Strategically Promoting Your Restaurant with Social Media Tools

This is an article I wrote for Restaurateur Magazine and appears in their April 2009 Issue. Due to popular demand, it was reprinted here for those who do not have access to the Magazine. Enjoy!

 

You work hard to get everything right, the food, the atmosphere, the service, the kitchen and back of the house staff, and once a guest comes through the door, you have the power to make sure they have the best possible experience. Then they go home.  A place you can’t control the experience – and you don’t know what they’ll tell their family, friends, co-workers, and anyone who will listen, about their experience. What if you could control it? What if you could extend the dining experience beyond the walls of your restaurant? With social media tools, you can.

 

You’ve heard the buzzwords: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin, and YouTube.  These tools allow you to enhance and carry the dining experience beyond your front door. They allow your customers to take the physical connections and loyalty virtual to experience it online as well. With customers increasing their online activity, the online experience that guests have with you can make or break you.

 

You put thought, consideration and passion into every physical aspect of your guests’ interaction with you, but how is their experience with your website?  Does it convey your brand, atmosphere, and message? Is it easy to navigate? Are your menus and specials quickly found? Is your contact information, location, hours of operation and amenities crystal clear? These are just the bare minimum standards now needed to entice someone to interact with your online brand.

 

When they interact, they feel connected. When they feel connected, they’ll often be your evangelists and make a point to refer your establishment or brag about their incredible experience. They are inclined to take someone with them the next time they visit, and will want to connect your restaurant to others.

 

In the best of times, it’s hard to promote a restaurant.  With labor and food costs constantly battling to take the lead as your primary concern, you need systems and tools that can give you the greatest return on your investment of dollars and time. Social Media are emerging tools that fit that bill.

 

Social Media tools are increasingly moving from consumer to consumer tools to business to consumer vehicles.  6,000 people a day are signing up for Facebook and only a percentage of them are the college students that the platform initially attracted.  Many businesses are motivated by the opportunity to opt in at a fairly cost effective manner, and also the ability to bring them to an intimate space next to their customer. What you are seeing is a vast array of Social Media approaches that converse and connect. Once you realize who your customer is, what makes them tick, what they like and dislike, using social media can be that missing link that transforms a casual customer into a brand evangelist.

 

Using tools for the “cool” factor of saying you use them will not bring you a tangible return.  You’ll need to start with a strategy. Once you’ve determined who your customers are, you need to know which social media tools they use, and engage with them on their turf. The effectiveness of social media isn’t simply using the tool; it’s listening, answering questions and connecting with others. These tools are just opportunities to connect your customers to your brand and by connecting with them, they’ll help you build relationship and gain invaluable insight to their propensity to buy from you.

 

Here is a list of tools that any restaurant owner can use to connect with their customer to convert them to brand evangelists:

 

Social Media Tools for Restaurants

• Make sure your restaurant can be searched and reviewed through local business guides such as Yelp.com, Urbanspoon.com, Getsatisfaction.com and TripAdvisor.com. Encourage your guests, that if they had a great experience to please post it to one of these sites.
• Twitter – sign up for a Twitter account. Use it also as a tool to listen and converse with your customers.
• E-Newsletter – Email a monthly newsletter with the latest happenings, new menu items, entertainment news, recipe of the month etc.
• Blog – Customers want to be part of something more than just a meal; they want to feel like they belong. A blog can be that tool.
• Facebook – Set up a Facebook fan page to connect with your customers on Facebook.
• MySpace – If your clientele is the MySpace generation, create a profile page and consistently update it with fresh content.
• YouTube – Incorporate video into your social media strategy.
• The Business Card – Provide a business card or note-card to each customer that visits your establishment with their receipt that maps out where they can continue their dining experience online by connecting to you via social media.

 

Christopher Lower is the Co-owner of Sterling Cross Communications, a Social Media, Public Relations, & Web Design Firm, that focuses on the Restaurant, Hospitality, Hotel, and Lodging industries. In addition to over 20 years of PR & Marketing experience, Chris worked over 8 years in the Hospitality Industry. He can be reached at www.sterlingcrossgroup.com or can be found on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mrchristopherl.

 

Sterling Cross is a proud to have been selected as a preferred vendor for Hospitality Minnesota. Hospitality Minnesota is the management entity for

 

 

 

The Minnesota Restaurant Association, Minnesota Lodging Association and Minnesota Resort and the Campground Association. These Associations provide legislative and regulatory advocacy, marketing, education and information and money-saving programs to members. In addition, Hospitality Minnesota operates a non-profit education foundation, the Hospitality Minnesota Education Foundation, which provides a high school curriculum in foodservice and lodging management and provides scholarships to students pursuing higher education in the hospitality field. For more info: www.hospitalitymn.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Cost of Not Entering into Social Media – How it Hurts Your Company (Part Three)

At the beginning of this conversation, we entered into a discussion of the fact that several companies have been questioning the “benefits” of entering into social media, and that many were still going to take a “wait and see” approach before delving in.  Many of the objections being raised were based on false assumptions. Social Media is too new. No one is really using these platforms. My customers aren’t using these platforms. Throughout this series, we’ve been dispelling these myths, and shaping the discussion around the following – What will it actually cost you and your company if you don’t engage in social media?  The answers are these so far: market share and sales, new business acquisition, your existing customers, and now we come to the next cost – loss of your internal talent, and the ability to recruit employees in the future.

Maybe this isn’t a worry for you if you are one of those companies that are laying-off staff this year. Why did you get to that point?   Is it truly just the panic of the economy? Why are other companies thriving and surviving? Are your marketing and sales teams allowed to utilize the best possible tools to achieve their goals?  Are you still clinging to traditional media and the cost it entails? Social media tools are very cost-effective and can turn that around for you, yet I digress, that will be covered fully in part four.

So back to the topic at hand – loss of your existing talent and your ability to recruit new talent. In the much quoted book, First, Break all the Rules, there was an extensive survey citing the top reasons good employees leave their employers. Three of those top reasons include the lack of their company to innovate, communicate, and empowering & incorporating these employees in the running and growth of the business.  How do your employees feel about your company? What is their perception of your ability to innovate, etc?

Will your company be able to attract talent in the future?  Over 64 million workers will exit from the workforce by the year 2010; this puts employers in a talent deficit dilemma. The pools they have to dip from are young men and women from ages 22-30. These employees operate on principles of openness, participation and interactivity. If a company’s technology infrastructures, including the intranet and technology platforms, do not encourage free communication, innovation, interaction and collaboration, it misses a big opportunity. Worse, it alienates these younger, internet-savvy employees.

Can your company afford this side-effect of not entering into social media?

The Cost of Not Entering into Social Media – How it Hurts Your Company (Part Two)

We previously covered the cost of loss of new market share and new business growth by not keeping pace with the new communication tools of social media in The Cost of Not Entering into Social Media – How it Hurts Your Company (Part One). Now we need to cover even a cost that is potentially more devastating to your company – the loss of your existing customer base.

In a challenging economy, it is not only important to grow your customer base, but to retain your existing customers. Perception is one of the leading factors that play a central role in customer retention.  Perception of your goods and services, customer service, methods, practices, are all formed by your clients, and thus their opinions and decisions.  If the perception of your advertising, communications, website, and public relations is out of date, or old-fashioned, that typically translates in how they perceive your business. Your website and online communications are now typically the first point of contact now that a customer has with your company.  This includes your existing customer.

Being out of date is not the worst association that will be felt by your company, what is worse is that you will be seen as out of touch with your customers!  Customer’s that perceive you as out of touch also think that you don’t care about them, and that, according to a Rockefeller Corporation Study, is the number one reason cited by customers that leave the current company they are doing business with.

At Sterling Cross Communications (www.sterlingcrossgroup.com), we offer and perform an in depth survey and perception check of our client’s customers called checking the Pulse of the Customer.  In this process we speak with a few of our client’s biggest customers, a few of their most recent customers, and if possible, with two customers that chose not to do business with them.  Our own work this year has proven out the theory that many clients are not paying enough attention to the perception of them in the market.  One of a client’s largest customers was considering leaving them because of a perception that they were out of date and weren’t going to be able to keep up with them as they were about to experience a major expansion due to a merger.

We also were able to help our client’s understand that the conversation about their company, for good or for ill is happening every day online, and that through incorporating Social Media, they can start engaging customers in that conversation.  The cost of not participating continues to become crystal clear.

What is the cost to your company to not utilize Social Media to connect and grow your business?

I’ve been asked several questions lately about Social Media Tools such as; what can I really do with them, do they apply in my Industry, should I really be talking about my everyday life, what if someone doesn’t like what I say, or any other of a similar nature.  All good questions indeed, but the most important one is not being asked – What is the cost to my business if I don’t utilize Social Media Tools?

Social Media platforms are the fastest growing segments of the internet user population.  New users of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and so on, number in the millions daily. Besides the basic benefits of networking, there are a myriad of ways you can utilize and incorporate social media tools into your business to support and enhance such functions as communication, customer service, PR, Marketing, Sales, New business Development, research, education, Human Resources, recruiting, training, and more. 

Businesses both traditional (Defined for our purpose today as the Fortune 500) and more non-traditional (Defined for our purposes today as the Inc. 500, although these companies really aren’t all that non-traditional – they are the fastest growing 500 private companies) are rapidly adopting social media tools and incorporating them into their business. According to research today, 62 (12.4%) of the Fortune 500 are blogging as of 9/9/08[1] and 39% of the Inc. 500 is blogging, which is a 20% increase over the previous year.[2] In the Summary of the report they predict the Inc. 500 will grow by a 40% adoption rate in this year alone.

What does that mean?  First of all, they are beating you and leaving you in the dust if you’re not already in the social media game, and more importantly, they are reaching an audience that prefers to receive its information and do its communication, via such tools. Combine that with the increasing number of consumer activities online, from product research to e-commerce, and the web is a critical battleground your business will need to play on in order to stay relevant today and in the future.

So, what can you do from keeping yourself from joining the ranks of the dinosaurs?  Follow along in my next few posts as we’ll talk about strategy, ground rules, and offer a few case studies from the clients we’ve helped, to other noteworthy business case studies.

To kick it all off, why don’t you take a moment to leave a comment on what is your biggest fear or roadblock to adopting Social Media Tools at your business??

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[1] http://www.socialtext.net/bizblogs/index.cgi

 

[2] http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesresearch/blogstudy5.cfm