27 – Emergency Facebook Marketing for your Restaurant

James Eling: Hey, it’s James from Marketing4Restaurants and welcome to episode 27 of Secret Sauce, the restaurant marketing podcast. How to run an emergency Facebook marketing campaign for your restaurant.

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: Last podcast that we did, seven reasons that restaurants fail, it didn’t actually go that well. The downloads have been pretty low on it, which I find really interesting because you can’t really talk about death. In a lot of societies, you know, death’s a bit of a taboo subject and it’s one of those things that people really, really don’t like to talk about even though it’s a fact of life. And you know what? In the restaurant industry restaurants failing is a fact of life. I suspected that it wasn’t going to be too popular. We did get some really good feedback though from some people who said, “Yes, we are guilty of that and it does feel like our restaurant is failing.” And I think it is really an important thing that you need to think about as a restaurant owner. If it’s not meeting your personal needs, you need to be doing something that changes it. Because, you know, it is a tough industry. So, today we’re going to talk about emergency Facebook marketing.

So, an emergency Facebook marketing campaign is when you’ve reached that, “Holy cow,” moment. “Payroll is going to start looking a bit tight. I don’t know, we’ve got the lease due in a weeks’ time and we’re still a thousand bucks short for it. I don’t know and I’ve got suppliers ringing me every day.” Now, we sadly get a lot of enquiries from people saying, “What can I do? I don’t have any marketing budget.” If you’ve got no marketing budget then, you know, there’s a few things that you can do. But none of them really have an immediate impact. We’re going to talk about how to run a campaign today that will bring customers in tonight. You will need to spend money to do this, you will need to spend money. I’m talking between $5 and $20 a day though, and I’m talking about spend the money now, get the money tight, alright.

So, it’s a pretty high return campaign. I’ve seen it work, they work pretty well. But before we get into that, couple of interesting stories to talk about. First off is that we’ve got a new feature in Marketing for Restaurants free restaurant online ordering system. Hurray. Working with developers is very arduous. You map out what it is that you want and it takes forever to get it done. Particularly, we’re quite particular with our online ordering system because it is an ecommerce platform and people do rely on it to bring money into their restaurants. So, we want to make sure that it all works. One of the big things that a lot of customers have been asking for is the ability to offer loyalty discounts. So, customer comes in and you can set the number. So, it might be if you want to offer a straight off 20% discount, then you could give, you know, “Order five times and your sixth order’s free.” So, effectively you’re giving a discount across those five orders of 20%. So, what we’ve done is we’ve put it so that when the customer orders, “Thank you for your first order, this is order number one of X number.” So, it might be five, six, seven. I think, you know, you sort of want to look around, you know, 9 to 10 I think is a sort of, you know, “Order nine get the tenth one free on us.” Those people go into a group which you can then market to, you know.

And the other thing is that the next time that they order, they’re going to get another email saying, “Thank you, this is the second order of,” five orders or ten orders, “that you need to get to get your free discount. This is the discount that you’ve already accrued.” A lot of people have asked for it because, in Australia we compete against Menu Log there’s also Delivery Hero, Foodpanda, all of the other guys, Delivery Hero, Eat24, Grub Hub, all of those guys are offering the same sort of thing. And it’s one of the reasons why customers stay with them. So, we think it’s going to be a really big idea. The other thing that I’ve seen work really well is campaigns where people who are running the free restaurant online ordering system will run a Facebook campaign saying, “Order direct from the restaurant and save 10 percent.” That can work really well, because customers are starting to see that, you know, the price for their takeaway food has been increased to cover the commissions. So, last week we had the launch of Uber Eats in Sydney and there’s a lot of discussion about what the fees are that they take.

The good things with the fee is that Uber Eats take is that they’re fixed. So, I think they’re about 30 percent, but it’s a fixed fee. So, you’re not actually having to worry about, you know, are you going to be able to generate meals or orders next week, and what are you going to have to pay to do that. so, that’s a significant advantage and of course they do the delivery for you. That’s a significant advantage for you as opposed to a lot of the other guys who are doing these auction time based online ordering systems. Just a very quick point on the online ordering systems. One of the big issues is that they don’t pass the email address onto you, so they own the customer not you. And that’s a critical issue, and it’s one of the biggest reasons for decreasing customer loyalty is database leakage, we see.

Because it means that they can control all of the demand generation marketing, not you. We are working on, we’ve been doing a little bit of research for a while now on a Menu Log marketing hack. Now, I think it’s going to work with Grub Hub, Eat24, Delivery Hero, all the other guys. I think it’s going to work with them. So, we’re doing some late testing with one of our beta customers. Very interesting, now it’s not hacking. It’s nothing illegal. But it’s a marketing trick that can use that’s really going to help spin the tables back in your favour not theirs. So, what we’re trying to do is, of course, build a stronger relationship between you and people have eaten at your restaurant. They’re your customers, they’re the ones buying your food, they’re the ones who are coming back because of the quality of the food. So, you need to really get front of centre and top of find for those people and make sure that they’re ordering from you.

And, of course, you know, with your own online ordering system you can get them to order direct and save. So, we’re going to have more details about that as we sort of work out. It’s probably going to be three or four weeks before we get it, but what we’re doing is we’re putting together a few tools that we’re going to be able to provide to our online ordering customers that we think, we’re hoping they’re going to produce some of the highest RIO marketing campaigns that we’ve ever done. But we’ll have more information on that as we sort of get it out there. And we’re going to be using this against Menu Log to start off with, we’re going to be looking for people in other countries to play with some of the other online companies. Going to be super interesting. Now, as sort of a segue into emergency Facebook marketing.

A really cool video that we put up in one of our blogs about, you may have seen this, it kind of went viral. But in Singapore Michelin has awarded one Michelin star to a couple of street food hawkers. And they made a video of one of them, Chan Hon Meng. Really nice guy, really humble. Learnt to cook from a Hong Kong chef and his street food, his little stall Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle, it’s the world’s first Michelin starred street food hawker. And I shared it because there’s a couple of things that he says in there that I think it really, really resonated with me. He says that you should always be cooking as if there’s a Michelin inspector in your restaurant. You should always be learning and it’s through your food that the talent of the chef is really shown.

And I think they are some really key things that you should be thinking about. This guy runs a street stall, okay? And you know what street food is like, you know. I love street food, you know, the flavours, the you know the atmosphere, all of that sort of thing. Some of the best meals I’ve had have been street food. But if this guy can think like that, then why can’t you? Why can’t you have that massive commitment to excellence? The other thing I really liked was he said, you know, “This is for all of them,” so he’s in Singapore, “this is for all of the Singaporean street food hawkers out there who are cooking amazing food. And I just want more people to see the kind of food that we cook in Singapore.”

So, once again, like he’s thinking of the community of street food hawkers because, and this is a great story, there’ll be more people who will be going out there looking for that street food. There’s more money in their pocket. But he’s community minded and I think a lot of restaurant owners aren’t community minded. They sort of bunker down in the restaurant, they put the barricades up and they don’t want to think about other restaurant owners, they don’t want to think about the industry as a whole. I think it’s really important to be doing that. We’re all in the same boat, you know. Talk to your competitors. You hear these little tiny pockets of stories of restaurants who, you know, someone might be down a waiter so a restaurant up the road will send one of their waiters because they’re a little bit quiet down the road to work for them.

You know, just to try and help out a mate, and I think that’s really, it makes life so much easier when you’ve got that sort of support network out there. But I’ll include a link to the blog article, have a look at the video. So, Michelin, and you know, I do get a little bit cynical. Maybe they did it because it was going to create a great story about street food having one Michelin star. His food is amazing though, he has a queue before he opens of people waiting to get into his, or to get his food. So, really exciting story. You need to think about that, I think, every day.

Now, emergency Facebook marketing. So, why are we going to be doing emergency Facebook marketing? Well, we’re going to be doing it for a couple of reasons. The first one is cash is type, right. So, hopefully you’re looking forward, hopefully you’re not actually realizing just right now that you’ve got no money. But you’re thinking, you know, “I’ve got the lease coming up. I’ve got suppliers chasing me. I’m struggling to make payroll.” Hopefully this is happening in the middle of winter, hopefully this is the worst, worst, worst, worst week of winter. And we’re in sunny Melbourne, it’s actually sunny this morning. And I think, I think, fingers crossed, we’ve passed the worst of winter. And, you know, I’ve been up and down some streets in the last few weeks and it is really tough for some of the restaurants, you know. There’s not too many people in there. So, hopefully this is when this is happening. If it’s happening in your peak times, then you’ve got really big problems. So, what you’re looking to do is to get an injection of cash into the business.

Now, typically what people would do is they would use Groupon to do this, okay. And we’ve spoken about this before, we see it as the Groupon death spiral, you know. You do one, then six weeks later you do another, and four weeks later you do two more. Then, you know, the business is shut. You get that hit of cash, it’s all good, but long-term they’re not viable. So, what we want to do is we want to bring some cash into the restaurant, we want to do it quickly. And we don’t have any cash to spend, we don’t have a lot of cash. You are going to have to spend money with this. The second reason that you’re doing emergency Facebook marketing is because of the things that you haven’t done. So, hopefully what I’m really hoping for is that you are the kind of person who’s going to be in this situation in six or 12 months’ time, you know.

Business is becoming increasingly more difficult and if you don’t do anything in 12 months’ time, you’re going to need to do emergency Facebook marketing. If that’s you, then make sure you start building a database. Start doing some database marketing. Start sending out emails. Make sure that the SEO is great on your website. Make sure that you’ve got a decent website. Make sure that it’s mobile optimized. Make sure that you’ve got a USP. Make sure that you’re actually cooking food that is of a great quality. If a street food hawker in Singapore can do it, you can too. Get that commitment to quality, get that commitment to an awesome customer experience and you won’t have to worry about doing an emergency Facebook marketing. But if you are that person, then this is the process that you take to get some money in as quickly as possible.

The first thing that we’re going to want to do with, and so what we’re going to do is we’re going to run a Facebook ad, okay. We’re going to run a Facebook ad and we’re going to target people in the local area. Now, the first thing that you’re going to want with this is, because remember, like online you’ve got to do two things: sales and marketing, sales and marketing, right.

So, the Facebook stuff, that’s the marketing, alright. We’re going to get you in front of people who could potentially buy your product tonight. Okay, that’s cool, no dramas there. How are you going to sell? Alright, so I need something sexy. I need a sexy photo and generally it’s going to be a sticky date pudding. It’s going to be a roast beef with crispy roast potatoes, and there’s gravy just oozing down the side and there’s steam coming off, right. I want a really nice photo of that. Something that’s unique. Your signature dish, dare I say if you’ve got one, why don’t you have one? Something that looks really good. Something that’s going to stop people. Because what you want to do is you want to interrupt them, you know.

I’m on Facebook, I’m scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, you know, I’m on my phone. Remember, most people are on their phone. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, “Wow, hey, look at that. That looks awesome. That looks awesome. I might go and, yeah. Let’s have that for dinner, that would be really cool. Or, “Look at that donut. Look at that milkshake.” And, you know, the news is full of all of these people coming up with crazy, I mean, just get some milk, throw half a litre of chocolate syrup in it and throw a donut in it, throw some Oreos on it. Throw jaffers in there. I don’t know, put a whole heap of crazy crap in there, and put that on Facebook. I mean, this is what people are doing. And I saw, it was on news.com.au yesterday, you know, some café just going completely bananas over that. That requires no imagination whatsoever. I’ve literally given that recipe.

Just go and have a look at some ridiculously, golden syrup, honey, I don’t know you might want to come up with something a bit weird to put in there just to make, you know, sweet tasting. But just something that you wouldn’t kind of expect. Pretty easy to do. So, we’re looking for that item that’s going to be really cool. Now, and we need a really good photo of it. “I don’t have money to go out and get a photographer. And I don’t have a good camera.” Well, there’s got to be someone, you probably have a, you know, within the last two generations iPhone or Android, okay. Yeah? Yeah? You should be able to take a photo. The biggest issue that I see that people have when they’re taking photos of their food is lighting. So, just make sure. And if you’ve got lights on your pass, that’s perfect. That is the perfect place. As it comes, over the pass boom, take a photo. Click, bang, but it up on Facebook. Easy. Easy, easy, easy. So, that’s the first thing that we want to do.

You’re going to want to take a photo of something that looks really good. Now, the next thing that we want to do that there’s, we’ve got a five-step process here. The next two steps are kind of linked. We want to come up with an offer. Now, the other component of that is we want to come up with some targeting, okay. So, targeting is about getting the right marketing message to people. So, we don’t want it to go out to, the right message to the right people.

So, if you send a highly targeted offer out to people, you’ve got a much, much, much better chance of people actually taking you up on it. So, in, now the next three podcasts are going to be on advanced Facebook techniques and we’re going to talk about advanced segmenting and a few other bits and pieces that are really cool that you can do on Facebook to dramatically increase the number of people that are coming to your restaurant from it. We’re not going to talk too much about that today though. What we’re going to talk about is really just the generic campaign. But listen to those podcasts, as well, because they’re the ones that will make it a lot better, the number of people who are clicking on your ad.

So, an example of that is, and I like targeting men aged, you know, sort of 18 to 30 who live alone. So, why do you want to target those people? These are the people who live alone and they’re probably eating baked beans or cheese toast every night, okay. They don’t have great cooking skills and they’re going to be eating the same food every night. It’s probably going to be four or five-day old leftovers, which they’ve had every night and they’re sick and tired of it. So, they are probably the easiest people that you can target. Now, I don’t want to say lazy but they’re probably, they might be a little bit lazy, as well. So, if you do deliveries, perfect. They live at home, they’ve got no one to cook for them, alright. The sink might be full of dishes.

So, the product that we’re going to bundle up is something for people who just want something basic, alright. This is really easy because it doesn’t have to be great. So, if you’re an Indian restaurant, I’m thinking a curry, some rice, two naan bread, and a can of coke. Right. That’s the offer. Bundle all of those up, make it cheap. Now, I know exactly this is difficult if you’re going to do delivery because, you know, it’s a pretty skinny margin. So, it might be pick up. There’s a lot of people who will pick food up on the way home. There’s a lot of people who are probably going to do it anyway. If you can have a great photo of the food, you can get them to change their pattern and come and pick it up from your restaurant, not their usual one. That’s what you want to be doing. So, your offer is going to be some sort of price related or, generally you don’t want to pricing, you know, some sort of bundling type thing. Because, we’ve got to remember, this is emergency. So, you’re trying to get the cash in. the bigger the discount that you give, the more alluring it will be. So, one of the things that you want to think about is what is it that is your highest margin product. If you’ve got something that you sell for five dollars, and it cost you 50 cents, you can give that away. So, “Buy one of these and we’ll give you a free blah.”

Because from a consumer point of view, they’re seeing free five dollars. From your point of view, don’t think of it as five dollars that you’re giving away. You’re thinking of, “I’m giving 50 cents away, to get a sale of a $10, which I make five bucks on.” So, you’re looking for the high margin product that you can bundle into some sort of offer for your customers. You can then run that in Facebook. Now, the important thing with Facebook is you offer a localized service, alright. I cannot stress this enough. It’s one of the big mistakes that we see with restaurants is they say, you know, “Facebook advertising doesn’t work.” And you go, “Okay, why doesn’t it work?” And they say, “Well, we ran this campaign and, you know, no one came in.” And you go, “Okay, you’re targeting everyone in Australia and you have a restaurant in,” I don’t care if it’s a degustation meal that normally is $200 a head, and you’re giving away a table of 10 to anyone who makes a booking, you’re not going to get people from Sydney for that offer. That’s the best offer ever. But people in Sydney aren’t going to do that. So, people have just been, they’ve been going in, they’ve been clicking next, next, next.

They haven’t been actually thinking about the marketing that they’re doing. Your customer is local to you. Or, they’re buying something on the way home. Are they buying some food to eat on the train home? Are they, you know, who is it that is going to buy your food? You need to really, really, really think about that. You can target people in an area who are in that area. You can target people who live in that area. There’s a lot of advanced targeting options in Facebook. So, you can set the age. You can set the demographic. You can set the, you know, all these demographics that are really powerful in Facebook. They’re the kind of things that you need to be thinking about as you start to construct this offer. I would think about some of the basic targeting, and we’re not going to go into it too much depth in this episode because we’re going to be talking about that a lot more in the next couple.

But you want to be thinking about how that is going to affect people. This marketing is all about the psychology. So, you want to be thinking, you want to have someone in mind and you want to have an offer that’s going to make sense to them. It might be, and you can try some simple things. And this is the great thing about Facebook is that you can try something today and leave it to run for two days, and if no one comes in then you change it, it hasn’t worked. This is not like Yellow Pages where you put an offer, you put some sort of ad up and in three months’ time the book came out and then you were committed to that for 15 months. So, if you made a bad decision you were wearing that for 15 months. You can make a bad decision in Facebook and wear it for two days.

The first day you get a rough indication of how well it’s going to work, the second day is the one that makes the big, you get a really good idea. Because Facebook, they’ve got these great algorithms that are going to be sort of working out, okay, who is most likely to take up this offer. From there, see, you might have done some basic demographics. You’ve come up with an offer. And there’s plenty of them out there. Kids eat free, you know, what about kids eat free? You know, people with lots of kids in the house. “Kids eat free tonight. Give mum a break from the kitchen. Kids eat free tonight.” Now, think about the timing of that.

I would run that from sort of 10:00 in the morning through to, you know, maybe 4:00, 5:00 because I want to see that ad, I want to speak to my wife and say, “You know what, how about we go out tonight? You know, I want to give you some time off.” Now, I’m saying to my beautiful wife, you know, “Don’t you cook something tonight, I’ll take you out.” In reality though, I’m going there to buy the baby back ribs with the barbeque sauce. I’ve seen that and there’s fries that look awesome. That’s how the offer and the targeting sort of work. And you want to sort of see how this is going to play out, because you’re dealing with a family. So, it’s not one single person. So, “Give mum the night off in the kitchen.” I’ve got the reason to do that, the baby back ribs with the awesome chips. There might be a beer in the background, as well. I think I’ve earnt it. That story then really starts to set the scene for how this is going to work. Run it from between 10 and 5, and then that night, you know, “Mention this ad in the restaurant and the kids eat free. Tonight only.” You can run that.

And the thing I like about, there’s two good things about that. One, if you say, “Here’s an awesome offer,” people will go, “Wow, that’s an awesome offer. I’ll have to do that. But I’m busy tonight, I’m going to watch Netflix tonight. So, yeah, I’ll probably do it next week.” And then of course, next week comes and they never turn up. “Tonight only.” If I like that offer, I’ve got to go tonight. Is it powerful enough to make me change my decisions tonight? Now, you might come up with 10 different offers that you would run on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday because they’re your quiet nights. And you might rotate through them. If you had nine, that’s one different offer every night for three quiet nights. And, of course, over the next three weeks you’re going to say, “Wow, we had a really big Wednesday. And we had a big Thursday the week before.” What were those offers? Ah ha. Really important to think about those sort of things, because now we’re actually starting to go into, actually, that’s measuring.

Before we get there though, budget. This is one of the things that people say, you know, “How much money should I throw at a Facebook campaign?” So, the smallest amount possible. One, because you don’t want to spend too much money because we’re doing emergency Facebook marketing. But two, I think one of the really important things to remember is people often say to me, “I spent $100 last week on this campaign, and it worked ridiculously well. I’m going to spend $400 this week and it should work even better.” That never happens, and it’s for two reasons. One, you’ve come up with an offer, you’ve come up with a photo, you’ve come up with all of those things. You’ve shown that to me and I’ve made a decision. Yes, that’s for me. No, it’s not. If I’ve gone out and had a meal at your restaurant, I’ve already taken up the offer. I may not do it again.

And if I’ve seen it and said, “Nah, that’s not for me,” I’ve probably made that decision. It’s a lot harder to get people to buy on the second, third, fourth view. Now, sometimes it’s good for branding and awareness and it’s like, “Yeah, I do need to get around to that.” But in general, you’ll find that it costs you a lot more to get someone to click through to your website. Because the people who are going to take an action have already taken an action. That’s the first thing. And the other thing is you’ll say to Facebook, “I’ve got 20 bucks to spend,” or, “I’ve got 50 bucks to spend today.” And the first thing that Facebook says is, “Goodie, I’ve got 50 bucks.

Now, here are all of the people that we can show it to.” And Facebook is going to see, if you give Facebook five bucks, it’s going to go, “I haven’t got a lot of money to spend, and I really, really want to get my five bucks. So, I’m going to have to show it to the fewest number of people who are actually going to take advantage of this.” So, who does Facebook know in its massive big database, which is completely awesome, that is most likely to do whatever it is? And you don’t want to boost the post, you want to do clicks to a website. You want to drive people to your website on this. Or, potentially call now.

I think click to website is a lot more important. So, if you give Facebook too much it just gets lazy and throws the offer in front of any old Tom, Dick, and Harry because it knows that it’s got more money than it needs to. So, if you double your budget, you’re not going to get double the response after a certain point. If you’re spending $5, you might boost it to $10 or $20 and that might be fine. The thing that you’ve got to think about though, like for Marketing for Restaurants I run some campaigns that have an audience and you’ll be able to see the number of people who are within your audience as you narrow it down. So, you might put your suburb in and, you know, 20 miles. You might say, “Well, there’s 40,000 people in that catchment area.” And you’ll say, “Well, I only want to do males,” that brings it down to 20,000. “And I only want males between 18 and 30.” Right, you’re now looking at 5,000 people. That’s a pretty skinny audience, yeah? That’s really skinny.

So, it’s going to be fairly expensive. There’s not that many people, because you’ve got to remember, they’ve got to be on Facebook to see your ad. And if you’re talking about doing some time-based marketing now, that’s the hardest stuff to do. Because if they’re not on Facebook today, they’re not going to see that ad. So, you would want a low budget with that. Which is good, because you don’t have a lot of money to spend and what we’re aiming to do is to get you to that tipping point where you can get an extra, you know, two or three bookings a night. And that, with the right offer, that’s not hard to do, I don’t think. And the critical thing is, you might, let’s just think about all of the things that you’ve got going on in your restaurant. Is it a happy hour offer? Do you want to get 15 people in the restaurant before 6:00 so that the restaurant looks moderately busy, so that you can increase your walk-through traffic? How many restaurants don’t get anyone in an entire night?

If you’ve got no one in the restaurant and the place next door to you has got 20 people in, then subconsciously everyone things, “This place, the locals know that this place is no good. I’m not going in there.” That’s scary for you. You know, you don’t want to be that restaurant. So, what you might do is you might run a happy hour offer just to get the first few customers in, and then the walk-in traffic will do the rest. “Look at this,” you know.

And make sure you seat people up the front so the people say, “Yeah, this place is pretty busy, I’m going to go in. I can see there’s a few tables out the back.” This is how you fill a restaurant on Tuesday night. These are some of the things that you can do. So, budget. The least amount that you want. You’ve got to really think about that and I see people who, you know, they say, “I’ve spent a thousand dollars on Facebook and got no return from it.” It’s like, “Wow, so you ran 100 campaigns?” “No, no, I ran one.” Well, that’s crazy bananas. That is crazy. You can test and measure on a daily basis. So, you should be looking at that and go, “This campaign was good, this campaign was bad.” And if it’s a good campaign, turn it off and leave it for next week or let it run until it starts getting a bit stale and then, you know, run it again in two months’ time. The exciting thing about this is you’re starting to understand what offers, what targeting works for your customers. Starting to get to be a smarter restaurant marketer and that’s exciting. You’ve got to start to do this stuff. So, measure.

Now, ideally, you’re going to drive them to the website and then metric it versus where they have in. So, our online booking system you can actually see some of the data about where the bookings came from. So, you can actually see, you know, this Facebook campaign or 10 people came from Facebook. And we’re doing an okay job of that, we’re going to be introducing a lot more introducing metrics so that people can actually see the kind of response that they’re marketing’s having. Because I think that this is absolutely crucial. One of the things that makes it really, really easy to do is to, “Mention this ad and the kids eat free,” you know. That’s a simple, simple, simple redemption type thing. Not a problem at all, you know. There’s other little quirky things, “Share our offer,” or, “Check in and get a free blah.”

Now, we’re actually getting the social validation that Facebook is so good at. “Share this offer and mention it in the restaurant and your kids eat free.” Now, 20 people might see that. 20 people might share that. You might get in front of 5,000, 10,000 people for free. This is the way that you do those things. This is the way that you build in that sort of virality, leverage the capabilities that Facebook gives us and create a really strong marketing campaign. “Mention this ad for,” is great, because you get your front of house staff to just say, you know, how many people came in and redeemed that offer, you know. Set it up in your POS system. That way you can keep a little spreadsheet. “I ran this offer to this group, I spent that much, and this many people came in.” You’ve got to be thinking about what it’s worthwhile to, you know, what’s the benefit of running a campaign like this.

So, let’s just say that you’ve had last Tuesday night you had no one in. What did it cost you to run, to open up? So, what is your lease divided by the number of days in the month? What is your electricity bill? What is the staff wages there? A lot of those costs you’re going to pay whether no one comes in or whether 10 people or 20 people come in. Now, you might call extra wait staff in, that’s a little bit different and back of house. So, that’s a little bit different. In general, though, the way that you should be thinking about this is just your variable costs. So, if someone comes in, what are you going to pay? You’re going to pay for their food of course. Now, one of the interesting things that people don’t think about is, and I was talking to a restaurant owner and she said, you know, “It’s really quiet at the moment.

So, I’m only producing 6 kilos of meat a day.” And the concern is that, no sorry, 6 kilos in the week and sometimes at the end of the week she’s giving stuff away because it’s about to go off. Now, if she’s giving stuff away, that’s increasing her costs. If she can get that few extra people in, she’s actually not only is she getting the extra revenue of the profit of the customer that comes in, she’s giving them free – if you’ve got wastage like that, you can get a customer in who’s going to cost you nothing. If you’re going to throw that food out anyway and someone comes in and pays something for it, then you are at that point where you’ve actually given them food that cost you nothing to produce because you’ve already produce it. You’ve already put the labour in, you’ve already paid for it. so, that customer, if they give you 50 bucks, that’s 50 bucks in your pocket that cost you nothing to produce. Think about that.

But in general, food costs are going to be what, say, somewhere between 20, 30%? So, if someone spends 100 bucks, 70 of that goes into your pocket. That’s the increase in your profit. So, that’s $70 towards the lease, $70 towards the wages. I would like to think of that $70, you take $10 out for tomorrow’s marketing campaign. Because you’re going to run a free marketing campaign tomorrow. The customer today pays for tomorrow’s marketing campaign.

Now, the thing that you’ve got to think about is that there are some people out there who are spending $1,000 a month on Facebook. You’re competing against them. And have you ever wondered why you’re quiet and the restaurant down the road is busy? Facebook is like SEO, you know, if you’re not in that target demographic then you’re never going to see the ads. So, that’s another thing that you need to think about. This is what you should be doing, don’t just take this money that you get and spend it on the lease. Fight really hard to retain some of that. Fight for it to be able to get a better website, fight for it to be able to get a real marketing budget. And, you know, the kind of things that you put in the marketing budget are, you know, do you want to put a coat of paint across the place? Do you need new carpet?

If you were to look dispassionately at the front of the restaurant is it the kind of place that you would want to take your family or go for a fine dining meal? Is it really? Because a lot of places aren’t. A lot of places are kind of like dodgy looking, and that’s scary. You want to be putting some of this money away to be able to pay for that. So, what have we covered? Take a picture on your mobile phone that looks pretty cool of your most exciting signature item. Link that with an offer. Link that with a type of target customer that you want, right. And if you don’t do any segmenting at all make sure that you at least make it location-based.

Do not target people who are 100 miles away from you because, unless you’re very, very, very, very special, you’re going to struggle to get people to drive all that way to eat your food, okay. Limit it by location. Set a budget. The budgets don’t need to be high. The big thing is measure it. This is all about finding out what is going to work with your customers, what picture works and there’s lots of things in there. So, there’s the picture, there’s the headline, there’s the offer, there’s the landing page, you know. Do you need to start working on your website? Are you going to struggle, you know, you might just get to call a restaurant now, because your website’s awful? Ideally, you’re going to be putting them into an online booking system, so that you can get their email address so that you don’t have to be doing emergency Facebook marketing or restaurant social media marketing. There are people out there who don’t do emergency Facebook marketing because when it gets quiet they send an email out to 10,000 people who have eaten in their restaurant, and they get a response rate of two percent. That’s 20 people making a booking, the average booking size is 3.5 seats. That’s 70 people spending 50 bucks a pop. That’s $3,500 and they’re doing it once a month. That’s an extra $50,000 in their pocket.

You want to be doing the emergency Facebook marketing to get you into a place where you don’t need to be doing emergency restaurant social media marketing. But it does work. If you’ve got ad problems, hit us up. You know, I can’t stress this enough. If you’re in trouble, reach out. And we’re going to go and help, we’re not going to spend like 50 hours helping you. But I took one of my kids to a restaurant about a couple of months ago now. Great little restaurant, really loved it. And it was on my list of places to go back to. And I liked it on Facebook, you know, just wanted to see, you know, what offers they were doing, what sort of marketing they were doing just out of interest.

And last night I’m scrolling through Facebook just before I went to bed and there was a message from one of the owners saying, “Look, we’re really sorry but we’ve closed the café.” And it as like, “I was going to take the family there.” Now, we had no idea that they were struggling. Like, when we were in there it was pretty quiet, but a great little place, great food, and sometimes people at Chan Hon Meng, the guy from Singapore with Hong Kong Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle, cooks ridiculously good food and has a queue out the front without any marketing whatsoever–no restaurant social media marketing. But those guys are the exception, they’re not the rule. Time and time and time again I’ve eaten in places where the food’s been really amazing, I’ve loved the service and I’ve thought, “This is a great little restaurant.” But we’ve been the only people in there and it’s because their marketing has just sucked or there was no restaurant social media marketing at all.

The suburb that I live in, there’s four Indian restaurants. Friday night is Indian delivered food for us. That’s, if we’re going to have takeout, it’s on a Friday night. My favourite is Indian. I like really, really hot Vindaloos. No one can make a really hot Vindaloo that’s one issue that I’ve got. Two, the quality has gone down. And I spoke to one of them and they said it’s because of increasing costs from Menulog, they’ve changed their recipes. But, you know what, it’s just increasingly bland. And I’m kind of turned off by it.

Now, we’ve got a relationship with a few companies and a part of that is we reach out to some restaurants and help them with their marketing. So, the first thing that I do is I go and eat there. And I had to go to one last week and little tiny place, obviously does more delivery than eat in. The chairs were really ordinary, they only had like, you know, there’s probably four tables in the restaurant and I remember standing out and saying, “You know what, this is just haggis. Why do I have to do this?” And, look, I wasn’t really happy about it because of the fact that I was pretty confident that I was going to have a really awful meal. And, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve eaten in a lot of restaurants. I’ve eaten in a lot of mom and pop restaurants, you know.

I do get to eat in some fine dining but, you know, 99 times out of 100 it’s someone’s local Chinese, Indian, pizza, something joint. And, you know what, some of the food, I’ve had some pretty ordinary experiences and I thought that this was going to be one of them. And I’m sitting there just talking to the family. I like it because I get to talk to the family. But I’m thinking, “God, the food’s taking forever.” And that’s because I’m dumb and slow, and I didn’t realize that they, the guy was cooking all of the food. He was actually cooking out the front. The burners are out the front so you can see exactly what’s going on. He’s cooking the food. Now rather than having the food prepared, you know, five days ago or whatever and just, you know, slipping it out of a bucket, this guy was actually cooking it. And they delivered it up and I thought, “The presentation’s actually quite good.” And then we ate it and it was like, “Holy cow, this is really nice. This is really, really good Indian.”

Now, their food is so good that we’re going to get, I’m going to drive, now because they won’t deliver to me because we live 20 minutes from them. It’s 20 minutes further for me on the way home, I can’t get this on the way home so I’m going to drive past my house get their food and have it on Friday night. So, it’s going to take me 40 minutes of driving to get the food. He’s got great food and I remember, I looked at the bill, it was $50 for the family. And I said to Tine, “That’s just criminal, isn’t it?” You know, that food is so much better and, in fact, we tried one of the local restaurants that we hadn’t tried for a while because they were very, very expensive. It was $100 for less food, maybe it was $90. A lot more expensive and the food, I thought it was a little bit better than the local stuff around. Nowhere near the price premium, they’re probably about 50% more expensive.

And Tina didn’t think that hers was any better at all. And I said to the guy, “This food is amazing, you know.” And we talked about ingredient substitution and things like that. He said, “I can’t do that. My father taught me to cook this way, and this is the way that we cook. Because I think that that’s the way that the food, you make the food as best as possible.” You know, it’s not rocket science, people. But this guy had encapsulated that, and this is what we’re really fighting for is I don’t think that he should be in a shop like that. He needs to be in a really nice restaurant because there was just this amazing interrupt, you know, this shop looked awful but his food was amazing. We need to get the profitability for this guy.

We need to be able to help him to be able to afford a more expensive lease, because he’ll get more customers. I would happily take my family back there. I’m driving for 40 minutes on Friday night. This is Friday night, it’s been a long week. All I want to do is get into a Chicken Vindaloo and a nice bottle of red. That’s how good his food is. So, hopefully we can help him with his marketing. Hopefully we can get more people to understand that his food is a lot better than a lot, than your average Indian food. He’s cooking, you know, with the proper spices, he’s cooking it with great meat. And you could tell, like the chicken was like, “Wow, this really tastes like chicken. This is really nice. It’s moist, tender–really, really nice. Not the kind of stuff that we get dished up from our local Indian restaurants.” That’s what it’s all about. Great food, great value.

So, his experience was a bit ordinary, you know, because of the environment. You know, front of house was, you know, friendly enough and all of that sort of thing. You only need two out of the three: great food, great value. He just needs more customers so that he can afford, you know, a nicer premise. He needs more people. You could see he wasn’t that busy in the kitchen. That’s probably a Wednesday night, so it’d be interesting to see what he was like on the weekend. It’d be interesting to see what he’s like on Friday night. But yeah, great food, great value. He just needs the great marketing to marry that up. So, the first two bits, or the first three, great food, great value, great experience, that’s your job.

We’ll help you with the great restaurant social media marketing. That’s it, so I hope you learnt something. If you are in the sad, sad, sad predicament of having to run an emergency restaurant social media marketing, hit us up with your ideas. We’re happy to critique them, you know, give you some ideas, you know. Help you with the targeting. Targeting’s a little bit complicated. Listen to the next three, we’re going to talk about remarketing, segmenting, and email marketing through Facebook. Some great little topics there that will dramatically help you with your Facebook marketing, really enable you to bring in a lot more customers for not a huge marketing budget. So, that’s it. I hope you have a busy day. Bye.

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