50 – Your Restaurant story, Restaurant Brand, and Restaurant Intellectual Property

Your Restaurant Story

Hooray – Episode 50.  Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to the Secret Sauce podcast since we started.  In this episode we talk at Restaurant Intellectual Property (IP) and Restaurant brands.

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,  which means it is a lot harder to build a strong brand, find new customers and turn them into repeat customers.

We’ll discuss intellectual property and intangible assets. These can have an impact on the price you pay when you buy a restaurant. And it can definitely impact the price of the restaurant 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 that Facebook created for you?  You need to claim that.

Do you have an unofficial Google My Business account?  You need to claim that and ensure that the information is correct.  We have seen people’s business listed as ‘Permanently Closed’ but are still open.  Very few customers would go to a Restaurant that Google has listed as ‘Permanently Closed’ and, unfortunately, dodgy competitors may list your restaurant as ‘Permanently Closed’.

Check out your restaurants Google listing from an incognito mode browser so that you can see your restaurants as other people see it.

Look for fake websites.  We see thess all the time and there are thousands of restaurant brand jacking websites, set up by shady online ordering companies.

Brand jacking can mean that you are missing out on all of the emails of your customers.

Check the details of your Google Knowledge Panel.  Many restaurant aggregators can try to hijack the Google Knowledge Panel to hijack your customers.  We look at restaurant Adwords arbitrage and how it can be costing your Restaurant tens of thousands of dollars every year.

We talk about how companies, like Dimmi, can attempt to hijack customers look for your restaurant and drive them to a restaurant using Dimmi.  We wrote an article about what happened to Brae and how Dimmi was trying to steal their customers.

Make a booking at your own restaurant with a new Gmail account and see what kind of emails you receive from your booking company.

We finish off with a story of how restaurant aggregators want to minimise the impact of your brand and your story.  The only way they can stand out in these online ordering platforms is with price, which decreases their ability to really create some awesome food.

If you are having issues with your Google Knowledge Panel, Facebook Page, fake websites, or domain name hijackers, please contact the M4R team, we deal with these issues every day and we know the best ways to help you to protect your own intellectual property.



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Transcript of the podcast on Restaurant Intellectual Property

JAMES ELING: Hey, everyone! Welcome back. Wow, episode 50.  It’s been quite a journey to get to Episode 50.  It’s been super exciting, we’ve spoken to some amazing people and it’s amazing. The thing that I am really quite humbled about is the relationship that this podcast has built with restaurant owners all around the world. Every week, people have hitting us up on LinkedIn and Facebook to ask us a question about a specific podcast or just to let us know how they’re going with it. So, thank you very much to everyone who contributed or made a comment, or shared one of the posts.

If you are loving the podcast, please leave a review on iTunes. And when you see one of the ads’ podcasts episode come up, if you think it’s a good episode; please share, it really does help the story get out.  We produce this free and we try and share as much as information as we can about the lessons that we’re learning every day as our team is doing restaurant for marketing for customers. And I think we’re at 10 countries which is amazing and really exciting.

So today we’re going to be talking about your Restaurant’s story. A lot of people put a lot of effort into creating a great restaurant story. That’s all part of the intellectual property that you’ve got around your business. And we’re going to be talking about building and protecting your story to increase profitability because this is a fundamental part of marketing that many people miss out on–and it creates massive issues for them. I have seen people’s businesses shut [down]. I have seen people in tears. I have seen people laying off staff because they have missed one of these things.

We had someone was who talking to us and they said, “You know it’s really tough.” And I looked at the issues that all that they had. All through the process, about managing their intellectual property. And the sad thing was that these things could have been fixed for half an hour and at no cost whatsoever. This [particular] restaurant owner just didn’t know what they we’re looking for. Even if they had found them out they wouldn’t have known what steps to take. Before we get in to that, though, I’ve got a little interesting story.

So, I live in Melbourne. One of the local papers is The Age. And in my Facebook feed this morning, there was an article from The Age, “The 20 Best Cafes for Brekkie in Melbourne.” It was about 2 degrees when I went for a run this morning. I would have like to had gone out to have a decent brekkie–interesting lists of cafes. As a restaurant marketer, I was looking for: ‘What is the marketing angle on this?’ So, the thing is that these restaurants have gone and put together a great story.

Now, because you got to think about, when the writer for The Age, so Dani Valent one of the writers at Good Food, which is one of the related companies has come up with this list. Those restaurants have gone to create a story partially around their food, partially around the experience, the value they have create, the way that their front of house staff are trained. The way that they present themselves, the ingredients they use, the location that they’ve got, the view from the restaurant, the history of the restaurant–all of those things come together to tell a story.

And a lot of restaurants have got great stories, they’re not very good at telling it. But these restaurants [in the list] are probably pretty good at telling their story because they’re good enough to be listed as one “The 20 Best Cafes for Brekkie in Melbourne.” Now, hopefully, those cafes had a really busy morning today as people woke up just as I did, saw that article, I thought, ‘You know what, let’s go out for brekkie. Let’s try this cafe, it’s pretty close by.’ So as soon as I came to work, I loaded up the article and I looked at the websites for the 20 cafes that were there.

There was something I found that’s really interesting. So, four of them didn’t even have a website, just relying on a Facebook page. Dani has gone through and grabbed their Facebook page and included that link. Now, that can work. That definitely can work. While I didn’t check Instagram, so they might be crushing it on Instagram. I only had a quick look at their Facebook pages. One had 1,400 likes, two of them have 2,700 likes, and one had 900 likes. Now, that’s not a really good indication of how good their Facebook marketing is because they may or may not have bought likes. You know, they’re probably doing an above average job of their Facebook. But one of the interesting things is that they don’t have a website.

Now, the next step that I looked at for those that did have a website, only one of them had the Facebook Pixel installed–only one of those websites! So, five [percent]of the 20 cafes that were listed in that list. Now, to me, that is absolutely crazy.

The Facebook Pixel, for us, is a fundamental part of the marketing that we do to build relationships with our customers. So, if you don’t know how that works, you should probably go back and have listen to some of the advance Facebook marketing techniques, which is a whole podcast just on the Facebook pixel and how it can help you to re-target your customers. And this is the real important thing. As you’re trying to build a brand, you’re going to put picture out of your smashed avocado or whatever it is. You might have come up with something really innovative. If you’ve got a strong brand people are going to take that up a lot more readily. So, how do you build a strong brand despite repeated exposure? And probably the easiest way to get that repeated exposure is to tag at the same people over and over and over on Facebook.

 

When someone goes to your website and if you’ve got Facebook pixel installed, you can create a custom audience that can target everyone who’s gone to your website.  And so if you’re getting a thousand people to your website every month, you may find that 70% of those people are logged in to Facebook, which means in over six months, you’re going to have five and half thousand people in that target audience. It means there are people who are aware of your restaurant. You’re going to get a lot better attraction with the [Facebook] ad that you run to people who are in that audience. It is a really simple and definitely well proven way of running highly effective Facebook campaigns I think that this is something that everyone needs to be thinking about and the really fundamental part of the way that you can start to build a pipeline of people who are interested in your restaurants.

So these are 20 cafes who have great stories. Obviously, they’ve been high enough on the radar to get that written up. The sad thing is that all those people who gone to that website if they had their [Facebook] Pixel installed, they could then re-target them and say, ‘You remember, we’re in that list of that top 20 restaurants or cafes, maybe you want to come back. Maybe you want to try this food. Maybe you should try what we’ve got on this week on our specials.’ Oh yeah, I remember those guys, I haven’t gotten around to getting to them.

Everyone’s busy. You need that opportunity and go back and hit the market again and say, ‘You know, remember us? We’re still here we still got some awesome food–perfect for coming out on a Sunday morning.’ That message over and over again, sooner or later, you start to get the attraction with it and those customers come in. And if you are doing a really, really good job, then you got a really, really good chance of turning them into repeat customers. And that’s part of the process about finding new customers and turning them into repeat customers. So with that little bit of story, these guys have great stories on how to that relate to intellectual property.

What is intellectual property?

According to Wikipedia, it’s a creation of intellect for which a monopoly is assigned to designated owners by law. Intellectual property rights are the rights protection granted to the creators of Intellectual Property, that include trademarks, copyright, patents, industrial design rights, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets. Artistic works including music and literature, as well as discoveries, inventions, words, phrases, symbols, and designs can all be protected as intellectual property.

The other things I want to talk about is an intangible asset, that’s an asset which lacks a physical substance. Unlike physical asset, so your ovens–that is a physical asset. And if you own it, that would be part of the business that would appear on the balance sheet. And intangible assets are those that you can’t touch–and it’s usually hard to evaluate. It includes patents, copyrights, franchises, goodwill, trademarks, trade names, the general interpretation also includes software and other intangible computer-based assets. Contrary to other assets, they generally do not necessarily suffer from typical market failures of non-rivalry and non-excludability.

Now, some of the intangible assets, you were going to buy when you buy a restaurant. Just think about that. If you’re buying a space, and you’re going to do a Chinese or Indian restaurant, and there’s a pizza restaurant in there, then you don’t really care about the name of the restaurant. You don’t really care about their customer data base or any of those sort of things.

Now, if you’re buying a restaurant and you plan on keeping the name, then you should be looking to get these intangible assets. You should be looking for things like the domain name. The email list because these might be fundamental parts of the profitability of the restaurant. If you’re buying a restaurants and they’ve been sending out in an email to an email lists of 10,000 people on a monthly basis and they get a let’s say, an 8% response rate, that’s 800 people who are coming in and you know how the figures go by now. Three and half people for each booking. That’s 2,400 people booking, so that’s probably a 100,000 dollars in monthly revenue from that one email.

Now, that business is built on 1.2 million dollars of that annual revenue is built on that email list. And it is so easy for owner to omit that from the fact they got this massive email list. He might be going to build a restaurant in another location, he might be planning on selling a very successful restaurant, but then he’s planning on keeping the email list, emailing every one of those customers saying, ‘Hey, I’ve moved to a new restaurant and this is the new menu.’ He may actually then be taking those customers from you. He potentially might have a right to those customers. It would be very disappointing if you were buying this restaurant and the price and you won’t get that 1.2 million dollars from being generated by email marketing–and you won’t get that email list.

So, what are one of issues that you can run into around intellectual property?

Restaurant Domain Names

One that I see is domain addresses–the rights to the actual domain for the website. We’ve been meaning to do this. One restaurant got a renewal notice from Menulog, but their website is doing business with us [Marketing4Restaurants] and they are using FROLO (Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system). I was, like, ‘Why are we getting this now? And our team went through it. We had to look at it and so—oh, because they [Menulog] own your domain name.’ And she [restaurant owner] said, ‘How could that be? And it’s because they [Menulog]registered it. You [restaurant] didn’t have the website. And when we [Marketing4Restaurants] created the website, you [restaurant owner] didn’t go through ownership of the domain of the website transferred to you [restaurant owner].

Now, I personally think that’s a pretty dodgy practice: to go register a domain name for a restaurant when you’re not that restaurant. So, and you can generally get it transferred fairly easily. These people haven’t gone through that process and we actually do this quite a bit because it’s a very common occurrence. I will talk a little bit more about that. How can that be problem a little bit more later in the podcast.

Protecting your Restaurant Facebook Page

The next thing that we see as being a problem is your Facebook page. Quite often you’ll see that the Facebook page is owned by as far as Facebook sees it. Sometimes the case is the restaurant  owner, who is 65 years old, lets a kid run and created a Facebook page, just because the kid suggested it. Then when the kid gets sacked for his poor performance, he simply forgets that he is the owner of the Facebook page. I have also seen instances wherein a kid gets sacked and he seeks revenge by posting stuff Facebook page that are not in the best interest of the restaurant. This leaves the restaurant in an awkward position wherein its Facebook page are filled with derogatory posts. Now the restaurant owner needs to think of a process to say, ‘No, we didn’t create the Facebook page but we are the actual owner of the Facebook page and restaurant.’ That’s a difficult and complicated process. So whenever you’re creating a Facebook page, you should make sure that you’re the owner of the restaurants, you should be the owner of that page. You can delegate out responsibility to some people. Some people can put posts up and you may want to delegate that load.

My personal opinion is that you should have someone in each shift who’s had 30-minute worth of training on Facebook. They know the kinds of things that they should be looking for to do a Facebook post and they should be allowed to post it. You don’t want to get an email, saying, ‘Here’s a photo from two weeks ago of some guy who came in and I thought it was a good photo, can you please put it up on Facebook?’ The guy comes in, it’s up on Facebook he knows that it’s up on Facebook and he likes it to himself and tags himself in at the restaurants. That’s the way you should be doing the Facebook marketing if you’re not going to be there every single hour of the week then you need to delegate that out.

I think that’s the way that you want to go. Obviously, be careful who you delegate it out to and monitor the kind of posts they’re putting up there. You can always edit those posts–that’s not a problem. And by using things like Pages Manager, it’s in your pocket. It’s with you all the time, you can monitor from anywhere in the world. Nice and simple, so much easier to control than having a Facebook page that is owned by someone else—you’ve got no control over that.

Now the next thing when it comes to Facebook Pages is, that if you have made a decision that to not have a Facebook page. You say, ‘We don’t get Facebook, we don’t understand it. We don’t think it’s worth the time. It’s going to waste too much time and effort. We’re not going to have a Facebook page.’ I’m sorry, it doesn’t work quite like that because Facebook decided that you’re going to have a Facebook page. This comes as a bit of shock to people. Here is your Facebook page. Oh, we never created one. Oh no, Facebook created it for you. They thought, ‘Who in their right mind wouldn’t have a Facebook page?’ But who in their right mind wouldn’t have a Facebook page? What they want, they want people to be able to say, ‘I’m at Bob’s Pizza Place.’ Bob hasn’t created a Facebook page. That’s fine, we’ll create it for him. Now, everyone that goes to Bob’s Pizza Place can check in, they can write reviews, they can do all of those sort of things that Facebook wants.

Now in a very, very similar way, you’ve got your Google My Business page. Google creates a page for you out of the information that it has about your restaurants. They might get it from the website. They can get it from a range of sources. But I think there’s a couple of things that’s important here. The first thing is that Google uses that information to present to people in the goggle knowledge graft. So if someone googles “Bob’s pizza restaurant”; it’s going put the, it’s going to say, let’s just discuss it with Bob’s Pizza Place. What we’re [Google] going to do is we’re going to get all of the information that we know about this place and where going to put it on the right hand side of the Google Search Results. So there will be a name, there’d be a link to the website, if there is one. There’ll be directions to where the restaurant is. There’ll be reviews because Google does reviews as well. And we all need more companies aggregating customers reviews, don’t we? He said sarcastically, but there will be reviews there. There is a whole heap of information: opening times, contact details, all of that sort of information is there in the Google knowledge graft. There are also some photos in there and a link to the menu as well as if you do online bookings, a link for bookings.

Now if you’re not running this, if you haven’t linked your website to a Google My Business account then Google is trying to work out what the opening hours are and they’ve actually got a program. This is where they say, ‘Ah, it looks like you’re at Bob’s Pizza Place. Is this the opening hours? Do they have off street parking?’ It will go through Google reviewers and ask them a series of questions to try and update the information that they got. The fact that Google has to go through your customers and not you, the restaurant owner–that may not be a good look for you.

The other thing that’s really important is, you are relying on the good intention of the people.  And some people don’t have good intentions. We’ve all seen the dodgy reviews that say that, ‘Bob’s Pizza Place is the worst pizza restaurant. I had Hawaiian pizza, I got violently ill and had diarrhea and vomiting and I thought I was going to die.’  We’ve all been seen that review. And we’ve all seen the responses. And the reviewer says, ‘I went in on Monday night and had the Hawaiian pizza.’ And then you see the response from Bob. ‘Hey, it’s Bob here. That’s really interesting , I’m not open on Monday nights.’ So not everyone’s got the best intentions.

Now, the scary thing is that someone could actually say that Bob’s Pizza Place is closed. And I’m not talking about closed now, I’m talking about permanently closed. When anyone searches that on the Google knowledge graph it’s going to come up with lettering permanently closed. This is so sad that I’ve actually seen it impact someone’s business. And as they going through the motions of winding up the restaurants before it actually closed. It’s hard to explain to Google that you’re not permanently closed. You have to explain that, we haven’t closed yet, but Google says that you permanently closed.

The same thing, the very same thing happens with Facebook as well.  You could claim this restaurants. Is this your business? You can claim it yes…it’s my business and it’s closed.  Sorry about that everyone …and it doesn’t…it may not be closed, it might be one of your competitors who wants to close it.  So that’s one thing you needed to be thinking about. Making sure that you’ve got control over your Facebook page, making sure that goggle my business page all set out.

Now one of the most important things that you can do to check the intellectual property of your business is, to goggle it.. now one of I like to do is …I was talking to a customer’s yesterday and he said oh…it’s interesting because  one of the business we just bought, when I first look at it, it was on the second page and I’ve look at it now and some of the first page so, it slowly moving up. Is it slowly moving up because the thing was I goggled it, I put this probably the exactly the same goggle, all search term into goggle which was just the name of the business and that for me, there on page two. Goggle keeps a history of the things that you’re looking for, and if you’ve look for and click thru on previous occasion on multiple times, it’s probably thinking you know what, his looks at Bob’s pizza restaurants 5 times, on the previous 4  times his click thru the  Bob’s pizza restaurants.  You know what is after, are recall is Bob’s pizza restaurants.  It will show it to you hard than it really is, so one of the things to do is to look at it in an incognito windows.

So if you’ve got chrome there’s a little arrow on the top right hand corner just under the X.  Under that new incognito window, click on that and that brings up a page that says you’ve gone incognito.  And there’s like a starlight, sets of glasses with a bit of a hat on.  Incognito mode is use for people who don’t want their browsing history tracked but the reason why I used it’s because goggle want reference your online profile so., Goggle has a massive profile about all of the things that I’m interested in.  Based on the things that I’ve been goggling.  If I’m goggling to find out where one of our restaurants is, I don’t to use a normal browser with… because Goggle knows that I’m looking for that restaurant.

I want to see what the normal public would get, and so the first thing you want to do, is open the incognito window and then just goggle your restaurants. You should be doing pretty well on your restaurants’ name but the thing that is scary is that it’s often things that can sort off trip you up. First thing that you should be thinking about is where you end upon the search rankings.

The second thing, that you want to be looking for is for fake websites. Because this where your intellectual property, your brand is being, could be at risk.  So one of the things that we see all the time when we goggle for  restaurants that’s come to us for help around, either  finding new customers or turning them into repeat customers is that, and the typical example will be, let stick with Bob’s pizza restaurants, and Bob’s URL, his web site is @Bob’s pizza.com. Okay, that’s what kind you’re of expecting to see.  Let’s just say it’s in San Francisco, the scary thing is when you goggle Bob’s pizza, and one of the thing that would come up is Bob’s pizza San Francisco.com.  This is a brand jacking website.  So this is someone has registered a domain name now, they want it to get Bob’s pizza because that’s the actual domain name that wasn’t available so they’re registered Bob’s pizza San Francisco and we see this all the time. It’s usually an online ordering company and what they do, is they create a website that is very similar, it will be their standard default website which just has the menu.  There might be a map, there might be a couple of reviews on there but it’s a literally a glorified menu page. That’s it. And because of the fact that a lot of people don’t do very good job with their CO’s.  There website probably comes up higher, than your website does.  Particularly, and so we seem Menulog doing a lot of this in Australia. Menulog log will have a link from their website, now Menulog is used by millions of people, —- a very highly traffic website, any link out of that is relatively well regarded by goggle.

So that depend means that your Bob’s pizza frank stern or Bob’s pizza seafood wherever is location is of it, that will come up higher than your one.  And the scary thing is then you’ve got customers who think that their ordering direct from you, are actually ordering from Bob’s pizzas San Francisco , or Melbourne or whatever the dodgy website that  they created is.

Why do people do this? So I’m in online ordering because of the fact that they’re probably taking anywhere between 10 and 35% of the order value.  What they want be able to do is they want to, because what was starting to see is because we’ve been talking about  this  for so long that you shouldn’t  be charge  for orders that comes thru your own website.  Some of them have started to do this deals where    I will charge you with 5% as handling fee if it comes from your own website or 10% and will charge more for when it comes from someone else.  Or they’ll often just market as this came from our network or this came from your website.  And I think that’s what Menulog does, I’m not sure but I don’t think charging different price yet.  What they’ll want it be able to do say you know, thru our website and they’re not going to say, which is Bob’s pizza frankstun.com.ru is.  They’re not going to say, we created a fake one to trick customers in to it. They’ll just going to say thru our website, we generated 75%, 80% or 90% of the orders.

That’s interesting when a customer’s moves to our free online, free restaurants  online ordering system, they’ve said  that they’ve  got customers whose says oh you know don’t forget to order direct  from us and because you can save, we’ll offer you something special or whatever they order is. They’ll say but I did order direct from you, no you didn’t.  You ordered from menulog.

The customers don’t actually understand it, this is so.. In the industry it’s called it brand jacking it’s like hijacking but they’re taking your …they’re inserting themselves in between you and your customers.  And they’re hijacking your brand so the customers thinks that they’re dealing direct  with the restaurants when in reality they’re actually dealing  direct with Menulog and of course, what’s the intellectual property of your restaurant? You know, it’s going be things like your email list, we talked about that the restaurants sending out 10,000 emails.  You’re not that guy, because you’re not getting the emails from those customers and if you’re not getting the emails then your been incredibly lacks in the marketing things that you should be doing because, I’ve got to tell you, if you’ve got email list of 10,000 customers who’ve eaten at your restaurants before and though the value was there and thought the food was there, was good. Then it’s a tribute to get that people come back.  It’s really easy.  If you’re not collecting those emails, then you’re never going to be able to send out an email to 10,000 customers who loved your food. Which restaurants you want to be? And seriously if you’re sending out to 10,000 you could be making $1.2 dollar and extra revenue. Over a year, not a month.  It would be nice to be able to that in a month.  You’re made a high volume kitchen though.

So, this is one of the things, you’re doing that goggle search and you’re looking for the kind of things that are coming up.  Now, the next thing to do is to have a look at the goggle’s knowledge graph.  When the transcripts goes up, I’ll get the team put up photos in of some the issues that we’ve said.  So Dimmi is quite the fairest for this. Oh now, before we move on to that, the other thing is, who else is above you? So you’ll often find if you Goggle’s Bob’s Pizza, you’ll often find, if your using an online ordering system or an online booking system that charges then you’ll often see they’re ad above your restaurants.  They’ll going to say We’re going tol partner with you and you know, just hope you take bookings online which on the face of it, that’s sounds really good. That’s a no brainer.

But the problem is, and this is the fundamental problem is that they’re e business, the consumer businesses they use restaurants for service delivery.  Whether for a booking or reserves a seat.  Or whether it’s an online order because this guy’s often don’t really care whether those go. They just want to make sure that people make a booking and they just want to make sure that people make an order.

So they will run an ad and I’m hoping to do an interview with someone who really understands this and really understand various of this for restaurants.   But it’s called adwords arbitrage and so let’s use the example of Dimmi, because they do quite a bit of this in Australia, open table does quite a lot of it in the United States and so we’ve read quite a few articles and talked to the guys.  The guys at talk are all over this because they compete quite a bit with open table and we’re starting to push up against the table open both here in Australia and in the United States. And restaurants serve a complaining about some restaurants also says but I get so much comes from the open table network or so much comes from the Dimmi Network and the interesting thing is, when you show adwords arbitrage is …and a lot of people don’t understand it which is why taken the time to go thru it today, so that you could understand.

Imagine with this scenario, you saw at Dimmi or open table that Dimmi charge $1 if the booking comes per seat, 1% per seat plus a monthly fee but let’s just focus on the per seat charge.  So the per seat charge is 1% if it comes from YOUR website.  If it comes from the Dimmi network then now charges you 3% so what they’ll do is they will run an ad words campaign because they know that people will going to click on that, you know, they see it. And it’s like in the ad it looks like it’s your restaurants.  The ad takes them to Dimmi and make a booking for 10 and before you know it, and the thing that is really sad about this, it’s probably, it’s often it’s a repeat customers.  And if it is a repeat customers, Dimmi’s done no marketing whatsoever, all they’ve done is once again brand hijack, and they’re trading of your great brand name. People said I would like to go to Bob’s pizza tonight. Bob’s pizza goes in to Goggle, bang…up comes the goggle ads words and they click to the Dimmi website, they make a booking for 10 that’s a $30 invoice to you. There’s two problems for that one, of course you’ve got to deal with no shows. If they decide to no show then, your $30 out of pocket, you didn’t even get any revenue whatsoever and, on top of that, you probably have a table of 10 for them so, if you don’t have a lot of walk by traffic, you unable to fill it your actually out of pocket of $30 plus the table of 10 which pizza restaurants say $30 per person on average. That cost $330 dollars now. The $330 that’s really going to do dent in to the profitable of the night, isn’t it?

At the end of the month, you get an invoice from Dimmi and Dimmi says look at the Dimmi network we generated a booking, this booking of 10 for you, are we fantastic when and they’ve done because, what they could have done is that they could have got a $10 fee if the booking come from your website but what they’re trying to do is they might have paid goggle %5.  Anywhere between $2 or $5 for that click and everyone makes a booking but if half of the people make thru that, make a booking, then they are able to, rather than getting a booking of, and making $10, they’re making $30 that 20$ difference funds the ad words campaign and they’ve get to build this dominant narrative about, look how good our marketing is and their restaurants sale. Wow this is amazing the marketing is really fundamental to what it is that we do and some restaurant owners get really upset about this when you explain it to them because they think, you know, they’re doing this for 2 or 3 years.  They’re been sharing their customers email detail with Dimmi, Open table don’t think they share their emails.

The online ordering guys I don’t think they definitely don’t share they’re emails. So, this creates a massive problem, you’re bleeding out customer contact details when another company that’s going to email out on behalf of the other restaurants to your customers and you’re paying for it.

So you want to look and see if there are ad words up there and one of the things that you’d to, look if Dimmi wasn’t  and open table weren’t doing this, I would say, you know, being their network  let them do some  marketing on behalf of your restaurants but the problem is they do this  adwords arbitrage so in general you need to be out of there network entirely because then they’re not going to run that ad words campaign, which I think is sad  because if they bring your new customers and that’s exciting and you’ll be quite. I think you’ll be happy to pay for that…but because of this  adwords arbitrage   issue then it makes it very difficult to be able to justify the added cost in being, remaining in the network.

Now, that’s not the only place you need to be looking at if you goggle search, the other thing is in   goggle knowledge graph because as I said before, there’s the booking and the online ordering tab in that information and one of the things that we’ve seen and so we we’re working with a couple of restaurant recently where this had happen.  You will goggle the restaurant and there would a,   under the booking’s thing,  would say Dimmi and you will click thru there, they wouldn’t even in, Dimmi’s booking system and so Dimmi had a little page on their website that said. Oh you try to book at Bob’s pizza, Bob doesn’t take booking thru Dimmi, try these other 4 restaurants that we think would be good substitute for that.

Now we wrote a blog article about this personally/recently and I will include the link to it so Dimmi had a page for Brae which is one of Australia’s best restaurant. So Dan Hunter is the chef out there does an amazing job, world’s famous restaurant and that the  thing that was  really  interesting about this is on the Dimmi pages says looking to book Brae, Brae doesn’t take on booking with Dimmi to book online check out this great alternative

Now, I’m not sure what sort of algorithms that they’ll using behind there but there was a link.  The number one restaurant that they thought was an alternative to Brae was Switch Lifestyles fountain gate.  Now I don’t want to say anything nasty about the guys at switch because I am sure that this wasn’t a apart of their thing but there ain’t no Brae.

okay so, there’s only one  brae and as I say, you know if it was a, I said I you know brae’s not taking booking, have you thought about Anika, have you thought about Restaurant Lume.  They would have  been too eminently  defendable alternatives but this is just a family restaurant Switch Lifestyle Fountain Gate and on top of that its about 300 kilometers from Brae, it’s no way nearer so, you need to be thinking about that, so what there trying to do is literally I’ll bait and switch and they’ve got a page there.  It says leave up the land some places can be describe as special and Brae and Victoria Beruga regent is just  that special among restaurant…bah bah…That’s that bit that comes up in the goggle search result.  Really quite scary and that pages is being put there so that they can then use the inset that into the goggle knowledge graph to be able to get those booking. It’s either, either think for the guys at brae, I don’t  think that made  any difference because if you search into  the book of Brae, you’re going to book a brae and you’re not going to be diswaited, you want a book of Brae and your certainly not  going to be booking at  any other  places.

 

There’s a pub in Aries in let, the place in the Valaret. None of those, there’s only one Brae so for them it’s okay but for you if you’re running a local restaurants and you see four of competitors up there  that could really really quite  nasty.  So same, same with the Menulog, Justeat, Grubhub, all of those guys. You want to make sure that none of those guys that you’ve  got your online ordering system in there and that link in the goggle knowledge graph is pointing  towards your booking system not somebody else’s. Because they’re just getting it from you. You know, there not doing any marketing all they done is inserted the information in there. And I think, that it’s really important you sort of understand that and that you keep on a look at for.  This is why I think, goggling yourself is so important.

Now, with your online booking system.  One of the things, that I think all online ordering system, one of the really, really powerful piece of advice that we give to restaurant is to make a booking at your own restaurant.  Yes, you know, if its free, then you’re not going received a fee, if it’s a monthly fee you’re not going to receive a fee, if it is per seat then you are going to receive a fee.  But I think it’s  really  important that you do that the best practice is  to signed up for  Gmail account.  And that, no one ever use before, record the users name and password.  Make the booking or the online order.  And then in a months’ time go back and just check your emails.  Because the thing is that a lot of restaurant are horrified when they find the kind of information that is sent to those email Addresses. So, Offers to other restaurants, discount to other restaurant, how can you built a loyal customer base and this I have spoken to about on numerous occasions.

The first time Tina use Dimmi, was for a Mexican Restaurant in Melbourne and on the Thursday after that she received the 50% offer from Dimmi to another Mexican Restaurant that was 3.2 kilometers away.  Now, its 50% off how can you built the local customer base when companies are sending 50% off coupons to your competitor to all of the people who have eaten at your restaurant. Its madness.  It’s really, really tough to build a local customer base when 50% coupons are on.  And this is why these aggregators, we think are really just Group on by stealth.  We all know how bad can be a group on can for a restaurant.

You don’t want to be using a group on by self-kind of marketing, so that is about it.  I think you know, you know, we can also talk about reviews sites as well. You know, you need to be on top of that monitoring what’s going on, or not.  Depends on what your strategies and how that’s going to play in. But I think, just sort of summing up, make sure that you have got a Facebook page that you’ve got control off.  You don’t want to lose control on your Facebook page.  Make sure that you got a goggle my business account set up.

In the show, no I’ll get one of the marketing   team, you know Jazmin, to put some links up on how to make sure you’ve got control of your Facebook page and your goggle my business account.  That’s going to feed in to the goggle knowledge graph and their kind of things that so many people are having trouble with. You don’t want to be the restaurant that is marked as permanently closed. You need a Facebook, or even worst on Goggle because that will kill your restaurants quicker than anything. I think, it’s probably the number one mistakes that you can make.  And the sad thing is, I’ve seen it happen

We had one, probably about 2 months ago that we we’re able to, she said you know, business is just fall on off the cliff in the last 6 months and I really, really struggling.  That one change made and… It’s not something that you’d can just ring up goggle and say…oh no we’re open can you just fix it. It takes a while for them to go through and sort everything out. And that’s quite scary, you know it’s particularly when revenue takes such a huge hits so quickly.  And this is one of the things to really remember is the fact that, you know a lot of people still are searching.

And you know, you’re not going to appear on the goggle maps search if you’re marked as permanently closed.  People aren’t going to call you  if you’re permanently closed, Have you look at fake websites make sure that you’re not giving customers details at to other companies that going to send offers to other restaurants to your loyal customers. I think that’s really important thing.

I just want to close with story of last night, last night we’re some doing this on a Sunday last night was Friday night.  You know, that we love some home delivered food on a Friday night. And flowed the idea of Vinee…because I love Indian food ah that didn’t go that well, let’s do something a bit different.  We decided on a rare occasion, we’re actually going to do some pizza.  I was going to get some, I’ve got some ribs as well.  It was interesting, I’m there with my son Will and was sitting in the lantern working at what we’re doing and he’s on Menulog, I’m on Menulog, we like to use our customers. We got a few who delivered to us but we use them quite a bit so we want to use something a bit different.  Will was on one website, I was on the other, and we got this half thing, on hang on a sec, which one are you looking at, which one of you looking a, no way hang on a sec, I’ll swap. No… Because there we’re two places for the very similar names and it was almost impossible, the menu we’re very similar, it was impossible to tell which one you we’re. We have to actually go wait, hang on a sec, you stop, you stay at that one and say, wait I’m going to and look for it.

Menulog does a really good job of creating a very level playing field and all of the guys doing this. From a booking point of view and from the take out online ordering point of view. Wow, they’ll use the same strategy that yellow pages used, when yellow pages was a thing   and that was they wanted to create a level of playing field for everyone. They wanted everyone to get some result but if you pay a lot more to them.  Then you will get a lot more orders and so when the yellow pages person came around.  That says…Ah you know, you had a quarter page color red.  This time why don’t we got half page or you know, really you should think about a full page ads because some of your competitors got full page ad. You know, You’d get so many more customers if you had full page ads they want to split up all of the customers based the share of the revenue that they got so, they want to create a, either if you have the yellow pages person doing your ads, they want to make sure that it was very bland, so it was just, literally just the color and the size of the ads that stood out.  They didn’t want to come up with really amazing heading or super catchy image.  Because that would have got you more customers than you are really entitle to.  They just want you to have full page ads that was full color and pick up most of the business in that.

Menulog and some other guys do the same sort of things. If you’re willing to pay them a high percentage of commission. If you’re willing to run a paid ads on their platform.  Then their willing to send so much more traffic towards you.  If you’re not, then it’s a very bland experience for everyone. It was almost impossible to differentiate between the two and the sad thing is. You know, once again I’ve learned my lesson the ribs that came I got a ribs and chicken wings pack. The chicken wings we’re under cooked and the ribs we’re over cooked.  I eat two of ribs I think there was 10 of them in the pack. The rest I gave to the dog because it was literally garbage and it was like…no I’m not, I’m not going to be eating there again.

A combination of couple of things that we had spoken, quite a few local restaurants.  When you’re paying a thousand dollars a month to Menulog that obviously put a lot of pressure on the business to be able to produce a great food.  The other component of these, is that there’s nothing on the Menulog that helps a restaurants differentiate itself.  You don’t get the story. What we should have been looking for and you know, I’ve learned my lesson, we’re definitely having Indian next week.

From the restaurants that I know, and I know a bit about the chef and I know that they cook a great vindaloo.  What we should have been looking for is someone you know, whose got run an American restaurants, his immigrated at the Australia, his got a smirks at the back and the ribs are absolutely epic. Because he got ribs done into a fine art.  Not just some pizza place, decided to do ribs a bit of product expansion don’t really know how to do it.  No quality control and probably don’t even care. This was the sad part about it.  What is your story? Tell that story a lot better and you will reap the benefit of it by getting more customer and be able to turn them into a repeat customers.

So there we go, if you take at one thing out of this podcast; goggle, in an incognito, window your own restaurants and see what comes up with it.  And Make sure that you’re happy with the result, if anyone got problems with this, like transferring the domain name can be quite tricky. So just hit we up, more customers of marketing4 restuarant.com hit me up on LinkedIn, Facebook we do this stuff all the time. The restaurants that we’re dealing with, where going on the process now of getting that domain transferred.  From Menulog not to us, even though it’s our website, not to us.  To the restaurant’s owner, it there website, it’s they’re intellectual property, its they’re story that there trying to tell. They’re the owner of the restaurants they’re the owner of the domain you know, I think that’s really important thing if you’re looking at.  So if you’ve got something today’s podcast.  Please like and share it.  Give us a good review in iTunes, that would be really appreciated, that really helps us to get the word at about the podcast.  Thank you for everyone who has been a part of the journey for us to, the first 50 podcast episode.  My challenge is to get to the 100 episode in under another 50 weeks.   So this week’s been a pretty good week this is my third podcast for the week. And we’ve got a whole heap of really interesting guest coming up on the show.  So, thank you very much and I hope you have a really busy week. Bye.


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