Restaurant Digital Strategy?

Hey friend, it sounds like to me you have yet to determine your average customer lifetime value. You say even if you generated a $22 cost per lead it wouldn't be profitable because of the average spend at the restaurant. This is assuming the customer will never come back or tell anybody else about the restaurant.

The first step is to calculate an average customer lifetime value so you know how much you can spend to acquire a new lead and customer.

If your average customer lifetime value is low, it means the main issue is with the food no offense. In the restaurant industry, average lifetime value should be high considering we all have to eat 3 times a day. I know I've been known to frequent my favorite restaurants once a week or once a month.

Building an email list that you can promote special dishes to is great! I'd try and offer special dishes that they can only get for a limited time only vs offering discounts. This is a great way to add scarcity to your offering without having to discount your food.

Aside from that, PPC Ads can be very confusing. I suggest talking with a professional regarding your campaigns.

What steps to you take to capture as much digital Information about the customers who currently eat food at the 7locations

Are those customers aware that you have seven locations .

If you are starting with no budget figure out how to do more business with current customers

Hello Panda

We are a large UK based Agency but we also operate in the US. Most of our clients are small business's, and they include small restaurants. We have added 4 new Pizza shops to our client list just in the last 10 days, and would have well over 200 small restaurant clients.

So my first comment is answering this: "the more I look into it, the more it appears to me that digital marketing for restaurants, is in fact, NOT worth it"

The reason you say that lies within your opening sentence:

"Hi. I'm a bit of a newcomer to the digital marketing game. I recently took over everything digital for my family's restaurant chain."

If online marketing for restaurants was in fact "NOT worth it", then we must have a lot of pretty silly clients, paying us month after month for something that gets them no benefit.

Then next - "Smallish budget (of course. about 1k/month)". Do I understand that correctly, your family is willing to only spend $1000 a month between 7 restaurants? That comes down to only $35 per week per restaurant. Some people would spend more than that on promoting their garage sale, and you are talking about promoting a business? I couldn't even advise you to change your window signage each week because that would far exceed the $35 a week per restaurant budget that you have.

I can't give you any detailed advice, the 4 new Pizza clients comes from a test campaign we are running prior to a larger campaign targeting restaurants both here and in the US, so our next client may be the restaurant just down the street from you.

But some advice I can give you is: Forget about PPC, you know nothing about it and cannot afford it anyway. You have done well in building up a 11K mailing list, so come up with more ways to use it. You need to be creative in finding other low cost ways of promotion, similar to your use of your email lists. That is what we are doing for our clients, we know they are small business's and don't have large advertising budgets. We would be leveraging your existing customers to help promote your restaurants, at very low cost to yourselves. I like DABK's suggestions to you,

Cheers
Lindy

I would suggest you need to be devoting an amount of time into your google business account. you NEED ratings. you NEED customers taking photos. You NEED customers leaving rave reviews. You NEED Google to work for you and not the other way around, meaning do the above things and Google will deliver the door traffic for free based on social signals and Googles local end users based on previous experiences vs paying Google to reach people that have absolutely no interest.

And now you are reading this thinking what the FLIP is this guy talking about. Go into Google Play or iTunes and download Googles app "Contribute" and start playing with it.. learn all about it, and USE it yourself.

Do all 7 of you locations have a Google maps entry? If not you will be able to include all of your locations. Do they all have images? if not you will be able to add them.

You suggested that the website isn't working for you? how specifically do you know that? do you have a mobile dedicated site? and NO I do not mean responsive. Can they get directions to each of your locations front door using Google maps? Is your menu available online? Do you push take out order at all as in... drive to the National chains parking lots around you and identify the "To GO Order" parking signs. My local McDonalds has 4 spots for goodness sakes.

Focus on this.. and get your family out of 1990 and bring them up to speed on the current trends of today and moving forward. Bottom line is you can only turn so many heads an hour even if you ran at capacity... To Go can increase that number. To Go can increase the convenience of your SERVICE, and probably increase that Value over lifetime number from figuring once a month to once a week.

Its very clear your family is set in their ways.. and want to keep things the way they have been, and yet every other restaurant around you has changed - its cute its quaint, but its a fast track to closing 7 locations doors over an amount of time.

Hope that Helps!

I agree with much of what others say here. For a brick-and-mortar business, your first order of the day should be to make sure your local SEO is on fleek. Optimize the hell out of your GMB profiles, work on getting into the local 3-pack, and do whatever else you have to do so that local searchers find you easily.
After that, an 11K mailing list is actually really good, so focus on growing this and using it to your benefit. If done right, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing and you have already made great progress there, so use it!

Thank you all so much for your imput, it's been very helpful. I'll give a bit more context:

My challenge has been to try to illustrate/prove the ROI of digital marketing to family and I'm not sure how to go about doing that (though you have all shed some light). Sure, I can get more people to visit our webiste, more people to follow us on Facebook/IG, and get our name in front of more people, but it's been hard to get approved for more money to be allocated without somehow illustrating direct ROI.

Getting people to look at our website/social surely builds awareness but because it's fast-casual and does not take reservations/online orders, it's hard to illustrate how spending thousands for people to see us directly translates into in-store returns... this is obviously not a new phenomenon: how do you measure the direct ROI of a billboard or a press story? - same challenge.

Our GMB, Yelp, and Social profiles are all fairly well built out and have over 2000 cumulative reviews with over a 4.5 star average - I have already dedicated a significant effort towards this. SEO could always be improved but we're doing alright... something I'm also working on. Emails are collected at the POS, part of why the list has 11k already.

I know it's a nebulous question with a lot of possible answers, but I am just trying to find the best platform/strategy to drive IN-STORE purchases with demonstrable ROI. You all have confirmed a lot of my suspicions and I appreciate your input. I think demonstrating the lifetime value of a customer is a great idea that will hopefully help me get more funding soon. Cheers.

Before you work on the expansion, start with working on building a brand along with a loyal customer base. Once you have an idea of what is your customer profile like it will help you plan your marketing activity around it.

You should focus on customer loyalty of the restaurant itself. Offer them a discount for leaving your email, for following you on Facebook, etc ... At the same time, agree that with ads on Facebooks. Try to get good reviews on Apps like Tripadvisor, etc ...

I think the only thing you need to do for now is to develop customer loyalty. Let your digital marketing strategy focus at encouraging previous customers to come back. Find a clever way of obtaining their contacts and use them to encourage repeated buying.

My advice is to try email marketing as an alternative strategy for your restaurant success, email marketing has the highest ROI for any business and can easily be set up and strategized for your own personal goals.

How is the food? Is it good? Do you get repeat customers? If you haven't got good reviews..you need to work on food. No screaming and hollering in the internet is going to make them come, maybe just for a little while... Once you've got the food ironed out, you need to get as many ppl as possible to be compiled into a data, so you can run mass promotional campaigns. I think nailing down to conversions may be too granular for a casual restaurant. You basically want them to remember your restaurant when they feel hungry...that can only happen with branding campaigns. You can cross promote your restaurant with businesses in your local areas that are not your direct competitors. Small grocer stores, barber shop etc can bring traffic your restaurant via cross promotion. You can run geo targeted campaigns easily via facebook, google, youtube [ The 3 big gorilla]

I believe digital marketing can work for a restaurant. Have the right strategy in place and things will sort themselves out .

What I like about the bricks and mortar business is that you can actually lynch customers off the street with banner campaigns using hired marketers parading the streets; and that you can also circulate fliers around the neighborhood with special offers in-print. Online marketing for a restaurant? Unless it's an enormous brand with outlets in every corner of every street... I know I exagerated there a bit, but you catch my drift.

one thing I would suggest is for local marketing you really need a feel for the area and it must be real difficult seeing that you are in Argentina. So, I have to wonder if your family has a chain of 7 units then they are successful and why would they hire you a couple of thousand miles away to do their local marketing. It makes no sense even if you are related.

al

I'm surprised that nobody mentioned "online ordering software for restaurants."

What about leveraging Google my business. You should enlist all your 7 locations on Google My business ( Google Map) and define the area which you serve. Keep your listing on GMB updated and keep on getting reviews, adding pictures etc and see the magic. You can also run a paid ad campaign on GMB. This will help you get local customers.

The way I see it, you don't need to get more people into the stores, you need to get more sales out of the stores. That can be done by increasing the number of customers and increasing the average amount spent.

The first thing that jumps off the page to me is that there's no way to order online. Any restaurant that doesn't allow you to order online for pickup or delivery is at a huge disadvantage nowadays. If you're not on UberEats/DoorDash/GrubHub/whatever is popular in your area then that is the place I would start.

Those apps are where people are actively looking to buy what you're selling. That's the low hanging fruit in your space, in my opinion.

Otherwise, you're going to be advertising discounts to people who aren't actively looking to buy food, in most cases. Unfortunately, you're a few years late when it comes to doing like/share giveaways on Facebook which were killer for offline businesses back in the day.

And, as others have said, I wouldn't even think about buying ads until you know the lifetime value of a customer.

A sign of a great restaurant = people standing in line outside the restaurant!


Ways to speed things up for them and increase your sales:
A sign that says "Pre-Paid Orders Please Come Directly To The Pick-up Cashier"

An employee taking orders with an online app to include free download of the app.

An employee giving out free appetizers and hot/cold drinks.

How are you currently tracking ROI?

Digital marketing is very important for every business even for the restaurant business and this helps you to market your business in a more proper way because nowadays everyone visits your website before coming to your restaurant so it will give you the opportunity to get the customer for your business

Digital marketing help to increase your business online. it not only helps to promote your business online but it help to generate leads and brand awareness

Do you post in local Facebook groups? Many allow businesses to post for free once a week. Read the group rules. People often ask for suggestions, when someone from the restaurant actually responds and personally asks them to drop by it can effective.

Do you have offers for each night?

Kids eat free with adult purchase.

Wino Wednesday - half price bottles of wine (my personal favorite)

Trivia night. Winners receive gift certificates to the restaurant.

Support the local band/sports team. 10% of all profits go to a local school. This will bring in all the parents of these kids. Plus, it shows you care about the local community.

Discounts for community workers such as police, firemen, military, or teachers. Again, a way to show you support the people in your town.

Create these events and then spread the word through local Facebook groups and ads.

Rose

Sounds like you need brandin'.


Hot & searin' on your inspirational ass; live & juicy when you twerkin' your booty.


So ... you a pizza joint evryplace unspesho or Life-threttnin' Capital city exotica?


(This is a Princess thought exercise btw. Balance in all things ... kinda thing.)