that are created by some of the reviews t

We look at the role that wine plays in a restaurant as a part of the experience that you are creating for your customers. What is the process that you should use in building a wine list and how does that reflect on the customers that you are looking to attract to your restaurant and what the menu is like. How can you use dynamic content on the wine list to increase the number of times that a customer will return to your restaurant. The linkage between wineries and restaurants are increasing to get closer as wineries look for wide distribution channels and restaurants look for ways that they can create new experiences for their customers.  Partnering with a local winery can give you access to the wine makers and enable you to create bespoke dinner events like paired degustation menus, which are perfect for the quieter nights of the week to drive higher revenue. Should you be dealing with a wine rep or direct from the winery?  What are the benefits of dealing with a wine rep?  How can a wine distributor. As a c

    We look at Just Eats latest profit results.  Orders growth is slowing and they are relying more for Revenue growth on top placement, which is where Restaurants pay for higher results in the Just Eat listings.  In Australia, Menulog has struggled with the entry of UberEats and Deliveroo and our Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system. In this podcast we look at how you can build a community in your Restaurant.  Looking at a place like Nick's Pizza and Pub, you can see the way that Facebook represents the integrated, community focused marketing plan that Nick Sarillo has at Nick's. Marketing with suppliers.  Telling the story of your suppliers can really help you to tell your story better.  Your suppliers are often struggling to get traction with their customers, so if you are marketing heir great produce, you may be able to access marketing funds or resources like a wine maker from your local winery to help run a wine tasting.  You can even run joint marketed events, engaging with not only your email market

To many people think that Facebook is just selling stuff, but there is a lot more that you can do with it. In Restaurant Autopsy, we talk about a Restaurant that looks like it is entering the Groupon Death Spiral :(.  There are a lot of things that you can do that are free or don't take a lot of time, or are free and don't take a lot of time, and yet they still don't get done and this is how Restaurants end up using Groupon out of desperation to try and keep the doors open. We look at the Lobster Cave's Groupon strategy.  They are one of the few Restaurants that have a decent discounting strategy. We look at how to run very cheap and cost effective Facebook campaigns and often the budget is just $3 per day. 1.  Sell stuff.  Have a think about what it is that you are selling and how you are reaching out to customers and prospects.  You can drive people to make an order and/or booking.  You can then make your marketing accountable.  Our FROLO and FORBS system will tell you where your bookings come from and this

Kyle Welter works at Tock, an ethical online booking and restaurant management software company.   We look at how Google Adwords works for Restaurants.  Not many Restaurants use Google Adwords, but companies like OpenTable and Dimmi use it very aggressively to come between their 'Restaurant partners' and the restaurant customers. We look at Arbitrage.  This is the process where you buy something in one market and sell it in another market at a higher price.  Companies like Dimmi and OpenTable use Adwords Arbitrage to steal your customers contact details (and sometimes they don't share them with you!) and as well as creating the impression that it is their marketing that is bringing customers to you, when in fact it is often your existing, regular customers that OpenTable is charging you a higher price to take that booking. The email address is the easiest way to communicate with your customers and Adwords Arbitrage allows Dimmi and OpenTable to get between your customers  Online Ordering has very similar prac

We discuss some of the retargetting methods for Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels.  One of the Restaurants featured in the Cheap Eats guide 2017 for Melbourne only had a Menulog website.  It had Google Analytics tag manager and the Facebook Pixel on the website they provided to the restaurant.  Menulog makes a lot of money out of these marketing techniques.  They aren't too hard to set up and every restaurant should have it set up for them. Chef Shaun Quade's night on Masterchef required a lot of preparation.  We built a website for Restaurant Lume that had the pixel installed, had Google Analytics installed.  It was designed to scale, with a lot of visitors at once and it was designed to show the Restaurant of in the best way.  Chef Quade has some amazing photos of the food and we needed to display them in the best possible way. The first mistake people make is not having a website.  The Website had 10 people on the website at once before the show.  The traffic jumped to 50, then to 300 in the space of mi

We talk about the Masterchef Effect.  The Masterchef Effect occurs when your Restaurant gets a huge amount of publicity.  It could be from getting a great review on a popular website, winning an award, have a meal or event go viral or being featured on national TV, like Masterchef.  Too many restaurants aren't prepared for the Masterchef Effect and as such they miss out on the ongoing benefits of their huge Public Relations win.  In this two part podcast, we examine the preparations 20 restaurants have taken after being featured in The Age Top 20 Cheap Eats for 2017 list and what happened to Restaurant Lume when Chef Shaun Quade was featured on Masterchef. The Age has released the Melbourne's Top 20 Cheap Eats for 2017 list in Melbourne.  Here are 20 restaurants that have done a great job of bringing together a team, the ingredients, the menu, the FOH experience and the marketing.  (No point in having the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of!)   The Cheap Eats guide has just 3 lines of text about ea

Hooray - Episode 50.  Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to the Secret Sauce podcast since we started. We look at how a lot of Restaurants miss some fundamental marketing steps and when they get a great public relations win they aren't in a position to capitalise on that win.  Too many restaurants don't have a website, they don't have the Facebook pixel installed, they which means it is a lot harder to build a strong brand and find new customers and turn them into repeat customers. We discuss what intellectual property and intangible assets.  These can have an impact on the price that you pay when you buy a restaurant and definitely can impact the price of the restaurant that you sell for. Does a restaurant have an email list?  How big is it and how  Domain Names - These are sometimes registered by aggegators like Menulog, or they can register a similar name. Facebook Pages - who is the owner of the Facebook page, who has access to it? Do you have an unofficial Facebook Page? Is there a site th

We talk to Robbie Doyle from Buy Grow Sell about the pitfalls and opportunities in negotiating a Restaurant property lease. This is particularly topical in Australia, with Sumo Salad putting two leasing companies into Administration because of the difficulties that they have had in negotiating the leases with Westfield.  Westfield, like a lot of shopping centre owners have tried to respond to decreasing retail trade by increasing the experiential opportunities for customers, and this has seen an increase in the number of restaurants in shopping centres with no increase in customers, in fact some shopping centres are seeing decreasing foot traffic. Where can restaurant owners find properties that have affordable rents? We discuss some of traps that can be included in a lease offer. We look at how many restaurant owners buy their property versus leasing.  Buying gives you a friendly landlord, but it is expensive and if the restaurant goes badly, you have a struggling lease and a struggling tenant to deal with a