Wouldn’t you be sad if your Restaurant was missing out on $100,000 a year in revenue because you believed a couple of these myths? We discuss what we hear from Restaurants vs What we actually seeing as working for Restaurants around the world.

We look at restaurant dark kitchens and how they are starting to change the way that food is delivered to Restaurants.

Myth #1: SEO is a monthly ongoing cost – What is this all about?  

Restaurant keyword optimisation can be a can of worms and often it comes down to a monthly report only a lot of the time.  Some restaurants are paying thousands of dollars every month for no real services.

Myth #2: If your Restaurant’s name comes up number 1 when someone searches for it, you have great SEO

There are two types of people out there and you are only reaching one group (the much smaller group) if you are only getting traffic when people type in your restaurant’s name.  We discuss the secret of SEO and how you can use that secret to dramatically grow the number of people going to your restaurant.  If someone doesn’t know about your restaurant, how many will find your restaurant in Google? The answer should be lots!

Myth #3: Great restaurants don’t need marketing

Too many times great restaurants with great food are outdone by crappy restaurants with great marketing. You don’t want to be the best restaurant that no one has ever heard of.

Myth #4: Restaurant email marketing doesn’t work 

Email marketing is great because it goes to people who know your Restaurant and it is very cheap to run and they are a great part of the yield utilisation process.  The hard part is building your marketing database.

Myth #5: Facebook no longer works

Ongoing changes to the Facebook platform have meant that some restaurants don’t think Facebook works any more.  Listen to last week’s episode about Mama’s BBQ Chicken and Salad Bar and how they got 1,000,000 views on Facebook.  For everyone who can’t dance like Wally, :), it has become pay to play, but the budgets are often just $3 per day.  We talk about our new Marketing University course on running your first Facebook Marketing ad campaign.

To read the other myths, click: 11 Restaurant Marketing Myths Exposed – PART II

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

Transcript on podcast Episode 64: 11 Restaurant Marketing Myths Exposed- Part 1

JAMES ELING: Hey, it’s James from Marketing4Restaurants here and welcome to Episode 64 of Secret Sauce, the restaurant marketing podcast, “11 Restaurant Marketing Myths Exposed.”

James: Welcome back, everyone. So last week, we looked at flavour, flavour, flavour, and how Wally at Mama’s BBQ, Chicken and Salad Bar in Endeavour Hills has had over a million views on Facebook. And I think, you know, everyone should have been outdoors in a chicken dance or coming up with something that expresses the way that they want to tell their story on Facebook Live. That’s an easy no-brainer thing to do to start finding more customers and turning them to repeat customers.

So, today, what we want to do is we want to start looking at some restaurant marketing myths exposed. And I think this is going to be a fairly important podcast because a lot of the myths that we’re going to be talking about today, these are myths that are really holding people back. These are things that people fundamentally believe, which I hope to go through and debunk a lot of these myths because they are costing people sometimes thousands of dollars every month.

There are restaurants out there that believe these myths and are costing them tens of thousands of dollars every month. I know restaurants who are losing over a hundred thousand dollars just because of some of the fundamental mistakes that they’re making. And these mistakes, they don’t think they’re doing the wrong thing. They think they’re following best practices, when in reality, they’re not.

Some of the time, they [restaurants] spend money that they don’t need to spend. Other times, they’re missing out on massive economic benefits because of things that they’re doing wrong or aren’t doing. Before we get into that – dark kitchens. I’ve written a bit of a blog article on dark kitchens. The term is becoming increasingly bandied around in the media and a lot of restaurants are really starting to try to get and their head around exactly what a dark kitchen is.

So a dark kitchen comes from the supermarket industry. Now with online delivery and supermarkets, they’ve got dark supermarkets. These are supermarkets that aren’t designed for customers to go into. Literally, there’s a team of pickers and packers, and they’re putting the orders. They go into a truck and then they deliver to their customers’ homes.

So, effectively, a dark kitchen is a very similar concept. Not structured in any way, shape or form for customers to come in to eat in, not even to pick up a lot of the time. So it is designed specifically for delivery. Now, they’ve become quite popular with Deliveroo. Deliveroo is planning on opening 200 and I think they’re over something like $600 million dollars to really, really push this out.

We go into quite a bit of depth in the blog article. The edited highlights are, I think, that one of the trends that not a lot of people are talking about is the fact that restaurants are starting to do this themselves and there’s a couple of benefits to this.

Obviously, you’re saving on a massive commission that Deliveroo charges, and for a lot of restaurants out there, at least 35%. And one of the other trends that we’re starting to see is people who are pulling out from people like UberEATS and Deliveroo. We’re not seeing too many people who are using Foodora in Australia, I think that they’ll probably leave fairly soon. But they’re struggling with profitability issues because they’re losing the 35%.

We’re seeing other people who are doing things like they’re playing with portion sizes, playing with recipes, playing with ingredients, to try and get the food costs down. But the 35%, even though you are making a serving because there’s no front of house and there’s no rent, it can be quite difficult to do that. And the other thing, of course, is that you’re not building your brand, you’re building someone else’s brand.

You don’t get the email address of your customers, which really makes it difficult to go back and market to those people. And if you’ve cooked a great burger or a great Vindaloo, those customers want to hear from you but you can’t actually directly reach out to them. I think that this is a big problem and it’s only going to get bigger.

So, when you’re seeing more and more restaurants who are actually, you know, they’re hiring space in a factory in a less commercial area with a rental lot cheaper, some of them are building a single restaurant and they’re doing delivery out of that and sometimes it’s delivery only. I think the best practice is going to evolve to be delivery and takeout from a dark kitchen, which is an extension of your brand. I think that there’s a lot to be said for that.

We’re hoping to do an interview around the economics of doing delivery, which I think is going to validate our thinking that if you can get the customer to come and pick it up, then it’s a whole lot more profitable for you. So looking at the work that Domino’s have done, they really do drive very aggressively for people to come and pick up the food. It’s much, much cheaper if the customer picks it up and I think that you’ll find that there’ll be a lot of restaurants out there who are going to do a dark kitchen, a little bit of paint on the front, a little bit of branding, so that customers can come in and pick it up. And that’s going to make a really, really big difference.

(To know more about how Domino’s does their delivery and pickup system, LISTEN to Episode 47: 7 ways to increase online orders for your restaurant – Part 2)

Now, on to our 11 restaurant marketing myths exposed. So what I want to do is we’re going to go through what the myth is and these are things that we hear all the time. We’re talking to restaurants all the time. We’ve got our revenue optimization consultants. They’re talking to lots of restaurants all the time. We’ve got our marketing and support team. They’re talking to our customers. And these are the kind of things that were getting fed back to us as to what it is that restaurants think, how they think that restaurant marketing works.

Restaurant marketing myth #1: SEO is a monthly ongoing cost

Now, the number one – and this is one of my pet peeves – is that SEO is an ongoing monthly cost. Every time we talk to someone who says that they offer an SEO service and, you know, it’s $100, $200, $1,000, $2,000–whatever the price–what’s involved with that? Because what will happen is that they’ll go through and they’ll sometimes talk about what keywords you want to be optimized for, which I always think is interesting because the marketing person should tell you what you want to be optimized for.

“You tell me what your business plan is about. You tell me what your offering is about and I’ll tell you the keywords that you want to be optimized about because I’m a restaurant marketer and that’s what I do.” If someone is saying to you, “What keywords do you want to be optimized for?” They don’t really understand. Like, “You guys aren’t in marketing, so how are you going to know what keywords you want to be optimised for?”

This is one of the big issues that we start to see. And so there’s a lot of restaurants out there who are paying – and sometimes it’s north of a thousand dollars a month, which I find absolutely fascinating. So what does this SEO company do? Well, I do our SEO.

Now, sometimes restaurants don’t even know what that is, so you have to explain what search engine optimization is. It’s what you get found for in Google, how much traffic Google refers to you. Find out what it is that they do. Now, sometimes the restaurant will be getting reports and that’s often it. Sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, you know, we submit your names to indexes and we write blog articles about you.”

All of that sort of stuff, that’s SEO practices from a few years ago and Google has been really anti. They use kind of spam-my links that people are putting in to kind of drive traffic, so they don’t really work anymore. Unless the SEO company is talking to you about an ongoing evolution of content on your website, they’re not really doing SEO for your restaurant.

We find that this happens time and time, and time again. I spent a bit of time talking to a guy who runs an SEO business. And effectively, what they do is they find people, they sign them up on a contract and they try and keep them for as long as possible. But they’ve always got sales people going out and finding more people. And so they know that if they’ve got 50 people on a thousand dollar contract, that’s $50,000 dollars a month coming in, and they know  that they’ll lose 10%, 20%, 30% of those a month. They just need to replace, find those new restaurants to get them across the line.

This is the other thing that’s really interesting. A lot of them don’t specialize in restaurants, so they’ll just do SEO for anyone. I’m very finicky about that because you need to understand the business. You need to understand what people are searching for.

Yes, there’s tools out there that you can use, which interestingly enough, a lot of people don’t use, a lot of these SEO companies don’t use. They’re really just out there to sort of put a report out on a monthly basis and make it appear that they’re doing work. And we do this with some of our restaurants. We’ll sit down and go, “Right. Let’s redo the SEO. Let’s have a good look at it. What are the kind of things that we want to be targeting?”

And we’ll have missed out a few things or the business would have evolved, make a few changes, and that’s it. The SEO is done and you can see a bit of a jump in traffic. Or if it’s a new customer come across, you might say, “Big jump in traffic,” because of the fact that they’re actually getting found for things that they weren’t being found for.

Restaurant marketing myth #2: If your Restaurant’s name come up as number one in Google, you have great SEO!

This leads us on to the second myth and that is, if you’re number one when someone searches your name you have great SEO. Unlike a lot of people, I spent some time talking to some of the Google Search guys at their campus in Mountain View. Now they didn’t tell me what the algorithm was–they don’t tell anyone that. They didn’t give me any specific things, but the one thing that I took away was what it is that Google is trying to do.

Google is a massive company and there’s a whole heap of smart people there, a lot smarter than you or I. All of the smart people work there. Now they’re trying to provide really good search answers. So if your restaurant is called, let’s say, Frank’s Diner. If you own Frank’s Diner, when people are googling Frank’s Diner, they’re looking for information on it.

Now if your website is anywhere near decent, you should come up the top because people are looking for your website. They want to know what the address is. They want to know are you open today, what’s on the menu, what does it look like. Well, what are those things that people need when they’re planning on coming out to your restaurant?

So Google will actually work pretty hard to rank the website of a restaurant towards the top. So it’s only if you’ve got one of those crappy one pages that some of the third party companies will do, or if you don’t have a website or if your website is actually just your Facebook page. Those guys really struggle. We see some Wix and Squarespace people or Weebly. You know, I see Weebly every now and then.

Those guys will often struggle to get high up in the site rankings for their name. You know that you’ve got a bit of a problem when people will reach out to us and say, “We need some help,” and we give them a call and we say, “Yes, so… Well, you don’t have a website.” And they go, “Yes, I do.” So, “Oh, do you? What is it?” And they say, “Oh, it’s this,” and they give us the URL. I say, “Uh, well, there you go. You do have a website.” I couldn’t find it.

And I got to tell you, we actually look for the website. It’s not like we’re just, “Uh, they don’t have a website,” because most of the people who are looking for your website, if they can’t find it in 15 seconds, they’re gone. It’s the old joke in SEO land, you know, “Where’s the best place to hide a body? On Page 2 of Google because no one ever looks there.”

So you want to be thinking about that and I always think that I’m going to give you the secret to SEOs. This is drilled into our team from Day 1 when they join the company and we’re working on a fairly extensive training program now because we’ve been scaling up our team. I think there’s, like, 12 or 13 people in the team now. Well, this is the big thing that we drill into that, the secret of SEO, and I’m going to give it to you because I don’t think it should be a secret.

What is the problem that you solved? If I had that problem, what would I type into Google? Now, that’s it. That is SEO. So we need to do a little bit of work on what is the problem that you solved because, you know, some restaurants, they kind of struggle with this. What is the problem that you solved? And don’t say, “Oh, we’re an Indian restaurant.” Well, that’s one part of it because there are two types of people who are going to be looking for your restaurant.

There are those who know about you and those who – and people say to me they get all confused. How is someone who doesn’t know my restaurant going to look for it? It’s because they’re not looking for your restaurant, they’re looking for the solution to their problem. Because there’s only one type of person who uses Google and that is a person with a problem. “So what is a good vegetarian restaurant near me?”

Now if you have a vegetarian offering that you’re proud off, then you should be doing SEO around vegetarian restaurant in your suburb with those catchment areas. Family friendly, gluten-free, you know, there’s a lot of niches out there. And this is why people who do a really good job with their SEO, they might have 30 pages in their website. Because if I’m looking for a gluten-free restaurant, then I am very, very different to someone who’s looking for the best Indian restaurant in town or the best hamburger joint in town.

I have some very specific needs and I want those needs to be addressed so that I can then make a commitment to a transaction here. So many times, so many times, we see people who say, “I’ve got SEO” and then you start talking to them and they’ve got an amazing story, and they’ve got an amazing niche offering and it’s not on the website. And you say, “Do you get a lot of people in for this?” No.

“You know, one of the big things is you’re not telling Google that you do that.” So SEO is a lot more complicated than, you know, just searching for your name and going, “Hey, that’s awesome.” Now, when you are checking your SEO, if you’re using Chrome, click on the three little buttons on the top right hand corner and on the third one down is New Incognito Window. Open that up because that does a search that doesn’t reference your search history.

One of the things that people will say is like, “Look at this. I’m fantastic. I’m number one.” It’s like, hmm, I’m looking at that and I’m not seeing that. Because if I’ve never been on your website before, I’m going to have a different search result if I’ve been on it ten times. If I’ve been on it ten times, Google is going to go, “You know what, James loves this website. He’s always going there. Let’s show it to him right at the top. That’s probably what he wants.”

So if you’ve been there ten times, for any kind of search that you meet the bare minimum requirement for with Google, boom, you’re going to be up number one because Google knows that you love going to that website.

Restaurant marketing myth #3: Great restaurants don’t need marketing. If your food is great, the customers will come.

Now, the next myth and this is an epic one. If the food is great, they will come, because great restaurants don’t need marketing because word-of-mouth will work for them. So, there’s a couple of problems with that. First up, a lot of people think that their amazing food, that as soon as I’m eating it I’m going to be, “Oh, my God. This food is amazing. I need to tell all of my friends out there.” And there’s a little bit of a backlash in Facebook about people taking photos of their food, that there’s a lot of demand on people’s social media time so people are becoming less and less likely to do that.

So it’s actually quite tough if you’re relying just on word-of-mouth to get the story out about your restaurant. The other thing is that there are a lot of restaurants out there who are very aggressive in their marketing. They’re running Facebook campaigns. They’re engaging in very active public relations campaigns. They’re having a good think about what it is that they want to be putting on the menu that’s going to capture the imagination of the people. They’ll be sending out emails, and [sending out] emails is a really, really amazing method of doing marketing. Other people don’t see it. If you’re not on a mailing list then you don’t see it and people are going, “Oh, why is this restaurant really, really busy?” And it’s like, “Hmm, interesting.”

So, there are some restaurants out there that don’t do any marketing and, you know, the chef is just incredibly talented and they’ve picked the right time, the right location, all of those sort of things. Everything’s sort of fallen in place and they’re really successful for it. But they are the top 1%. There’s a lot of other restaurants who are doing a lot of marketing and, you know, I can’t say this enough.

Too many times, great restaurants get out-marketed by restaurants with great marketing, and the restaurant with the great marketing, they’re the ones that are successful and the restaurant with the great food, the great value, the great experience, they’re the ones that go to the wall. And I think that that’s really sad.

So if you think that you can get by without marketing, I think you need to have a really good hard look at it, definitely. And, yeah, I’d like to talk to you if you’re not doing any marketing whatsoever and you’re full five nights a week–that’s epic. That is epic but so many people who don’t do any marketing or that they’ve got the really crap website, there’ll be something else that they’re pouring their heart and soul into to drive the demand for their restaurant. So everyone, I think, needs to think about that.

Restaurant marketing myth #4: Emails don’t work, they just go into the spam folder

So the next one I want to talk about is emails don’t work, they just go into Spam. Now the thing about email is that these are going to be people who have probably eaten in your restaurant. So you know, the old small business maxim that it’s easier to get an existing customer to buy from you again than it is to go out and find a new customer. Because you think about the customer journey that you’ve got to do, you know, you’ve got to create awareness, interest and desire, and then the action.

The awareness and the interest, it’s one of the old marketing methodology but I quite like it because it’s very unlikely that someone’s going to see a single post on Facebook and go, “Oh, I’m going to eat there.” Now you can do it, it is possible. But generally, people want to hear about a restaurant that, you know, someone goes there, there’s maybe a little bit of word of mouth, maybe a couple of Facebook posts, maybe you go to the website and you have a look at the food, all of those sort of things. There’s lots of steps involved to get that initial reaction.

If someone’s going to your restaurant and they may not have made the booking, they’ve gone as a guest. But if they’ve been in your restaurant, if they’ve had a great time, if they’ve experienced great food, they’ve had great value, they are a lot easier to get back for a second time. And email is fantastic because the open rates are usually quite high because of the fact that people, “It’s a restaurant the people like. Yes, I would like to know what’s going on there. Is this something I should be thinking about? Do they have a new menu item that I should be going?”

Or if you have discounting and deals, “What is the discount and deal that are being offered? I’m going to have a look at this because there might be a good deal. Maybe I can save myself cooking tonight, I can take the family out for a meal.” The insidious thing about email marketing is that you don’t get to see it. In the old days, we talk about Yellow Pages, used to get to see who was doing all of the marketing because pretty much that was the most marketing that people did. It was in Yellow Pages and you could see who had a big ad. It was like, “Wow. Those guys are really doing a lot of marketing.”

You can send an email out to 20,000 people. You can fill a restaurant for a month and no one outside of that email list of 20,000 people knows what it is that you’re doing. They don’t know what the offer was. They don’t know what the special event it was that you were doing, what the menu item was. They don’t know any of that. It’s all dark. And we know that it is one of the easiest ways, particularly – and I love this for you to utilise – dragging people from their Saturdays.

When you’re really busy on a Saturday and you want to focus more on the walk-ins because they’re probably new customers, get some of those regulars who are probably highly likely to come in on a Saturday night. Send in an email out and drag on to a Tuesday night. You might discount. You might offer a happy hour type deal or my preferred way of doing it is run an event. Team up with the local winery, team up with the local suppliers, team up with a book club, team up with someone who’s teaching language courses in your dialect – do some sort of event that moves us away from selling food to selling an experience. Get the people in on a Tuesday night.

And it’s interesting when you see people say, “Wow. That place is really busy. We should go there and check it out.” Now, it might have been a book club and they all might have ordered $12 dollar entrées. But the fact that the place is busy on a Tuesday night, it creates that interest and people are like, “We should go in there, we should go in and check that out.” That’s a new customer. It’s then up to you to create that value, create that experience so that it’s going to be a lot easy for you to bring them back as a repeat customer.

Now, the other component of that, of course, is how do you build your email database? And the thing that we find is that with our Free Online Restaurant Booking System (FORBS) and the Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system (FROLO), there are people who are adding hundreds of emails every month to that list. So you can quite conceivably have an email list of 5,000 people. If you move in a good clip after 12 months, probably more likely two years.

The thing is, “Well, it’s going to take two years to do that.” It’s like, yeah, but if you don’t start today then you’re not going to start. And this is why you’ve got such a massive advantage when you’re trying to drive yield. And the other component of it is, of course, if you want to sell a business and you can say, “So I just want to give you my MailChimp report. We’ve got 10,000 people in the email list. You can see that we’ve got a 21% open rate and 6% click through rate. So 6% of those people, that’s 1,200 people came across. And of course, if you’re using the Free Online Reservation Booking System (FORBS) it will actually tell you how many people clicked on a redemption.”

Now, the kind of thing that I think works really well when you’re trying to sell a business is  like, so we did one last month and we sold 3,000 seats on it. We have been pretty slack with our email marketing so we haven’t done as much of it as we could have. So that would be one of the things for whoever buys it, that would be the first thing I’d be doing is to send out a monthly email. In a buyer’s eyes, it’s like ka-ching. “It’s so easy to send an email out. We got 20,000 people here who love the restaurant. Good engagement rates with the emails. This sounds like a really good opportunity for me to buy.”

So you’re turning that 20,000 person mailing list into a really tangible benefit. But you don’t need to be focusing on your sell price. At the end of the day, it’s just really easy. If you’re going to run an event, you can send it out to 20,000. And I like having events where you can only fit a hundred people in because they sell out. It’s like, “Oh, man. That thing’s sold out.” Because people really want what they can’t have. It’s like, “Uh, sorry. It’s sold out.” That’s like, “Damn. Next time they run an event, I got to get on to it really quickly because they run out really, really fast.”

Restaurant marketing myth # 5: Facebook doesn’t work anymore.

Now, number five on our list is that Facebook no longer works. And there’s been a few people who have been talking about this. Facebook has come out about how they’re making some changes and they’re going to be pushing post from pages further into obscurity because of the fact that they’re now full. You know, Facebook has only got so many eyeballs that it can show things to and every business has now got a Facebook page, and they’re all putting up all sorts of crazy stuff. And so it’s very hard to get cut through for your brand.

A lot of people say that Facebook just no longer works, and you know, it’s interesting. We’re talking to people who have been using Facebook for a long time and they’re the ones who can sort of – they’re tracking what it was like five years ago when they’d put something up and it would go viral, and 10,000 people would see it. And now saying, “We’re putting the same thing up. We’ve got twice as many people following us on Facebook but we’re getting – only a hundred people are seeing it.”

And it’s like, “Yeah, exactly.” The answer to that is that Facebook is pretty much paid to play. Now if you can nail that unique selling proposition and the story that you have and the way that you want to tell that story, then it’s not paid to play. And if you didn’t listen to last week’s episode, then listen to last week’s episode. Because Wally, Mama’s BBQ Chicken, over a million views on Facebook, turned his business around and I think he only promoted about six posts.

So he put a little bit of petrol on the fire for some of his earlier posts and from there just cracked on relentlessly and I think he’s been doing really well with that. He’s an outlier. I’m not expecting you to go out and create a whole heap of viral videos that are going to be seen by millions of people, so don’t stress too much there. But what I would say is that you need to be thinking about Facebook campaigns.

When we say that it’s paid to play, a lot of people think, “What kind of budget is it that we should be putting out?” And the reality of it is, for most restaurants, it’s pretty low budget. It’s one of the biggest issues that a lot of restaurants have, is how do you scale up a team. And what we’ve done is we’ve created a video course. It’s about two and a quarter hours, I think, and it takes people step by step through how to run their first Facebook ad for a restaurant.

So we don’t do anything overly fancy. We talk about how the different kind of post that you can put up, and for your first post, what you should be putting up. We talk about the kind of content that you can put up, you know, the types of posts that you can do, funny offers, all of those sort of things, and we give you some recommendations. One part of it, which goes for about 20 minutes and we just go through a whole heap of post from some restaurants that we follow and like, and we sort of give a critique on why we think that those posts are really good. And that’s designed to give you some inspiration as to the kind of content that you want to do.

We then talk about creating the content, you know, some basic photography type things, as well as, how you’re going to edit the artworks. So both making it look a little bit more spiffy for Facebook and putting text into the image, if you want to. And then finally, there’s one part which is designed for you to open up Facebook and have it ready to go, and step by step just follow us through. And we’re going to talk about targeting and how you can put that in all of the different options in there, what do they all mean, which ones should you select, and then we finally talk about budgeting.

So this is a really cool tool to sort of help you understand how to put that first Facebook ad up there. And this is a massive opportunity. I’m so excited about this because very few restaurants are using Facebook ads at all. So, it’s only going to be harder, which means that there’s going to be less restaurants on Facebook. And so when we talk about the battle, the battle to influence people and to get them to come out tonight for your happy hour offer or for your wine night or, you know, to try your new burger, there’s very little competition in that space.

So from a restaurant point of view, this is open season. I think it’s something that everyone should really be thinking about. I’ll include our link to that in the show notes.

So that’s the first five and we’ve got another six for next week’s episode. Have a think about what it is that I’ve said and have a think about what is your strategy towards SEO. Do you have texts on your website about all of the problems that you solve for Google – because so many restaurants don’t. If I’ve been told that a restaurant’s really good and I can’t find their website, I’ll persevere a little bit.

If I’m looking for a vegetarian restaurant in your town and you’re a great vegetarian restaurant but it’s not on your website, I will go somewhere else. And the scary thing is that Google won’t send you an email to say, “You know what, someone looked for a vegetarian restaurant and we sent them over here because you don’t say anything about it.” This is why poor SEO is the silent killer of restaurants.

“If the food is great, well, they will come.” Well, maybe. If you’re on the top 1% then maybe they will. It’s a tough industry. You don’t want to be fighting with one arm behind your back. You need to be doing marketing because word-of-mouth, I think, has changed fundamentally these days and you don’t get the kind of reaction that other people are getting.

Emails, you know, they do work. We’re helping restaurants sending out thousands and thousands of emails every month, and we know that they work. We can see it. And if you’re using something like FORBS or FROLO, which are free, you can actually tag those campaigns so that you can say, “I sent an email out. It went to 2,000 people. We generated 50 orders and that brought in $1,500.”

Now, they’re the kind of matrix that are really fascinating, because if you run a campaign like that, each email address is almost worth $1 dollar in revenue, too. Do that twelve times a year and boom. You’re really starting to make an impact in the profitability of your restaurant.

And the last one, Facebook no longer works. It works. Like we know that it works. It works for us. Our prime way of getting the story out about Marketing4Restaurants is through Facebook. And for the restaurants that we work with, we know it works for them. If you’re really keen to set one up, have a look at the university course. It’s two and a half hours. For single location restaurants, you can get a couple of people to go through it, look at it, start training your staff up.

It’s only $99 dollars, Australian, which if you’re in US, it’ll be a lot less than that. It’s probably the best $99 dollars and it’s got a 30-day money back guarantee. If it doesn’t work for you, we’ll just give you the money back. We’re passionate about making sure that we’re putting the right tools in the hands of all you restaurant owners out there.

Yeah, have a think about that. And that’s it, we’ll be back next week with the other six. And apart from that, you have a busy week. Bye!

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