To see the first five Restaurant Marketing Myths, click: 11 Restaurant Marketing Myths Exposed – Part I

Restaurant Marketing Myth #6: Marketing is all about discounting
A lot of Restaurants already give discounts, especially if you are doing lunch or breakfast meals. We look at dynamic yield pricing for Restaurants.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #7:  “We are killing it on Instagram, (or Twitter or Snapchat). We don’t need any other marketing.”
Marketing must, must, must be tied to revenue. Too many people think that having 100,000 people following them on Instagram is enough, but you can’t meet payroll with Instagram followers or likes.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #8: “Our third-party provider does all of our marketing”
Restaurants using people like Menulog, Dimmi, OpenTable, Just Eat, and GrubHub think that they are doing marketing on their behalf. The third-party providers do marketing on their own behalf, not yours.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #9: “We can’t afford a $1,000 a month marketing budget”
We have restaurants doing 1,000 seats a month.  With Dimmi, that costs $1,000 a month!  We recommend spending $3 – $10 a day on Facebook marketing. We are also looking at a results-driven marketing campaign as well. Too many people are spending $3,000 a month with companies that aren’t focused on revenue.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #10: “We need to do brand marketing.”
You should always be looking at your sales funnel and drive people into the funnel. Great social media drive customers to websites that tell an engaging story and convert with great photos and menus and customer experiences.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #11: “I am too old to do the marketing for my Restaurant.”
This is a poor excuse. If it is your restaurant, it is your story that your customers want to hear and restaurant marketing isn’t rocket science.  Anyone can learn the basics of the tools that work to help you tell your Restaurant’s story.

BONUS: Restaurant Marketing Myth #12:  “I already have a website.”
Restaurant owners don’t want a Restaurant website, they want a Restaurant eCommerce machine that generates revenue. Don’t let your main sales person in your team (your restaurant’s website) do nothing – it should be working really hard.  Make sure you know the metrics, make sure it is fast, make sure it is optimized for mobile, make sure it tells your story.

If you need help with your Restaurant website, have a look at our Restaurant features so so we can help in a specific way to tell your Restaurant’s story.

To see the first five Restaurant Marketing Myths, click: 11 Restaurant Marketing Myths Exposed – Part I

Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.

Podcast transcription on Episode 65 – 11 Restaurant Marketing Myths exposed Part II

 

James Eling: Hey, it’s James from Marketing4Restaurants and welcome to episode 65 of Secret Sauce, the restaurant marketing podcast. 11 restaurant marketing myths exposed, part two.

James: Hey, everyone! Let’s get straight into it. So, 6 to 11 of the 11 restaurant marketing myths exposed.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #6: Marketing is all about discounting

So, the next one, number six: marketing is discounting. You know, “We don’t like running discounting.” So, there’s a couple of things here. One, most restaurants discount. If you run a breakfast menu, you’re discounting. So, people, fundamentally, are prepared to pay less for breakfast than they are for dinner. So, you’ll find that your dinner menu will be a lot cheaper your dinner menu. You are working on a dynamic yield pricing type thing. You can only charge X amount for breakfast, so we will have a breakfast menu that is cheaper. And this is the interesting thing, people will do that and they’ll do the same thing for lunch.

A lot of restaurants will have a lunch menu and a dinner menu, and the lunch menu is a lot cheaper. So, we’re already doing discounting. We’re doing the discounting to sort of work with yield utilization. So, the next thing to start thinking about is, you know, your Tuesday nights. Now, Tuesday nights are the nights that are usually a lot quieter.

I’m assuming you’re not opening on a Monday night. And it was interesting, we put on one of our Facebook posts. So, in the Free Online Restaurant Booking System (FORBS), we’ve got a heat grid, no actually I think it was out of Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system (FROLO), we’ve got heat grids for both now. But I think we surfaced some customer data and they’re open seven nights a week. Now, their Monday night is about twice as busy as their Tuesday night. Small town, regional restaurant, they’re the only restaurant that’s open. So, on a Monday night they actually crush their revenue or the orders is twice as much on a Monday night. So, they wouldn’t be discounting, you know, they struggle on a Tuesday.

Now, I’m not saying that you should be discounting, but it’s one of the things that you can think about. If the restaurant’s going to be quiet, you probably want to get a few people in. What are the ways that you can do it? But marketing isn’t about discounting, fundamentally. There are other offers, it’s awareness, you know, getting people to be aware of what it is that you do, what are the problems that you solve. Why is it that someone would want to go to your restaurant as opposed to someone else’s restaurant? And fundamentally, why would I come to your restaurant tonight when I could be at home cooking for myself? That’s the kind of messaging that you want to get out.

Too many people think, “Things are going badly, I better run a 25% off deal.” Or, you know, even worse, they go straight to Groupon, or one of these crazy discounting type people where they’re given a 50% discount and, you know 20% or 30% of the revenue they actually get, that goes to Groupon. The good thing is that they get the money up front. So, if they get this little bit of injection for cash flow, but so often we see and we call it, you know, we call it the Groupon death spiral.

They’ll do one Groupon campaign, then four weeks later they’ll do another Groupon campaign, then three weeks later they’ll do it with another one, another one of the discounting company and then four weeks after that, they’re dead. And it’s just because of the fact that they became addicted to that hit of cash flow.

And when the customers actually come in to redeem the coupons, they’ve closed up. And that’s really sad. You want to be very careful about the discounting that you do. And I’m always reminded of one of our very early customers, and he said that the restaurant industry was an amazing industry with so many amazing people, it’s just the bottom 10% of restaurants that ruin it for everyone. These are the guys that were doing the heavy discounting, they’re running fundamentally uneconomic restaurants. It’s just a questioning of how much runway they’ve got, and how long it’ll take, and how much damage they’re going to do to anyone else before they go out of business.

So, be very careful with the discounting, there is definitely a place for it. We’re actually working on demand-driven yield utilization. So, just like an aircraft where they will, everyone pays a different price for that seat, we think that there’s scope for that for some restaurants, particularly if you’re booked out a lot. I think that there’s the opportunity there to, you know, charge a premium for some nights and, you know, this is the interesting thing about variable pricing. Are we discounting the quiet nights, or are we charging a premium for the expensive nights, or the busy nights? Which means that people are then going to go to the nights, so you’re actually extracting a premium on they busy days, and you’re driving demand to the quieter nights because they’ll be some people who want to move down that yield curve. So, they’ll go on the less popular nights. It’s an interesting, fascinating topic. And we’re probably going to be doing a separate podcast on it, because we’re looking at doing a lot of research into this and probably product development.

But discounting is one of those things that you need to have a really firm strategy around. It shouldn’t be the first tool that you go for, and marketing should not be synonymous with it. So, don’t just put up on Facebook, “It’s, you know, 20% off,” or, “$10 parma night,” or whatever it is that you want to be doing. There can be a lot more sophistication to it.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #7:  “We are killing it on Instagram, (or Twitter or Snapchat). We don’t need any other marketing.”

Now, number seven, I love this one, “We’re killing it on Instagram, or Snapchat, or Twitter. We don’t need anymore marketing.” Now, the interesting thing is, I had this conversation with a restaurant owner, where we were eating and it was, to be fair, it was probably a Wednesday night I would have thought, and they were showing me their Instagram feed and they were just so proud. You know, the dishes looked fantastic and, you know, they were crushing it on Instagram, just crushing it. And he was beaming away, you know, “We’re really good at marketing.” The restaurant was empty. Like, Instagram is not something that you do, like you can’t meet payroll with Instagram likes or engagement. Nor Snapchat, nor Twitter, nor Facebook, nor anything.

At the end of the day, marketing must, must, must be fundamentally tied to revenue. If it’s not, then that’s madness. Now, Instagram is notorious for being very difficult to get people off the Instagram platform. So, Instagram likes people to be on Instagram and it likes people to just like stuff and then continue on. Let’s just look at a whole heap of stuff and like it. This makes it really difficult for marketers to get to work out what the ROI (return on investment) is on it.

And I think you need to be very careful with something like Instagram. One of the things that we recommend is, you know, having a URL for the Instagram page, having that tagged so people know that, you know that it’s come from Instagram. That way, at least you can say, you know, where the traffic was coming from. And if you’re using FORBS and FROLO, just a little plug for FORBS and FROLO. So, you can set it up with tagging of campaigns. So, you could say, “Well, we got a thousand seats of bookings last month, and 30% of those came from Instagram.”

Now, automatically, you know, you can save those 300 seats, if it’s $50 bucks a seat. That’s $15,000. So, you probably are crushing it on Instagram. But, you know, the interesting thing is that a lot of people – I’ve never met anyone who can say that. Who can say, “Yup, let me show you the data.” When you ask for the data, everything gets very wishy washy. It’s like, “Well, you know, someone came in last week and said that they saw us on Instagram.” It’s like, “Okay, so that’s one person. What about the rest of it?” And it’s interesting, you know, some people go out and they get professional photographers, they do all sorts of, all of this sort of work to make sure that their Instagram feed is just absolutely immaculate. And yet, they can’t actually point to the economic benefit it has. Now, if you’re full seven days a week, then keep doing what you’re doing. And if you’re, you know, spending a lot of money on Instagram but you’re making a lot of money, keep doing it, you know. Don’t rock the applecart. But, if you’re not busy all of the time, then maybe that’s something that you need to be thinking about.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #8: The third-party provider does all of our marketing

Now, number eight, “Our third-party provider does all of our marketing.” Now, so the restaurant will never say, “Our third-party provider,” but they’re talking about someone like Open Table, Menulog, Just Eat, you know. “Menulog does all of this marketing for us.” It’s like, “Really?” You know, actually, they don’t. There’s a whole heap of things that they do where they’re actually hijacking your intellectual property.

So, Dimmi is a classic for this. They’ll run an AdWords campaign against your restaurant to drive people to their booking platform. So that, rather than going to the website, they’re going to go to Dimmi’s platform and then Dimmi can say, “Look, we bought you a booking.” Now, the interesting thing is that that customer was probably looking for your restaurant, and it’s only because they saw the ad that Dimmi was running in Google AdWords that they’ve booked through Dimmi. So, if you weren’t on Dimmi, you would have got the booking anyway, it would have just gone to – you just wouldn’t have been charged for it.

The other component of that, of course, is that all of these companies are collecting emails on their own behalf. Now, some of them will share those emails with you, some of them won’t. But, either way, they’re building up a database of where people are eating, what they’re ordering, all of those sorts of things frequency, which they will send out offers on behalf of other restaurants. And you really need to think about that because: A) You’re incurring a marketing cost that you shouldn’t be, and: B) You’re losing access to your customer database. And this is an absolutely fundamental mistake that so many people are making.

Now, one of the interesting things was we were talking to a restaurant and the restaurant owner said, look, they would never do that. And I said, “Really?” I said, “I tell you what, you ring your rep up today and you say, ‘Look, I’m really struggling, can we run a campaign to local diners who haven’t eaten here before?’” And he was shocked at what was offered to him. We’ve heard of people who have been offered, “We’ll send an email out to everyone who’s eaten at this restaurant.” Now, and I mean not your restaurant but one of your competitor’s restaurants. So, this just goes to show just how keen they are to get the booking, or to get the order. So, you really need to be careful about that, because you’re giving away your intellectual property which is a fundamental part of your business. And if you give that away, then there’s probably not a lot left.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #9: We can’t afford a $1,000 a month marketing budget

Number nine, “We can’t afford $1,000 a month marketing budget.” Now, this is always an interesting one. This is a very interesting conversation, because the question is, “How do you find a marketing budget?” You need to have a marketing budget, what should it be? That depends. How should be doing the marketing thing? That’s another thing, it depends. But the first thing is what are the charges from the, you know, your third-party provider. So, we see people, I mean, we’ve got restaurants who are doing 1,000 seats in bookings every month. Now, if they were using something like an Open Table or a Dimmi, if they were using Dimmi it’d be a dollar a seat that’s $1,000 that they would’ve been charged. So, we know that there’s still restaurants out there who are copping a bill for more than $1,000 a month from companies like Dimmi. The online ordering space where Just Eat, Grub Hub, you know, those guys are charging at a minimum 13%. We’ve got multiple restaurants who are saving $1,000 a month.

And the number is growing every month, because this is amazing – they are finding a free thousand-dollar marketing budget. Now, as I’ve said before, we think best practice, pocket $500 and put $500 back into your marketing budget. This is a free marketing budget, it only builds, you know, it’s building your email database, it’s building the revenue, it’s building the value of your business. How much should you be spending on the marketing budget? So, if you’re doing a Facebook campaign and if you had two campaigns running at any one time, we think you should probably, for most restaurants, somewhere between $3 and $10 a day per campaign.

So, if you’ve got two campaigns running, over a month you’re looking at spending $200. Now, one of the things that we’re looking at doing, we have had so much demand for a formalized marketing program to help restaurants out. So, the marketing team are really working together putting the finishing touches on this, and we’re going to be releasing this out to a few restaurants just before Christmas. So, we’re keen to get some feedback, they’ll probably be discounted because, you know, we want to get some real, you know, we’re metrics driven.

We’re a data company, so we want to get some metrics on what it is that we can expect to see for that. But we’re looking at something like $1,000 marketing boost where a restaurant will not only get the value of the experience of us, you know, we’re running Facebook ads all the time. But a tailored approach where we can come up with some content that’s going to be able to work for you. Of course, we’ve got inhouse graphic design capabilities which is, you know, means that the content, the messaging can be a lot better. And, of course, because we’re running so many Facebook ads, we get an idea of what works. So, probably running more effective ads and, on top of that, really tangibly linked to outcomes. So, this will work particularly well with people who are using FORBS and FROLO, because you’ll see, “Look, this campaign generated this many bookings. This campaign generated this many orders.” And we think that there’s a lot of traction that we can get out of this. So, this is going to be a really exciting thing.

But if you are spending $1,000 a month with a marketing company, you want to find out how much of it is actually going into ads. Because one of the things that I found really disturbing is we spoke to someone who was paying $2,500 a month. And so, someone was coming in, taking some photos, the photos were okay. There was no actual marketing budget assigned to it. So, the posts were going nowhere. You know that your social media’s not right when there’s every post has got three likes and it’s the same three people. It’s the person who put the post up, who’s your social media marketing person, and the two owners of the restaurant. That’s not social media, that’s not cutting the mustard in any way, shape or form, and you need to be a lot more agile around that. Our big thing is the first thing that you should be doing is you should be running your own campaigns.

But we understand that there’s a knowledge deficit there, which is why the marketing boost, what we want to do in that is to have a training component so that after a few of those we can probably hand that back into the restaurant. So, it’ll be a lot more effective. And if you want to do it yourself, then of course there’s the Marketing University course. So, that’s just $99 and it’s your first Facebook ads campaign, and 2 hours of video that will take you through everything you need to know to be able to put a post up and get it up and running.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #10: We need to do brand marketing

Now, number 10 is an interesting one – we need to do brand marketing. Now, through your local restaurant I think that the brand marketing, brand marketing is one of those things that is done by people who aren’t confident that they can actually make a sale through the marketing process. So, when you look at sales and marketing, your marketing is going to be something like Facebook or SEO, they’re your marketing channels.

The sale then, is probably going to be your website. So, what does the menu look like? What is the experience that you’re offering? What are the photos there? You know, they’re the kind of things that close a deal for you. You want a couple of photos of food that is just crushingly good. “Yes, I really want to eat that, that looks amazing.” And so, we see a lot of people who do a really good job of that, you can see that in their bookings. Because of course, if you’ve got online booking and online ordering then of course you can see how effective that is.

And it’s interesting when someone make a change to their website and they put some better photos up of the food and then they get a change in the number of people who make a booking versus the number of visitors. That’s one of the metrics that we look at on a, every Monday we call it Data Monday. For every restaurant who’s using FORBS or FROLO we look at the number of people who have gone to their website and then made a booking. And there’s a fundamental difference in, you know, great photography that is clearly from your restaurant not stock photography. People are very wary of stock photography. And I think, don’t be afraid to go in for the sale, you know, so, “We’re running this offer, this experience, you know, make a booking now.” Because you’ve got the ability there to get the word of mouth referral, you know, if you’ve got 2,000 people who like you on Facebook, when that post comes up people are going to see, “This friend, this friend, this friend, and this friend like this restaurant.” It’s like, “Wow. So, a lot of people like this restaurant,” that is a weak word-of-mouth referral. So, but if four people have been there or like it, then people are going to go, “Maybe I should try it out.” So, try not to focus too much on brand marketing.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #11: “I am too old to do the marketing for my Restaurant.”

Now, number 11, “I am too old, too busy to do the marketing for my restaurant.” Now, this is crap. There are some people out there who are early 70s who are crushing it on Facebook, or who have fundamentally understood what it is that they offer their customers because they’ve been doing it for 50 years. And the amazing thing is that when they sit down, when they take that half an hour out of their day and they tell you their whole story there’s just so much great SEO goodness in there. Because these people have been doing it for a long, long, long time.

And you’re never too old, you’re never too busy to be doing the marketing in your restaurant. There are some people out there who are working, you know, a solid 70 hours a week but they’ve still got the time to whip their camera out and take a photo of some food as it comes over the pass and say, you know, “This is today’s special.” And get really good engagement with it. “Just had this fish delivered,” you know, and there’ll be a massive big piece of fish that looks just absolutely epic and people go, “Wow, what are you going to cook that up into? I’m going to come in tonight, because I want to try that.”

Restaurant marketing is not rocket science and, you know, we joke that it’s a lot more complicated than that but it isn’t really. It’s about telling your story, it’s just that the tools have changed a little bit. And Facebook isn’t super complicated to use. Your website shouldn’t be super complicated to use. There’s a lot of people who will delegate it to someone who’s a little bit younger in their team, and a little bit more tech savvy. But you’d be surprised at what some of the really busy people can crank out.

So, I think that marketing is such a fundamentally important part of the business that you need to have a plan around it and just saying, “I’m too busy to be doing marketing,” it’s not a great solution. You need to be understanding what’s going on with the marketing, at least, you know, if you have outsourced it you want to be making sure that the people who are doing it are actually doing a good job. Because time and time and time again we see that people aren’t doing a really great job. Now, the last myth, which I think has killed so many restaurants, and I’ve spoken to restaurant owners about this, you know, after the fact. So, literally in a dead restaurant as they’re cleaning up, as they’re moving bits and pieces out.

Restaurant Marketing Myth #11: “I am too old to do the marketing for my Restaurant.”

“I already have a website, I don’t need to think about it anymore.” And one of the things I think is really interesting is if you want a website and you’ve got a website, then that’s fantastic. But you don’t want a website. You want an e-commerce machine that is going to build your business and create money for you, okay. And a website and an e-commerce machine that is going to create money for you, they should be one in the same, the should be. But time and time and time again, they are fundamentally completely different. So, you need to be able to answer, when you look at the website, the website is the employee in your company.

Now, would you let someone front of house just sit there while a table was waiting to be served? Probably not. Would you let the chef sit there in the kitchen and read the paper while there are dockets piling up? Probably not. So, why do you let one of the main sales people in your team, why do you often let it do absolutely nothing? You know, would you have a sales person who says, “Well, this is actually a crappy experience don’t come here,” you know? That’s not a really good sales person and yet, that’s what some restaurant website are. You look at it and you go, “Wow, that looks disgusting. I’m less likely to go there after having a look at the website.”

So, your website is a sales person for you, and it should be an order taker, and it should do the bookings for you. It should do all of those sorts of things. And, you know, so how do you know if the person, if your sales person, is working? So, first off, how many people got to the website? And you should know that number, and it should be one of the KPIs in your marketing. “We want to drive more people to the website next month.” So, if you’re getting 100 people to the website in a month, you have a fundamental problem most likely.

The average restaurant website these days is getting about 1,100, 1,200 visits. This is the average one. So, you know, there’s some people who are getting a lot less, there’s some people who are getting a lot, lot, lot more. So, someone in your team needs to be looking at your Google Analytics metrics. They need to be looking at the number of people who are coming in. Where are those people coming from? Are you getting enough from search? Is the SEO there? Does it work on a mobile phone? Now, this is a really, really interesting one. Because your website needs to be pretty quick, and it needs to be optimized for mobile.

So, Google quite a long time ago stopped referring traffic to websites that aren’t mobile-optimised because it’s a poor experience for users. It’s like, “You know, there’s probably other places that have got that information. Sure, it’s not the restaurant’s website, but the end user is going to have a better experience.” And that’s what Google’s focusing on, people who are searching it, wants them to get a good experience.

So, have a think about what it looks like on a mobile phone. It’s easy to do. Just pull your mobile phone out and have a look at your website. And we talk to restaurant owners all the time about this, and they go, “Wow, hang on a sec. It doesn’t work very well on a mobile.” And it’s like, “Yeah.” Surprise there. What do the images look like? What does the menu look like? These are the kind of things that we talked about before. You want to be making sure that the people who are coming to your website are getting a really good understanding of what the value proposition is, what your story is, what the food’s going to be like, what the ambiance is like. All of those sort of things, and far too often you look at the website and it’s like this is, either the message that you’ve got out there is a bad message, or it’s not the message that you want to be getting out. You’re not telling enough of it.

BONUS: Restaurant Marketing Myth #12:  I already have a website 

And I think that the final thing that you should be thinking about is, you know, how many orders, how many seats are you getting from the website. That’s the real test of how effective your website is as a part of an integrated marketing plan. This is the other thing; does it play well with Facebook? Have you got the Facebook Pixel in there? Because so many restaurants don’t.

We have a marketing meeting every Friday afternoon, it’s the best meeting that I have all week because I’ve usually got a beer in my hand when we’re doing it. And the team will go through some of our clients’ websites and we’ll also go through restaurants who’ve approached us during the week. And so many, so often there’s no Facebook Pixel installed on the websites that people are coming to us looking for help. That means that you can’t retarget people who’ve gone to your website. They are the closest thing that you’ve got to an email list if you don’t have an email list. They’re people who’ve probably been to the website, they know your brand, they’re the easiest ones to get across the line. And so, some restaurants will have 20,000 people in a custom audience of people who have been to their website.

And yet, other people who are getting twice as much traffic to their website, because they haven’t got that Facebook Pixel in there they miss all of that. And the classic example of this is, this was part of the research that we did around the Good Food Guide. They did a bit of marketing that was in Melbourne was seen by quite a lot of people, and there were 20 restaurants in that guide. Now, only two of them had the Facebook Pixel on their website. That’s madness. Because the big thing that is really, now we know that it generated some traffic because one of the websites was, you know, “We’ve exceeded our limit,” and now the website’s down. So, we know that quite a few people went to the websites for the restaurants who were listed in that. But the sad thing is that all of those people, unless they captured an email, unless they made a booking which we know is quite a low percentage, you can’t go back to any of those people.

Now, I’ve since been, working my way through a couple of those places to go out and have a look at it to see what it is that, you know, you need to be, where you need to be at to be on that list. And a lot of these places aren’t busy now. So, a lot of people went to there, and how hard would it be in a months’ time to say, “You know, hey we were on the Good Food Guide, we’re in the top 20. Maybe you want to come out, here’s a picture of our burger, here’s a picture of this, here’s a picture of that.” It wouldn’t be too hard to run that campaign. And I know that would be one of the most successful campaigns. Because there’s third-party validation that your restaurant’s really good. People have just forgotten about it, people have just forgotten that you’re in the Good Food Guide, that they’d been to the website.

They just need that gentle reminder and this is the thing that we’re talking about. It’s a lot easier to get someone to come back for a repeat visit than it is to be new. But if they’ve looked at your website, they already know your brand. So, they’re halfway down that funnel for you to be able to convert them. So, you want to be thinking about how hard your website is working.

And be very careful when you choose a website provider. Obviously choose us, I think if you’re looking at a new website. And I think, so we charge in Australian dollars, now we’ve got I think we’ve got websites in 11 countries now. We are growing the number of countries that we’re in. Super excited, I’m actually going to Vietnam and I’m hoping to go to one of our customers’ restaurants there. Which I think is going to be completely epic next month. So, that’s something that’s exciting. I’m dropping in on a few countries, I’m going to be doing quite a bit of a culinary tour which is exciting.

So, the websites, there, a one-pager is $495. The $995, that’s a fairly popular one. Our most popular is the $2995 website. The difference between that is, that there’s a bit more design work, because the $995’s they’re pretty much templated. Now, they’re templates that we know that work, and that we know that work well. We’ve been doing this for quite a long time now. So, we’ve got templates that work well from a restaurant SEO point of view and for the functionality for things like online ordering and online booking. The $2995, there’s a bit more, they’re less templated. So, there’s a bit more work that we can do around to customise it to what it is that you want. And, of course, the other component of it is that they all have an SEO meeting, for the $2995s, I’m the one who does those.

I love talking to restaurant owners. So, that’s one of the differences in the $295. And then we’ve got bespoke ones, which is where we start from scratch and we work through and create something for the restaurant specifically around what it is that they want. And they’re $4,995. And of course, there’s a subscription on that, you know, the $49, the $99 or the $199.

But be very careful, because it’s really sad when one of the team calls someone who’s reached out to us and they say, “You know, we don’t want to get a new website because we’ve just got one.” It’s like, “Wow.” And they say that they’ve spent $10,000 on it, but it doesn’t do this, this, this, this, and this. And they almost need to start again, and the sad thing is that they got less in terms of performance for their website than the would have if they’d actually got a $995 website with us.

So, we only do restaurant websites–the only thing that we do. So, the team is really quite skilled in getting them put together and making sure they work. And I think the other thing that’s a fundamental difference for us is, so we have Data Monday and we will look at it and go, “What’s going on with this guy? He’s not getting a lot of traffic.” Now, we also look at it and go, “Wow, look at what this guy’s doing, he’s doing really well.” And so, we look at it because this is what generates our best practices. But, you know, we worry about the guys who aren’t doing well. And so, the team will go out and call people and say, “Your websites not going too well,” or, “Your bookings aren’t going too well. Your orders aren’t going too well. What is there that we can do to help you?” That’s part of our support contract and, you know, so there’s that monthly subscription. That monthly subscription actually gets you, someone is worrying about how your restaurant is going. And I think that’s a really big difference between us and everyone else. So, have a think about your website. Make sure that it’s doing the sales work for you.

Too often people say, “You know, I don’t need website,” or, “We’ve already got one.” When you know that it’s not getting the traffic that it should, and you know that it’s not telling the story of your restaurant. This is the opportunity to have someone selling your restaurant 24 hours a day, so that, you know, you can go to bed and wake up the next morning and there’ll be two bookings for the next day because someone has gone in, they’ve found out that you’re open, they’ve found out where your address is. And they’ve looked at the menu, and they’ve looked at the food photos and gone, “I want to eat here.” Then, you know as we say, it’s over to you.

Create the great value, the great food, great experience for them. And you’re 75% of the way of having a new customer who you’re about to turn into a repeat customer. That’s what we’re here to do, that’s what we’re here to help you do. So, just wrapping up. Try to keep away from discounting. There needs to be a sensible strategy around it but marketing isn’t discounting. You can’t meet payroll with Instagram likes, so make sure that your marketing is actually integrated to part of your revenue strategy. And if it’s not, then you know, you might be wasting time on it. Be very careful when you’re using third-parties like Open Table, Menu Log, Just Eat, Dimmi, Grub Hub. They take a lot of commission and they’re building their database as well as, or or not, your database. So, it’s good if they share, some of them don’t share and I just think that that’s absolutely madness. Have a think about your marketing budget.

I think in this day and age you can’t afford not to have a marketing budget. If you’re doing it yourself, then you might be looking at probably $300 a month, probably less or possibly less. So, and if you don’t know how to do Facebook ads, which is probably a big part of where you need to be thinking, have a look at our Facebook University course that we’ve got. Be very careful about band marketing. I think the opportunity is there to drive, you want to spend some money in Facebook and then see what the actual result is. That’s an important part of the marketing and sales mix.

You’re never too old, you’re never too busy to learn about restaurant marketing. It’s not overly complicated and there’s lots of people out there who are just screwing away those, and a lot of the time it’s just the 60 second actions. Take that quick photo and post it up really quickly. And if you don’t do any marketing today, then today’s a day that you didn’t do anything to build your business. And have a good hard think about your website. Yes, you might already have a website. Is it a fundamental part of your sales and marketing strategy? Is it pulling its weight? One of the things that we find that is interesting is how some people who are crushing it on Instagram or Facebook, and they’ve got really good engagement there, but they’re not seeing the benefit of it because their website’s awful. And you don’t want to be driving all of those people to go and have a look at a website that just doesn’t tell your story.

So, your website should be telling your story, and is should be telling your story in a way that sells people to come in or to make an order. That’s about it. So, we’ve covered off on all of these. There’s a whole heap of myths there, 12 in all. We like to under promise and overdeliver. So, 12 restaurant marketing myths exposed. Hopefully you haven’t been believing in too many of these, and if you have, you know, a lot of them they’re pretty easy to turn around. So, it’s not like you’re going to have to spend $20,000 on a whole new marketing campaign. A few gentle tweaks and particularly if you’re looking at things like, you know, learning how to do Facebook marketing we’ve got our course for $99.

If you’re looking at building your email database. Hey, they’re free. The free online restaurant booking system and the free restaurant online ordering system. So, have a think about the way that you’ve got your marketing running and yeah, I’m really keen to know what myths there are that you’ve discovered haven’t been working for you in your restaurant. So, you have a really busy week and we’ll talk next week. Bye.

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