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.

Here is a list of the second 5 (out of 10) most annoying server errors as related by diners who have suffered through them. Most of these mistakes are caused by a lack of attention and most have easy fixes, but you be the judge.

6. Inappropriate pacing of the meal
Diners don’t like to feel rushed, nor do they want to have to wait too long between courses. Even if the server nails the beginning and end of the meal (getting customers seated quickly, making sure they have a drink, getting them the check as soon as the customer’s ready for it), pacing the meal in between those two endpoints is much trickier.

The cure: Servers should watch their tables and try to estimate when diners will be finished with a course to know when to fire the next one. One server at an upscale restaurant says that four or five minutes before diners are finished with their appetizers, she’ll tell the kitchen to fire the main course. How does the server know? The server watches the tables closely. Paying close attention is key to providing good service in general.

7. Sweeping, wiping, clearing dishes
A number of readers objected to bus boys or servers who sweep the floor while guests are dining, who wipe the table with the same cloth used to wipe the chair, who generally disregard hygiene or noisily drop dirty dishes into bins within diners’ earshot.

The cure: Offending bus boys and servers, clean up your act.

8. Tip games
“Do you need change?” This is a question that irked a number ofdiners. The server who rounds up change from a cash tip in his own favor, or who brings the change in big bills in the effort to land a bigger tip also fared poorly.

The cure: Just bring the change, even if you’re not sure it’s necessary. If some smaller bills are needed for the diner to leave a 20 percent tip, then by all means, include some smaller bills.

9. Untimely dish removal
Diners don’t seem to appreciate it when a server begins removing plates before everyone at the table has finished the course. The person still eating feels rushed, and the person whose plate is cleared before everyone else feels like they ate too fast. On the other hand, some diners are bothered when the servers don’t pre-bus or remove some of the dirty, used plates, bowls, etc. from the table because they clutter the table and are unappetizing-looking. So what to do?

As it turns out, it depends on the type of restaurant and on the specific policy of the management. “Some restaurants allow servers to clear plates before everyone’s done,” explains Susskind, and it’s usually the casual spots. In more upscale establishments, he says, “The standard is you don’t clear till everyone’s done.”

The cure: At one fine dining establishment, a server came up with a smart solution. “Normally I don’t clear plates until everyone has finished,” she said, when one of the diners had finished his soup. “But perhaps you’d like me to take this now?” Problem solved, though it was a mouthful for a busy server.

10. The errant wine pour
A server pours the wine all around the table, overfilling the glasses, and comes up empty before getting to the last guest. “Another bottle?” he asks perkily. It may or may not be an honest mistake, but it’s a mistake nonetheless, and in any case it can leave the diner feeling had. Of course, you have to spring for that second bottle.

The cure: This one’s easy. “You’ve got to do the math,” says Michael Flynn, a wine and beverage director at the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek. A bottle has 25.4 ounces, “so you do some quick division. You have to make sure you’re pouring the same amount in everyone’s glass, no matter how small that portion may be.” And if it’s just three diners, and you’re on the second round of pours? If someone hasn’t been sipping, don’t top off their glass.

Turns out it’s just like most other points of service. “You have to keep an eye on them,” says Flynn. “It’s actually being involved in service, in serving people as they need it.”

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.

Thanks to Leslie Brenner of the Dallas Morning News for many of these server mistakes.