We talk about our new Marketing Metrics dashboard, providing detailed information about customers, orders, bookings and Facebook. We’re going deep on restaurant Facebook marketing.

We look at the Facebook ad grid, with Avatars and Benefits.  Who are the customers that you are looking for in your area.  If you think it is people who like your cuisine in your local area, you need to be a lot more granular to create marketing campaigns that really resonate with your customers.  This is breaking down your customer base into the specific niches.

We talk about Duncan Robertson from Duncan’s Thai Kitchen, the Holy Basil Thai.

We go into the Avatars that we created for Rooster Burgers, our test Restaurant and discuss some of the benefits that we would provide those customers.

We talk about some of the ideas to come up with innovative marketing campaigns that can dramatically increase the number of customers that they bring in, along with the segmentation options that are available in Facebook.  Plenty of interesting options that can really help you target new customers very effectively.

We look at how to take great photos for your Restaurant, quickly and easily that will help your create killer marketing campaigns and also be great content for your website.


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Podcast transcript on Advanced Facebook Marketing Campaigns Part I – Segmenting

James Eling: Hey, it’s James from Marketing4Restaurants and welcome to episode 28 of Secret Sauce, the restaurant marketing podcast. Advanced restaurant Facebook marketing, session one. Segmenting.

Voiceover: Some restaurants are quiet, lose money, and the owner works 70 hours a week. Other restaurants are busy, profitable, and the owners work a few hours a day. What’s the difference? They have a secret sauce. Join James from Marketing4Restaurants as he helps you come up with your recipe for restaurant success, your Secret Sauce.

James: Hey everyone, welcome back. Had a lot of exciting feedback about the emergency Facebook marketing podcast that we did, which is a little bit sad because it’s the kind of thing that, you know, you shouldn’t get too excited about. Because it’s the kind of thing that you shouldn’t need to be doing. But hopefully it has helped some people get a bit of extra cash in the door. And I think that that’s the whole opportunity there, rather than running to something like Groupon to be doing that sort of thing. There’s much better ways that are a lot more sustainable for you in your restaurant.

So, today we’re going to be talking about advanced Facebook marketing techniques, and this is the first in a series of three. Today we’re going to be talking about segmenting, which is something that I’m really passionate about. Something that we do here a lot, both for ourselves and also for our customers. A really exciting way of reaching out to customers in a very, very cost-effective way, and I think it’s cost effective because not a lot of people are do it. Which is really cool.

But before we get into that, I just want to talk about a little bit of exciting news that we’ve got in the marketing for restaurants seen. Jason, one of our developers, has been working away for a while now on our new marketing metrics screen. So, in the back end of marketing central, which is the dashboard that all of our customers with websites or using the free restaurant online ordering system, or the free online restaurant booking system they get access to marketing central. And one of the things that we’re putting in there is we’re doing a better way of surfacing a lot of the information that’s coming out to our customers.

So, now obviously this, we’ve got some data here that is generic. But what it’s going to enable people to do is to look at the number of bookings that they’re getting and then work out how well they compare against other restaurants. So, are you above average? Are you below average? And we’re doing that for bookings, orders, customers, and website. And I think they’re the four really big things that you want to be sort of looking at. And the exciting thing about this is this is just phase one. We’re going to be adding a lot more ways to view your data.

So, what we have been doing up until now is just sending out an email on Monday. Monday is Data Monday for Marketing4Restaurants, it’s when we send out all of our emails. And it’s interesting because we send out emails and sometimes they’re quite confronting for our customers, and they’ll say, you know, “You’re below average in a metric.” And so, we generally from the more proactive customers we’ll get an email back saying, “Why am I below average and what can I do to fix that?” And I think, it’s really quite good because a lot of people realize that, you know, hey this is the first step in fixing the problem is knowing that you’ve got a problem.

And they’re now realizing that, you know, there’s work that needs to be done on their website or there’s work that needs to be done on driving more bookings. And so, there’s a lot of ways that we can do to help with that. First step is getting that data out there, and I think that this is going to be a really nifty tool to be able to help customers to be able to get a much better grip on what it is that they’re trying to do with their restaurant. Now, advanced Facebook marketing. So, these techniques I’m called them advanced, I think that they are advanced because I, based on what we’re seeing I think if you run a segmented campaign today, you’re probably only somewhere between one and five percent of restaurants who are doing this. And I think that that number is closer to one percent. Now, I know a lot of our customers when they come on board with us, they’re not doing this kind of thing. The vast majority are not doing this. They’ve got a Facebook page, you know, more than half the time.

More often than not, it hasn’t received a lot of love or it’s very generic. It’s just, you know, sort of, “Sell, sell, sell,” or very unfocused. So, the first step is to get the, you know, tidy up the Facebook page, then we start to talk to them about marketing, you know, spending some actual dollars. And it is getting increasingly difficult to be able to run an organic campaign with Facebook, it’s a lot harder to do than it was back in the day. So, that’s one of the things that you need to be really sort of thinking about moving down some of these advanced techniques. But it is really exciting, because hardly anyone is doing that. Which means that you could be picking up new customers for extremely low dollar amounts, and what is the value of the customer? So, what is their average spend multiplied by the number of times that they come in? now, do you have customers who come in once? That’s not uncommon.

And that’s not uncommon for great restaurants in tourist destinations. There are some restaurants that I love but they’re maybe on the Gold Coast or Hamilton Island, and unless you’re there you’re not going to be able to go and eat at that place. So, for tourist destinations they need to tend to work a bit harder to get a customer in because they don’t have a lot of repeat customers. Having said that, there are some restaurants in San Francisco and Chicago that I love going to. Now, I may only go to Chicago once a year for the NRA show, but I love going there and that is, I would view me as being a repeat customer of those places. So, now, compare and contrast that with a fish and chip shop who, if it’s in a residential area, much less likely to have people who buy from them once. If you’re not converting people in a residential area and you’re a fish and chip shop, or a chicken and chip shops, I would really be questioning the quality of your food because that is a very easily habit-forming type process and I know the fish and chip shop that we go to it’s okay, it’s not great. But it’s close and the ones that are a bit further away aren’t any better.

There was one that was great, there was a guy who was cooking up fresh, made his own potato cakes. That was a great place. He tragically went out of business because he wasn’t getting that story out about how good the food was, and I was travelling an extra 10 minutes. Last night I had Indian, so Friday night we normally have delivered Indian. I drove and got it because we were outside of their delivery area. It was 25 minutes to get home and I drove past home to get there, so I spent 50 minutes travelling. Because I really wanted a nice Indian meal and the four Indian restaurants that will deliver to our house suck, frankly, it’s really quite poor Indian. And I’m not really a big fan, like, we will continue to use them but last night I just felt like some great Indian food.

And so, I was prepared to travel because I knew that this place, small little restaurant, great Indian food, that was what I wanted. And as I was eating my Vindaloo last night, there was a piece of chicken in there, little bit of skin on. You could just tell that it had been properly cooked, really nice. That’s the way I like it. Not the, you know, sloppy, horrible stuff that the local ones deliver to. So, and this is the part of the differentiation that you’ve got to be starting to think about. I’m prepared to pay a premium and to go out of my way to get it. The other guys are really struggling with profitability and I know, and we’ve talked about this, they’re changing their recipes because of the fact that they’re trying to make up for the commissions that are charged by the online ordering people. So, a good way into segmenting. You need to start thinking about who it is that your target market is.

Who is the person that you’re going to be wanted to sell to? And this is one problem that a lot of people make in their restaurant marketing, they will say, “People in the local area.” You know, it’s very, very hard to come up with a message that’s going to work for people in the local area. A great tool that I’ve been using for a while that really helps you refine your target. When you’ve got a target in mind, it’s a lot easier to come up with a message. Then we’re going to talk about how you can deliver the message. And then we’re going to talk about evaluating it. Now, the big thing with segmenting, this enables you to focus like a laser, okay. It’s really cool. And the more focused that your marketing is, the much more cost effective it’s going to be. So, step one, identify your target market. I don’t want to hear, “People in our local area.” Because that’s a lot of people. Now, when you look at me, so I’ll get Indian foot on a Friday night. What it is that I am buying? Because last night I bought really good Indian food.

The week before I bought convenience because it was going to be delivered, I certainly didn’t get the convenience last night. It was a pain to get it. It was a 45-minute wait for pick up last night and that’s because these guys cook to order, they don’t have a, you know, a big thing of Vindaloo just sitting there waiting to be slopped out. These guys cook to order, and that’s why it tastes significantly better. This is where you’re starting to think about your product mix and who it is that you’re targeting. I’ve started to have a brief conversation with this restaurant. They’re not a customer, yet. They’re actually really quite cheap. So, I would be happy to pay a price premium. I would definitely pay a price premium if they delivered in our area, I’d like these guys to move into our suburb that would be fantastic.

But they’re actually quite cheap, and I think that this is a factor of their marketing. They haven’t got the work out, they haven’t created the demand to be able to get the price premium that their food deserves. So, how do you identify your target market? Now, this is a tool, the Facebook Ad Grid. Now, I’ve got this from Perpetual Traffic, which is a Facebook marketing podcast. I’ll include a link there. And I’ll also include a link on one of these that’s actually filled out so that you guys can download this and start having a think about the kind of people that you want to start putting in there. But there’s two ways that you’ve got to start thinking about. So, avatars.

Now, an avatar in marketing is the person that you are going to sell to. So, when I do marketing for Marketing4Restaurants, I start thinking about all of the things that we do and the reasons that people buy from us. Because the message is very different. When we want to create a message for chefs, that’s a very, very different kind of message because a chef wants to be in the kitchen focusing on great food. So, the benefits that we give them is that they can basically tick the box on marketing without actually having to spend any time on it. Compare that to, so we’ve got a lot of customers who are people, investors, or accountants. And one of the things that, the first thing that they do when they buy a restaurant, fix it up, and then flog it off. One of the first things that they’ll do it start going through all of the costs.

Now, if they’re using Grub Hub, Eat24, Menu Log, Just Eat, Delivery Hero, Dimmi, Trip Advisor, all of those guys with the online ordering, online booking systems, the first thing that they want to do is cut those costs. And particularly, if they’re doing online bookings, most of those come from their own website anyway. It’s a real no brainer to switch over to our free online restaurant booking system. So, my message when I target that person, so a person who is an accountant who works in the restaurant industry, I’m talking about saving money. For a chef this is the, you know, you’ve got great food, great value, great experience. You just need great marketing. Because you don’t want to have the best restaurant that no one’s ever heard of. Now, they’re two different, very different messages for two very different people. Now, you’ve got hooks. So, avatars and hooks, they’re the two things that you want to think of.

What is the hook that you have in your restaurant? And so, by hook I’m talking about benefit. Now, you might cook vegetarian food, okay. That is something that, for a certain avatar, is going to be really interesting. “I like vegetarian food. I like vegan food.” Have you identified those hooks? Now, you may not have identified those hooks. And this is one of the things that we talk to, when a new customer comes onboard. So, what makes you unique? “We cook Indian food.” “Right, and what’s different about it?” “It’s authentic.” “Right.” “It’s really good.” “Right.” None of those are real benefits that is going to get a customer in, because everyone says, “We cook authentic Indian food, and it’s really tasty.” No one says, “Our food isn’t authentic. Our food doesn’t taste that good.” So, you’re competing against something that everyone else is running with. When you start breaking it up into things like, “It’s vegetarian,” we’re starting to get into a little bit more granular about the benefits that you’re offering your customers. So, not saying that you can’t do that but it’s a more difficult message that you’re trying to get across when you’re trying to get to say that your food is authentic. You then need a picture of your chef in, you know, somewhere in India cooking an Indian meal. Where’s the picture of him at the spice market?

And is there a video saying, you know, “So, I use cardamom and the cardamom that I use is sourced from this place because there’s actually eight different grades of cardamom, and I use the highest grade of cardamom because cardamom really gives you that signature flavour in this, this, and this dish.” And if you’re using one of the lesser ones then it could have been stored for two years. “I’m using stuff that is fresh, it’s organic and it’s being treated in the way that is going to make sure that my dish tastes the best.” Now, I don’t know anything about cardamom whatsoever. But to say that you’re cooking authentic Indian food, that’s how you need to back that up. And you need to be able to get that message across.

Most people aren’t really going to be that interested. So, it’s very hard to run with that. I’m not saying that you can’t and if you do, do that I think that there’s a massive opportunity, because people are going to, once you start educating people about their food particularly someone who likes to cook Indian food at home. Once you start educating them about that, then that can make a really big difference to your value proposition. And that’s the kind of thing that Duncan Roberts from Duncan’s Thai Kitchen, that’s what he does. You know, he goes into how he cooks because he, you know, he does authentic Thai food. Well, how do we know that it’s authentic? Because there’s videos of him in Thailand and he talks about the way that he sources the food. He goes through that entire process. So, but he spends a huge amount of effort, he’s got a book, he’s got his own cookbook, okay. That’s a huge amount of investment.

What are the easier benefits that you can come up with? So, thinking about our little, one of our test imaginary restaurants that we’ve got is Rooster Burgers and they cook organic chicken burgers. Now, I’m actually doing this for Kebabs for reasons that I will show you, explain later. But just imagine that you run a restaurant that does delivery and organic kebabs. Now, this restaurant that we sort of set up in our mind, because we came up with a marketing plan for it because we wanted to start looking at the ways that we would use our products to market our restaurant if we had one. So, part of the value proposition was at lunch we wanted to target lawyers, accountants, and stockbrokers with a meal that was moderately healthy for them, tasty, good value, but most importantly we would deliver it to their desk, okay.

So, if you think a lawyer, accountant, or a stockbroker, now these guys work ridiculously long hours, okay. So, because they work so long hours they don’t want to catch the lift down and head out and then walk for 15 minutes to get to your restaurant, to get the food and then eat it, and then go back. Now, if they’ve spent an hour out of their day, that could be another hour that they’re going to be working and they may not get home until 10 o’ clock at night. So, what I wanted to do is to move up the value chain and deliver it to them because what am I delivering? Time. And for a stockbroker that’s hugely valuable. Same for a lawyer. Same for an accountant. These guys bill for time.

Now, in the city, in the CBD an accountant’s charge hour rate could be 200 bucks. Now, if it takes them an hour to get lunch or even half an hour, that’s $100. So, you can see that I don’t want to give them food, I want to give them time. I will deliver it to their desk, to their desk, that’s what I want to be able to do. So, part of our marketing plan was that we would go around and talk to the accounting firms, you know, put the flyers in their hands and then we would target people in those areas. You know, through Facebook, retargeting all sorts of interesting ways that we could do that.

Now, the interesting thing is that this is an imaginary restaurant, it’s not real. It doesn’t even have an address, but we do talk about the target markets that we target. And even though we’ve got a website for it, we still get phone calls every now and then from people wanting to place orders, which is a bit sad. So, lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers. Now, I’m actually going to put a link that where you can download this ad grid, so that you can see the kind of hooks that we’ve got. So, the hooks that we had was free WIFI. Now, free WIFI of course is sort of targeted at people who are going to dine in. So, we’re assuming that we’ve got dine in and takeaway. Delivery. Now, one of the offers that we wanted to put together was a kebab, chips and coke for $13.95. Now, of course I haven’t done any costings on this. So, you need to make sure that that’s costed out, but I’m assuming that that’s a pretty good deal and the last thing that we got is an organic kebab, okay.

So, we’re targeting people who want a kebab, chips, and coke but we also want that little kicker of it being organic. So, we’ve made a relationship with a chicken supplier and we would tell a bit of that story, you know, “This is where the chickens are raised, you can see that they’re all free range. This is what they eat, because we believe that you shouldn’t be putting any poisons in your body.” Now, that’s the kind of message. Now, that doesn’t relate to everyone, but it relates to some people. So, my main target market is people who want a really good kebab, but I’ve got the kicker of being able to target people who are interested in organic food. So, we’re going to have the organic story there, if people are looking for the organic story it’s going to be there. We’re probably not going to lead for it.

Now, our avatars. A lawyer, accountant, stockbroker who wants food delivered at lunch. We might target families, we might target single men, and we might target teenagers. Now, in the city, so free WIFI. Now, for a lawyer, and accountant, or a stockbroker I would talk about, you know, being able to keep up with the market with our free WIFI while you eat Melbourne’s best organic kebab. For single men, for single men in that demographic if they’re going to come in, if they’re going to dine in obviously if the free WIFI is why they’re coming in. Do they want to just come in for 30 minutes of an evening and, you know, watch some Netflix? They’re going to bring their iPad in. now, WIFI’s a really interesting one because it increases to dwell time.

Now, you need to be thinking about, you know, if seats are at a premium you may not be wanting to increase the dwell time of your customers. You need to then have a process where you’re actually going to reach out to people to say, “Can I get you another coffee? Do you want another drink?” Because what you want to do, if you’re going to be increasing dwell time and seats are at a premium, then you want to be increasing average spend. So, that’s just a little thing about WIFI. Teenagers. Now, free WIFI kebab and a Pokémon gym. Sounds like a perfect dinner to me. So, we’ve got one hook: free WIFI. But a very different message for lawyers, single men, and teenagers. Because they’re very different groups.

Now, delivery. One of our hooks: lunch delivered to your desk. Don’t stop billing the customers, “Eat now, get one of our great kebabs delivered to your desk.” And I love this messaging because we don’t need to talk about price, because we’re selling something that is worth a lot more than $13.95 which is our notional value of it. You could charge, you know a $3 delivery fee, a $5 delivery fee. The way that we notionally thought about this will be delivered on bike, you know, pretty easily. For families. Organic chicken kebab. Healthy family dinner delivered in 30 minutes. Right, so we’ve gone from lunch. So, we’re now talking about dinner. And we’re now trying to think about the kind of things, so in my mind I’m targeting this at a mum and she needs to get food for the family but she doesn’t want to get, you know, McDonald’s which isn’t very good for her. She wants to get it delivered, she doesn’t want to get pizza because that’s unhealthy. So, we’re trying to come up with, we’re really pushing the healthy message to a mum who is busy and just got home. I’m hoping that this is sort of highlighting, the kind of depth that I’m going to in coming up with these stories, because the way that we target these people with this story that’s how we’re going to get cut through.

For single men, for a single man, munchies? Get a kebab delivered. You know, some sort of story about that. Teenagers. Xbox and kebab delivered to your door. Now, I’ve said Xbox, but it could be PlayStation. How do I know? Because Facebook’s going to tell me. I could cut that market up into Xbox people, people who like Xbox and people who like PlayStation. The more targeted your message the much better cut through you’re going to get with it. And I think that, you know, this is a really great story, you know. “I’m playing Xbox tonight, wow, Xbox and kebab. Yeah, that sounds awesome.” You might even put a picture of the game in. you know, you might talk about what game they’re playing, what’s the latest game that people are playing. So, I filled this grid out just with some very rough ideas on restaurant Facebook marketing and, of course, you need to come up with your own hooks that play to your strengths and you need to come up with your own avatars.

And when you’re thinking about the avatars, who are the people that you can make the most money out of, you know. You don’t want to be focusing on people who you’re not going to make a lot of money out of. One of the things that we’ve talked about with a lot of customers is getting people to, focusing on single men who are living by themselves and targeting them with a cheap offer. Now, it’s a cheap offer, so you probably not going to want to get that delivered. Because then you’ve got all of the costs of delivering that. So, it’s going to be a pickup offer.

So, you’ve got to think about who it is you’re going to be targeting it to, the message that, you know, the offer that you’re going to target them with and then, you know, does this make economic reality? You know, do I want to sell this? So, we’ve come up with some really great avatars and hooks that we can start to do. And, you know, I’m keen to see, I’d like to get some feedback from people about the kind of hooks that you’re using and the kind of avatars that you’re targeting. A lot of this should fall out of your marketing plan, but we know it’s not going to because you probably don’t have a marketing plan. That’s alright. This is a shorthand way of getting there pretty quickly.

So, targeting options. This is just straight out of Facebook. You can target custom audiences and we’re going to be talking about a lot more about custom audiences in the second and third advanced Facebook marketing sessions that we’re going to do. Location, location. You must target by location. We’ve had too many people who say that Facebook doesn’t work but they’re running a campaign for the whole of the country. Food is pretty local, alright. Unless you’re running a chain food, it’s really local.

So, you need to be targeting areas where people are actually going to be able to come to your restaurant. Demographics, you know, you can target by household income, that’s interesting particularly if you’re fine dining or, you know, a cheap family restaurant. Age and gender, interests, behaviours, and connections. So, what I will do is I’m going to put this up on YouTube, as well, so if you want you can sort of follow through and I’ve got some screenshots of what it is they actually look like. And as I come up with a fake Facebook campaign just to sort of show you what it sort of looks like. Now, one of the issue with location is that you can only narrow down to about 10 miles, that’s a bit of an issue. Wouldn’t particularly work very well for us in our Rooster Burgers example because the way that we thought about the marketing plan for this, we’re actually targeting specific buildings.

So, you know, because of the fact that you’re in a high-rise environment, it’s not that hard to be able to limit yourself to just, you know, maybe four or five high-rises, you know. And in any large city, you know, New York, your catchment area could be very, very small geographically but still have tens of thousands of people in those areas. Which is great from a delivery point of view. So, you put the location in and that works more better I think in suburban type areas. Gender. So, when we talk about single men, we can put the gender in there. Age. The default for Facebook is 18 to 65 and I think you want to, you know, narrow that down a lot more because the way that you would talk to an 18-year-old is very different to the way that you would talk to a 65-year-old. And the great thing about Facebook is that you can come up with a message, you can come up with the exact same offer and you can sell to 18- and 65-year-olds, you just have a different ad targeting those different people.

The great thing about Facebook is that if target people within 10 miles of Melbourne, males aged 18 to 65, there’s nearly half a million people in that demographic. That’s a lot of people. So, one of the things you want to think about is the larger your audience the cheaper it’s going to be to get there, because Facebook will want to take your entire budget for the day however long that you run that. And if you’re only targeting a thousand people, you think about it. Not everyone’s going to log into Facebook every day. So, Facebook will charge you more because there’s going to be less people that it can actually show that ad to. We run some ads that are, you know, targeting half a million, a million people and the cost to actually get a lead from that is a lot cheaper. So, demographics. Household composition. You can do housemate-based households. Relationship status. Single. Single males living in that kind of environment.

Now, that’s a really exciting demographic, because these are the people who don’t, probably don’t want to cook for themselves. Perfect for delivery, perfect for a pickup offer. Particularly a pickup offer because you don’t have the costs of the delivery. You know, families for a family restaurant. You know, people with kids. All of those kind of things. When you start targeting people with kids then your offer can become very specific because what is it that you’re selling. It’s not a meal, it’s, you know, if you’ve got a playground a picture of the playground because mum and dad are going to be thinking about, “I can have 30 minutes while I eat the food to actually talk to my partner without the kids, you know, interrupting and crying and all of that sort of stuff.” You’re selling time with their partner.

Once again, that’s a lot more valuable, a lot higher margin. Because you’re not just selling the food. Where there’s experience, there’s margin. So, you can target by demographics, interests, behaviours, and a few other categories. In demographics there’s education. Now, why would you target by education? Well, what if you want to do a book club night? What if you want to start a book club in your restaurant? That’s an easy one. You might look for people who have a certain education level. Ethnic, affinity, financial, generation, home, life events, parents, relationship, work. Work is a great one, you know, targeting accounts who want to stay at their desks for our delivered food. Business and industry, entertainment, family and relationships – sorry, these are under interests. Fitness and wellness. You know, people who like vegetarian food. Food and drink. People who like steak. People who like a certain type of cuisine. Hobbies and activities, shopping and fashion. Sports and outdoors. Technology. Now, a lot of people say there’s only a few that you can really sort of target. I say that there’s, the question has got to be how do you target people who like marathon running. Now, so as I’m recording this the Olympics are on. Do you want to target people? If you’ve got big screen TVs in your restaurant, do you want to run an event when the marathon is on.

So, come in and here are three, you know, “Watch the marathon with us, here’s an offer. You know, a free beer,” might not work too well because they’re probably health conscious. You know, what sort of healthy snacks have you got while we’re watching the marathon? Now, these campaigns are very cheap to run. And if the marathon’s on, all you’ve got to do is turn that on, right. And then you’re running an event. So, the risk in running this is really low. Why don’t you have a crack? You’re going to find out what works and what doesn’t work. Because there’s literally millions of combinations in here when you do this segmenting, there are millions of combinations. Which is awesome because people aren’t going to be running campaigns targeting people who want to come in and watch the marathon. You’re going to create a little community of people who are going to come to your sporting events, you know. People who want to watch the football in a crowd environment.

One of the interesting changes I think is the number of people who are living alone, and that might be people who are traveling. And so, they’re by themselves. Or, people who just live alone. Now, one of the things that they’re going to crave is that sense of belonging. They’re the people who you can turn into your regulars. So, how do you get that person to come in every Friday night to watch the football? Can you get 40 people every Friday night to come in and watch the football match? Because if you can, that’s 40 people every Friday night that you can bank on.

Now, you should be busy every Friday night, but if you’re not that’s a way that you can fill 40 seats. What other events are there, and see this is the thing that’s awesome about Facebook and restaurant Facebook marketing. You know, Tour de France. What are the none sporting events out there that you can create something around? A book club. A language club. Go through each of these interests and think, “What would that look like in my restaurant? What would that look like?” To give you a rough example, my wife runs an IT company and through a strange series of events she had the opportunity to get an ice cream truck. You know, like a Mr Whippy can, you know, gelato. And the big question was far too many people say, “What would I do with an ice cream truck?” right. So, she’s got one for a day to do whatever she wants with it.

Now, this is the thing that’s annoying about marketing. Too many people say, you know, so she’s in IT, I’m in IT. Now, she didn’t do this but she said, “What could we do?” And that’s the question. What could I do? Most people have got really amazing, creative brains, we just don’t let them be amazing and creative. “I’m in IT, I don’t do that. I don’t do, you know, ice cream. So, you know, we don’t run events or anything like that.” So, what we did was we ran a “Customer Appreciation Day.” And so, we went we got a list of all of our great customers and we gave them a call and said, “We love you. We’d like to bring you ice-cream, is that okay?” And of course, they all said yes. Now, so that does one thing. One, it creates a much tighter relationship without customers. We got really good feedback from it, you know.

Sometimes when there’s customer service issues you find out about them in an informal way, which is gold because you can then fix it. You also find out about some opportunities, gold because you can capitalize on those opportunities. We didn’t stop there. We then went up and down those streets, because streets where our good customers where were full of other businesses that would be good customers for her IT business. And so, the team went up and down the street and said, “Hello, I’m from Extreme Networks local IT company. We look after this customer and this customer in this street, they’re really good customers of ours. And because of that we’ve just given them free ice cream. My question for you today is there anyone in this building who would like free ice cream?”

Now, surprisingly enough some people actually said no, which I thought was kind of weird. But people lined up. And you could see them coming and so we took photos of it, you know, because this is one of those things that sort of differentiates her IT company, you know, not your usual IT company. And what she did then was, as people were lined up she would say, “Hello, I’m Tina from Extreme.” And people, you know, the law of reciprocity meant that people wanted to give her something back, something that was meaningful to her. And a lot of the time it was like, “Yeah, our IT person’s not very good. We have this problem, we have this problem, we have that problem.” And she would just stand there going, “Gee, that’s no good. That would never happen with us.” Now, we did that and four weeks later we sold 20 PCs to a customer. And her IT company is great, they’ve been around for, like, 16 years, they’ve got a whole heap of really smart engineers. Great company. They bought ice cream for someone, and that broke that door down.

And now, the interesting thing is people look at that campaign in the IT industry and go, “Wow, you guys are geniuses.” No. I could never have thought of that, never in a million years would I have thought of that until someone said, “You can have a Mr Whippy van for a day.” Huh, what would I do with a Mr Whippy van? Interesting. So, as you go through these interests, what would I do? What would I do with that? People who are interested in this, how could I create a community around that? How could I create an offer that would be of interest to those people? You know, behaviours, automotive, consumer classification, digital activities, expats, financial, job role, mobile device user, purchase behaviour, travel, seasonal events. There are like literally millions of combinations. Millions and millions of combinations.

Mums who are interested in four-wheel driving. Retired people who are interested in history, you know. How does that work? Now, 99 percent of those aren’t going to work. That’s still leaves about a thousand ideas that you could run with, because depending on your restaurant, depending on the experience that you’re aiming to provide, there’s a lot of opportunity. And of course, you can run these on the nights that are really quiet. These campaigns are going to be cheap to run, we’re not going to talk about costings in this one but we will talk about it in the second or third episode. So, you can run one of these probably with minimal effort and, of course, let’s just say you want to set up a history club. You’re going to target people, so you’ve got your restaurant is set up in an old English pub.

So, I’m making this up as I go along. Now, you’re going to talk about history. What about, could you do a joint venture with a school that teaches history? A local author who writes about history. A local museum who has volunteers. Do you want to give those a free meal and they’ll come in and give a talk about the history of the town? And do you target that to travels? Or, you know, there’s a lot of things that you could do. And we talk to a lot of restaurants who have no one or five people on a Tuesday night. What if you got 10 people to come in at 6:30? And then all of a sudden, you’re the restaurant with 10 people, which as people go walking up and down they say, “This is the restaurant with 10 people, I will go in there.” So, that 10 turns into 20. Interesting.

Then connections. So, you can target, people who like your page, people who are attending an event. You could use events in Facebook. Friends of people who are connected to you. That can work, as well. You can exclude people who are connected to you. If there are people who like your page and you’re going to run a really, really good offer, you don’t want to destroy the value that you’re creating by having those people coming in and claiming an offer. And this is one of the big issues that people have is, you know, and I know I was talking to someone about four weeks ago now and he was talking about Groupon. And he said, “I hate it.” Because he got a lot of people who came in and they were always low spending, because that was the kind of people that they were. And he got his regulars who were like, “This is great, I’m eating for 50% off.” They were going to come in anyway. You can exclude this offer to people who already like your page. So, whoops, your message.

So, what message is it that you want to get out? And so, part of the message is going to be around you offer. So, your offer and we’ve already talked about the hook that you’re using for the avatar and how you’re going to message that. Now, I’ve got a photo which I’ll put in the show notes, and I would like some honest feedback on the photo. Because, you know what, I think it looks pretty good. This is actually a kebab from one of our customers and I wanted to do some, just do a quick photo for them for their website. And they’re local to us, so we went out and got kebabs for everyone and before I devoured mine a took a photo with it. Now, I’ve got a moderately good, not digital SLR, a moderately good compact digital camera which I took the photos with. But just out of interest, just out of interest, I took one with my new Samsung phone.

So, I thought just what would it look like? So, the image that I’m going to put up on the website, that was taken with a mobile phone. Now, this, from my point of view, this is perfectly usable. Perfectly usable. So, I’ll put this picture up. And I think it looks great. I don’t have any problem with that and it’s perfect for Facebook, perfect for putting on your website. There’s no real dramas with that whatsoever. I took this photo in five minutes. So, the big thing that I did was I made sure that I laid it out on a table which was right next to the sunlight. So, this is taken in almost direct sunlight, and I think it looks great. I think there’s no real problems with that whatsoever. If I can do that in five minutes, what could you do if you were going to spend half an hour on a marketing campaign? Or, even less? You don’t need to be spending that long to be able to get this kind of quality out there. So, the next step is to deliver your message.

So, we’ve come up with our offer. We’ve come up with the group that we’re going to target it to, and in one of the other advanced restaurant Facebook marketing ones we’ll talk about how you actually put that message out there. This is probably the easy bit, we’ll talk about budget so that you’ve got an idea about the amount of money that you want to be spending. And we’re also going to talk about evaluating the message. So, I think that if you’ve got a clear call to action and I think that that really needs to be around making an order online, or making a booking. You want to tie that in with your marketing system. So, our online ordering system and our booking system, that will give you an indication of how successful your marketing is.

Now, the other thing that you can do, of course, is you can tie this in with a simple call to action. So, “Mention this offer when you come in and get a free blah.” Now, it’s a little bit old school but these are the easiest campaigns that you can do. “Mention this offer for a free dessert.” Now, people are going to be driven to tell you, “I saw this on Facebook, can I please have my free dessert?” That’s nice and easy. You can get a little bit trickier with it, you know. Experiment with, “Share this on Facebook,” or, “Come into the restaurant, tell us about the offer and share it on Facebook and we’ll give you a free dessert.” That is another way that you can increase your social sharing. Now, some people are less, the virality of your restaurant Facebook marketing.

Now, some people are a little bit hesitant to do that, you might get them to check in like something like that. There’s plenty of ideas out there that you can try it, I think that this is the big thing you want to be focusing on is how do you evaluate the success of it? And the big thing that you want to be doing is you want to, you’ve got to keep score somehow. If it’s for bookings that’s a very easy thing, you’ll be able to see which bookings come in from Facebook. Very simple to do, and then you can say, “Right, I spent $5 a day for, you know, let’s say 10 days and it generated 20 seats.” Now, that’s not a really, I don’t think that that’s an incredible result. I would like to see a higher result than that. the important thing is that you’ve spent $50 and you’ve bought in, you know, a thousand dollars’ worth of business. Now, let’s say that food is 30% of your costs, that’s $700. You’re looking at 14 to 1, that’s a pretty good return.

As one of the big things with Facebook is you can’t leave these campaigns going forever because those who, you’re going to be showing the campaign to the same people over and over again. Those who like the offer are going to take it up, those who don’t aren’t. So, at some point your cost per customer is going to increase and you’ll need to come up with a new offer. And then what you want to do is recycle, you know, so I want a monthly or quarterly basis. You’ll go back to that campaign or back to that offer and run it again. But pretty easy to do. So, we’ve covered lots of interesting things today. We’ve talked about how to segment your customers, all of the ways that you can do it.

Coming up with an offer and then putting it out and evaluating the effectiveness of it. There’s lots of things there to do, this is an advanced restaurant Facebook marketing technique. But I think we’ve, as we’ve gone through this hopefully you’ll have seen it’s not really that advanced. It’s not that complicate for you. So, hopefully you will get some ideas our of it, hopefully you’ll be able to run a much better campaign which is going to convert customers for you at a lot lower price. That’s it for me. Have an outstanding day.

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