Restaurant with no birthday club, no catering and no delivery. Do they like money?...

Hey Offliners,

I'm going to throw a monkey wrench at you today.

But, it will be worth it.

See, I know that reputation management and mobile marketing is the hottest thing in offline marketing these days, but there is soooooo much more to getting diners to come through the door.

Don't get me wrong.

Reputation management is vitally important to a restaurant, but if a restaurant owner needed sales by this weekend, would he be clamoring to hire you to improve his online reputation?

Probably not.

However, if his reviews are in the toilet he definitely should be hiring you at some point, but just not for the weekend sales push.

Anyway, I've always had a few concerns about offering reputation management in my offline business.

For starters, what if their terrible reputation is earned and deserved? What do I do then?

Put lipstick on a pig and pucker up?

I think not.

Of course I realize that most restaurants are run by good people trying to provide good food and good service, but the guy who has twenty or thirty bad reviews definitely has some issues.

Now, when it comes to sms/mobile marketing, that has the potential to be a real gamechanger for most restaurants.

However, are the marketing messages mostly discount driven?

If so, that's a dangerous way for a restaurant owner to train his most loyal customers to take action and it can be the worst possible way to introduce people to the restaurant, unless a upsell funnel is in place.

That's what makes Groupon so dangerous for most businesses.

Just think about it for a moment.

Would you only want your best clients to consistently hire you because you're running a sale and bleeding profits left and right.

Of course not.

In reality, you want clients to hire you at premium prices in exchange for providing premium value and services to them.

Sure you can run a sale from time to time, but it certainly shouldn't be something you do every single day all day long.

That's business suicide.

I've personally learned that lesson the hard way.

So, what's the answer to the question of what should you be trying to do for a restaurant to bring in more guests and diners.

Well, the real money-makers are birthday party's and events related to birthdays, catering and delivery.

That's where most of the independent restaurant owner's make a killing.

They can add all types of valuable incentives and higher priced items when they are offering those specialty services.

So, the real question is, are you going to be the marketing consultant to help them get those programs up and running.

Or do they have to hire a expensive marketing consultant like me to do that while you're just running a back-linking campaign to push the good reviews above the bad ones for a few hundred dollars?

I know which one I'd rather be, but that doesn't really matter.

What really matters is which one would you rather be?

Now, go close some deals,

Chris

P.S. I realize that some of the big fast food chains offer none of the three, but they do offer fast food. If you're working with a independent dine-in restaurant the things I said above most certainly apply.