Tip No. 1: Marketing: Keep it in the Neighborhood
Imagine a circle around your restaurant with a radius of three miles. Now, imagine that everyone outside that ring disappears. You would hardly notice the effect on your business!

Research shows that nearly 80% of restaurant sales – whether a one-store independent or a member of a major chain – come from within the three-mile radius that represents your neighborhood. Are you directing 80% of your marketing efforts toward that critical area? Or even 50%?

The mass marketing myth that the more people you reach, the more business you will attract just does not work for neighborhood businesses like restaurants. The battle for the heart, mind (and pocketbook) of the local patron must be won block-by-block, store- by-store and purchase-by-purchase through what we call neighborhood marketing.

Tip No. 2: Get Flexible, Get Cozy, Get Wealthy!
Guests are no longer willing to sit in dining rooms that are less than half full and deadly quiet. (Ever notice how everyone ends up in the kitchen at parties?) Please your guests with guaranteed cozy dining and your sales will grow as a result.

You cannot control the number of guests who arrive, but you can control how full the room looks and how cozy the guests feel. It takes a willingness to re- organize your seating, the wisdom to change service policies, and the ability to reconfigure the dining areas to match your volume of business. It will not happen with huge open dining rooms, rigid seating policies or by using the dreaded “This Section Closed” sign.

Tip No. 3 Expectations and Guest Satisfaction
Hospitality is a business based on expectations. The more a consumer spends, the greater expectations he or she will have. Meet those expectations and you will succeed; exceed them and you will prosper.

Let’s say you eat out and your meal costs $5.00. What are your expectations? You expect a “no-frills” experience – ready quickly, the food hot or cold enough, probably wrapped in paper and handed over a counter to be eaten with disposable utensils in an environment dominated by plastic.

If these expectations are met, a sort of unspoken contract has been fulfilled between the customer and the restaurant. The value received corresponds with the price charged. The expectations have been met. The guest is satisfied.

Now consider a $20.00 meal. Your expectations will be both different and greater. This time you will probably expect a china plate, a tablecloth, glassware, metal flatware and personal table service. Make sure you are meeting (or exceeding) the customer’s expectations.

Tip No. 4: Pre-Shift Sales Briefing
In full service operations, one opportunity to build volume lies in increasing sales through improved selling skills at the table.  There are virtually hundreds of tactics to assist the waiter or waitress in selling more. But to really make a difference, today’s operator must focus on selling strategies that unfold within the restaurant’s four walls, from the time that a guest crosses the threshold until leaving the building. A realistic goal is to improve communication between management, the kitchen team, and the server/salespeople who are actually talking to the patrons.

The better prepared servers are to explain, promote and merchandise food items – whether the core menu or specials – the more they will sell. Tips will be incrementally higher, add-on sales will build, and extra profit will be banked.

The approach is to create an environment conducive to selling, replete with information and data about what is being served. This can best be accomplished by developing an effective pre-shift sales briefing. Most operators have a short meeting with the wait staff before each meal to relay the specials and describe the fresh or in-Season menu items, so this should be no big deal.

Tip No. 5: Build Sales through Environmental Enhancement
Did you ever think that the position of your entrance, cash register or range could impact your sales? Surprising as it may sound, the layout of your operation may position you for profound success or endless struggle. How does it work?

What we call environmental enhancement derives from the ancient Chinese art of object placement. Over 3,000 years ago, the Chinese discovered how your working environment acts as a mirror of yourself and your life’s circumstances. Challenges such as financial debt, poor morale and difficult staff relations can often be traced directly to the surrounding energy imbalances.

By tracing the flow of energy through the space, an environmental enhancement expert can locate the areas of your environment which correspond to such important issues as finances, relationships, health and career.

When the energy in these physical areas of the environment are obstructed or missing, the environmental enhancement consultant may recommend changes in the position of objects in the room, the correct application of color and much more to eliminate the problem.

Excerpted from 50 Proven Ways to Build Restaurant Sales & Profits from Hospitality Masters Press.

If you are a restaurateur thinking about ways to increase sales, increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make.

The community marketing concept rests on the premise that brands are built by communities of like-minded individuals who share their brand experiences with friends and those with whom they have some connection. By identifying those communities and finding creative ways to get them to help recruit your next customers, you can see significant and sustainable results.

Also, most of us agree that the most effective restaurant marketing is local marketing, so the community marketing concept makes perfect since for restaurants. So how do the 80/20 rule and the 4% factor fit in?

The 80/20 rule is the long held belief that 20% of a business’s customers drive 80% or more of its sales. The 4% factor comes into play when you divide that 20% into smaller segments of 20% each – or 4% of your entire customer base. Once identified, you market to your 4% groups with compelling offers that have extremely high conversion rates due to the targeted nature of the offer. Highly targeted offers tend to yield higher conversion rates with lower costs.

How important would it be to you to find out that 4% of your fajita lovers drove 70% of margarita sales? How long would it take you to get a “fajita night” email offer out to those customers?

How do you find out about your customers to determine which are the 20% and tailor offers to segments within that group? Well, do you have a customer database, and if so, what is in it?

If you don’t have a customer database, you should probably stop reading now and work on setting one up. If you do, what is in it and what efforts are you making to enhance the data in it? A name, an email address, and birthdays are a good start. Don’t have email addresses? Start collecting them. As far as a communication tool, an email address is your holy grail. Some ideas on ways to collect them include:

• Fishbowl drops for happy hours
• Raffles and/or door prizes with entry forms including email addresses, favorite menu items, number of visits per month, etc.
• Simple “mailing” lists, and
• VIP Clubs

Once you have begun building out an effective customer database, you can begin to drill into it to identify your top 20% customers. Once you have identified those customers, you can begin to divide that group into smaller sub segments of customers with commonalities that you can address with very targeted offers.

The goal here is to tailor offers to these sub segments with sky high conversion rates. If you can achieve this you will lower your overall marketing costs, increase sales among your best customers, establish yourself as a brand of choice creating even more customer loyalty, and convert many of these customers into brand ambassadors that can lead to even more good customers.

When you compare the potential payoff of 80/20, 4% factor marketing against your typical direct mail or newspaper ad payoff, the benefits become clear. Isn’t it time to bring your marketing into the 21st Century and start harvesting the benefits?

If you are a restaurateur thinking about increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make.

We all have been told that Social Media sites and applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the “new frontier” for marketing. In a few short years, the old question of “do you have a website” has been replaced with “do you have a YouTube Channel?”

Unfortunately, few people tell us how to harness the power of social media.This series of blogs is intended to help you determine the parameters of a social media strategy for your restaurant and to make suggestions on how to implement one.

Let’s start at the beginning: finding out what is already being said about your restaurant and listening to any ongoing conversations. People may already be talking about your establishment in the social media space. These conversations can occur on Yelp, Twitter, blogs, and comments to blogs, among other places.

Yelp
Since most restaurant marketing is local in nature, let’s start with Yelp. If you are not going onto Yelp regularly and searching for your brand name, start today. If you see a negative review, take that feedback to heart and then you have a couple of choices. First, you can reach out to that person, send them a message, invite them back and improve on their experience (have them ask to see the manager or yourself when they come in). You will need to set up a Yelp account to send messages to reviewers, but it is quick, easy, and free. Hopefully, you will get a follow up review that is much more positive.

Your other option is to get the review buried on page 8 or 9, so it’s less likely to be seen. For this you would need to encourage diners that have had great experiences to post a review to Yelp. Train your servers to identify parties that are clearly having a great experience and have the server ask them to post a Yelp review. Chances are, someone at the table regularly uses Yelp. Either way, reading the reviews on Yelp is a great place to start.

Google Alerts
Another way to monitor what is being said about you is to set up a Google Alert for your establishment. It’s easy to do. Go to google.com/alerts, enter your search term – which is most likely your restaurant or brand name – set the alerts to “comprehensive,” set the frequency, and enter your email address. When your search terms are mentioned on the internet (or a Google indexed page on the internet), you will receive an email alert with a link to the conversation. If you haven’t already done this, you should do this in the next few days.

Twitter
The first step is again to set up a Twitter account if you do not have one. Once you log into your Twitter account on the right navigation bar you will find a search box. Input the keywords relevant to your restaurant and hit the search button. At the bottom of the navigation bar you will see a link called “RSS feed for this query.” Click that link and on the ensuing page you will see the current tweets for your particular keyword. In the lower left of the box at the top you will see a link that says “Subscribe to this feed.” Click that link and follow the steps if you want to automate the process.

Backtype
Conversations about your restaurant can occur in many places including social media sites, social network sites, blogs and comments to blogs. That is why you probably want to use something like Backtype. Backtype is a free service that indexes literally millions of conversations from blogs, social networks, and social media sites. You can search Backtype from its website (without setting up an account) or you can create an account and set up email alerts when keywords relevant to your restaurant are mentioned in a conversation. As with all these tools, it is better to automate the process and have the information pushed to you rather than having to manually retrieve it.

Taking these first steps will allow you to see what has been said about your restaurant in the recent past and to begin monitoring what will be said in the future. This is a key first step in harnessing the power of social media on behalf of your restaurant.

If you are a restaurateur thinking about increasing marketing, making capital expenditures, or otherwise investing in your business and looking for a restaurant loan, try Advance Restaurant Finance, LLC (ARF). ARF has been making short term business loans to restaurants for almost a decade. Despite the economy, ARF never stopped making business loans to restaurants, and ARF makes restaurant loans up to $1,000,000 per location. If you are looking for a restaurant loan, ARF is one of the first calls you should make.