03- How To Profit From Every Marketing Campaign You Run

How To Profit From Every Restaurant Marketing Campaign You Run

Hey, what’s going on everybody? Welcome to Episode number three, How to profit from every restaurant marketing campaign that you run.

Now, I hear time and time again, “My marketing doesn’t work. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Every time I spend money, I don’t seem to get a return on my marketing dollars.”

Well, marketing does work if you have one key ingredient that you use within your marketing each and every time that you’re paying for advertising, and I’m going to tell you what that is today!

I just want to get one thing across, that if you get this one thing, if you get this one ingredient and apply it to every single marketing message that you do, I can promise you that you will double your results from your marketing campaigns, guaranteed.

And this is something that is not talked about at all in our industry. I research a lot of different blogs, websites, and newsletters in our industry, and I never see anybody talking about this. And this is something that I’ve discovered in the copywriting world, the small business marketing world.

I’m going to get into that here in a second. But first, I want to talk about why most bar and restaurant owners that I’ve talked to, that I have worked with, feel like marketing is a waste. I want to get into my own personal story on why I felt marketing was a waste years ago.

But let me just cover the problems that we are all facing, all of us bar owners, restaurant owners, managers, when we’re marketing our business. They say that today, there’s just so much marketing clutter and overwhelm.

We see or hear over 5,000 marketing messages a day. So there’s just tons of marketing clutter, a lot of things coming at us for our attention, and we don’t have that much attention span to pay attention to all this.

We avoid a lot of marketing messages, a lot of advertisements, like the plague. And it’s easier, so much easier these days, to tune out these marketing messages with apps like Pandora. If people want to hear their favorite music, they can go buy an app for $2 or $3 dollars a month where they can listen to their favorite music, pick exactly what they want, and eliminate any kind of ads going to to them.

You look at TiVo and all these TV apps like Netflix now, and you can eliminate going through any kind of commercials if you want to.

So it’s becoming easier and easier to tune out these marketing messages that we’re trying to deliver, which these marketing messages are the ones we’re delivering in order to bring customers in our door, to put money in our pockets, to provide for our families.

So it’s kind of a scary thing, the way that the future is going. Who knows what else is to come? How much harder is it going to get to hit our prospects with our marketing message?

The other thing is there’s more competition now today, I think, than there ever was before. It seems like everybody wants to open a bar. Everybody wants to open restaurants. More and more franchises are popping up. So there’s a lot more competition fighting for the exact types of customers we’re going after, more offers out there, more value, so it’s very competitive.

And the other problem is it’s very expensive, in most cases, to advertise your business. The digital marketing strategies aren’t expensive when you can test, and I’m not going to get into that now. You can test digital marketing strategies on a much smaller scale, saying “Hey, I want to throw 50 here and a 100 there.”

But if you’re trying to use TV, radio, newspaper, billboards, or mass mailers, you have to commit to a certain amount of money. It’s not like you can just call them and say, “Hey, stop this ad. It’s not working.”

So it is expensive to advertise as well, and if we don’t have the right marketing message being delivered, if we don’t have this one key ingredient that I’m going to talk about, we’re going to waste our money. And when that happens, then that puts fear inside of us to not spend money to advertise and grow our business. So what I just covered here are some of the most common problems that we’re all facing when it comes to advertising.

The next thing I want to talk about is what I see so many bar and restaurant owners do, and this is what I used to do when I used to advertise my business years ago. And it was focusing on awareness style advertising, trying to hit the masses. Let me get my specials in front of 50,000, 100,000, 500,000 people. The more people that see it, the more people that are going to come in.

That’s strategy, hitting the masses is what’s stuck in a lot of owners minds as the best route to take and that’s what a lot of the newspapers and radio stations try to sell you on, “We hit half a million people from here to 15 or 20 miles away.”

Well, people aren’t driving that far to come to your bars and restaurants, not many of them. Probably 90 percent of your target market is coming from within a three to five-mile radius.

But what I see so many bar and restaurant owners doing, same thing i was doing, is promoting our prices, advertising our specials, our prices, and that’s about it. One thing you can’t do with that is you can’t really track and manage whether it’s working or not. If you’re in multiple different medias and you’re saying, “Hey, here are our specials. Here are our prices”, how do you know who is coming in from where?

I was reading a book, I don’t know, about five years ago. I forgot what book it was, but it put a great image in my head of this awareness style advertising that a lot of the big corporate chains and the franchises are doing because they have millions of dollars in ad budget to bring that awareness.

Small business owners need to be more strategic about their marketing so we can pinpoint and target exactly who we want to go after, rather than trying to hit the masses.

The author of the book painted a picture in my head. They said, “Image advertising, mass media advertising, awareness advertising is like going over your city in a helicopter with a bunch of bags of postcards, letters, or whatever it is, and then just throwing it off to the side and hoping that your message, hoping that your offer, hoping that your special – whatever your marketing message is – gets into the hand of the right prospects, the right people that are willing to do business with you.”

Because let’s face it, not everybody is our customer. There are only certain types of people who visit certain types of bars and restaurants. They only drive a certain number of miles to get to those places.

And that’s kind of like with awareness style advertising that just painted a great picture, to me, of putting that message out there over a helicopter and hoping that gets to the right people. We cannot afford to do that.

So what is this one key thing that we need to put within our marketing? Well, it all comes down to this. What is great advertising? What is great marketing? And I talk about this in my book, Bar & Restaurant Success.

From what I’ve learned from some of the old, old copywriters, some of the forefathers of modern day advertising, is that great marketing, great advertising, is salesmanship in print or it’s salesmanship multiplied. Marketing and advertising isn’t about winning awards for design and style. It’s about one thing and one thing only, and that’s making a sale.

So think about it. When we’re advertising our business, when we’re going to the newspaper, when we’re going on Facebook and running ads, wherever we’re going and we’re spending money, what are we doing when we advertise, when we spend that money? We are ASKING people to do business with us.

We are asking people to walk into our doors and spend money with us so we can recoup that marketing investment and hopefully make a profit. That’s why we’re in business. We’re trying to get new customers in the door. We’re asking them to do business with us.

Well, there are only two ways to get people to do what you ask of them. You can force them, which isn’t an option, or you can persuade them. And that’s the one key thing you need to focus on and think about when you’re advertising is what is your marketing message going to say? What are you going to do to persuade this brand new customer or this existing customer to come in for your promotion? Because you can’t force people to come in, but you can persuade them.

And if you think about the psychology of this – I didn’t really think about this until about three or four years ago when I was reading another book on advertising. But realistically, we are asking people to do business with us. And if you look this up, how do you get people to do what you ask of them? There are only two ways: force or persuade.

And that’s what marketing comes down to, and if you get that and understand that one thing and focus on that with every dollar you spend on your advertising, you’re going to be able to double or triple your results if you focus on how you persuade them to take you up on your offer. That’s the key. One sole purpose with marketing is to sell to persuade to get people to do business with you.

Now, to add to that, OK, Nick, how do you persuade people? The first thing you need to think about when you’re advertising is who exactly are you marketing to? Remember that not everybody is our customer. Certain promotions attract certain types of people, certain age demographics, certain genders, and certain people who have an interest in certain things.

At one of our bars, Rural on Tap, 80 percent of our sales is craft beer, so most of our advertising is focusing on craft beer drinkers. People who don’t drink beer, I’m going to talk to them completely differently if we’re trying to get them in for something else.

So you’ve just got to think about who is your prospect, and what do you need to say to this person to get them in the door? What is going to be your marketing message? If I’m running a craft beer event and I’m targeting craft beer enthusiasts, what do I need to say to get these people in the door? How are they going to benefit? What kind of value are they going to get?

What kind of picture can I paint in their mind through my advertising copy that’s going to show them the experience that they’re going to have when they walk in the door, the different types of beers that are going to be there, the exclusivity of ‘hey, you can only get this for a limited amount of time?’ You’ve got to try this. What can I say that’s going to persuade them, to get them in the door?

I want to talk about the difference here, because you might be kind of confused with paid advertising versus the free social media postings. Yes, you should still go on Facebook, social media, and post your specials and say, “Hey, here are our specials for the day.” Put an image of your food for branding and everything. Yes, you should do that.

What I’m saying is when you’re paying for advertising, you should not just be focusing on saying, “Hey, here are our prices. Here are our specials. Like on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Here’s our address. Here’s our phone number.” Because you can’t track and manage that, and that doesn’t really persuade people to get in the door.

But if you could use more of the written word and explain to them how they’re going to benefit, the value that they’re getting, what they’re going to experience – whatever you need to say to that particular person that’s going to persuade them to get in the door – that’s where you need to use that in your marketing, is in the paid advertising.

The free social media stuff, yeah, just put out your specials, whatever it may be. But when it comes to paid, you have to use persuasion. What are you going to say to get this person in the door?

In the next episode, episode number four, I’m going to dive a little bit deeper into this for you. And I’m also going to go through the five key ingredients that you need in every single ad that you run that will double or triple your response on your advertising. So I’ll go through that in the next episode.

This is also something that I go through in my new book, Bar & Restaurant Success. And if you haven’t gotten a free copy of that yet, click here.  Just cover shipping and handling.  It’ll also be in the show notes.

But the one big takeaway that I want you guys to walk away with today is that marketing is very frustrating for a lot of people, but the key thing if you can remember is, who is it that I’m targeting? Who am I talking to here? And what do I need to say that’s going to persuade this person to come in?

Don’t just focus on your prices and your specials and your logo and branding. That’s what a lot of the big corporate companies do. They can afford to do that. We can’t do that. We need to get a much more strategic about our marketing and our message that’s going to get these people, especially brand new customers.

It’s not that difficult to get existing customers to come through the door if they have a great experience when they come in and they’re regulars. It’s not that hard to get them to come in. But if you want to grow and build your business and create breakthroughs in your business, you need to learn how to attract more new paying customers that you can turn into loyal customers, and that all comes down to marketing and persuasion. How do you get these new people in the door?

So that’s the big takeaway I want you guys to walk away with. Use persuasive copy. Figure out how you’re targeting and what you need to say to them to get them to walk into the door. And we’ll see you guys on the next episode.