Restaurant Marketing That Works

Back to the Basics

Matt Plapp

• Publisher: Braughler Books, LLC
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781970063967
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Do you HOPE your customers remember the great food and service you provided, and PRAY that they return again?

In Restaurant Marketing That Works I'll teach you the FIVE TACTICS of creating a plan that will produce predictable marketing successes with measurable results.

Say goodbye to hopes and prayers and say hello to finally seeing results from your restaurant marketing!

Matt Plapp got his start in digital marketing in the late 90's, building a website from scratch for a family owned business. By leveraging the new online marketplace of websites and chat rooms, the business grew to be one of the region's largest boat and RV dealerships. Matt soon realized that other businesses could directly benefit from his digital marketing expertise, leading him to found Driven Media Solutions in 2008. Through research and analysis of client data, Driven Media Solutions has made the connection between SEO, social media platforms (Facebook in particular), and small business ROI. They can determine what works and what doesn't, in terms that matter to business owners. Helping a client convert a $150 Facebook campaign into $18, 000 in sales for three restaurants confirmed that Matt and his team have the expertise to help small businesses take their sales, profits and brands to the next level. Contact Matt at MattPlapp.com to learn what America's Best Restaurants can do for your business!

CHAPTER 1

My Story

When I was thinking about writing my third book, I considered how I could write it so that people could take the knowledge from this book and easily adapt it to their current business, along with some of the strategies they use in everyday restaurant marketing that already work. I didn’t want this book to be “This is how you do it, and this is the only way to market your restaurant.” I wanted it to be a book that you could pull ideas from to optimize what you’re already doing.

Why did I call it Restaurant Marketing That Works — Back to the Basics? Because, honestly, in dealing with thousands of restaurants over the past 11 years of being a marketing agency owner, the one thing I have seen is that people skip the basics. People go for what’s sexy and what’s easy — they ignore what they should be doing and do not have a plan in place to attack the necessary elements to take business to the next level.

Before I get into what this book is about, I want you to understand my background. I want you to understand where my beliefs are rooted and how I got to this point, because I have a unique journey compared to a lot of people in my industry. In 1999, I graduated from college and, after a short stint in TV, landed my second job in radio advertising sales for WGRR 103.5, the oldies station in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Now, what’s unique about my position right out of college is that I was 23, with zero experience in advertising or marketing. My job was to make sure that people on the other side of the table — or, many times, on the other side of the phone — didn’t know that I really had no clue what I was doing regarding advertising and marketing. I was simply conveying the message that my bosses had told me, about why our radio stations were exactly what every small business needed. The one thing that I was fortunate to have was training by my father. He taught me the art of listening in a sales environment and consultative selling.

Many of my first sales calls were to restaurants because I saw them as places that consistently needed to have their message in front of people. Unlike car dealers and other types of businesses, restaurants had a need for customers every week. I mentioned the part about my father teaching me because it is a very important part of my background in marketing. You see, being a “consultative seller,” as my dad calls it, allowed me to quickly become trusted by a lot of people I met with early on in my radio career.

Because I wasn’t like a lot of my counterparts in the business, walking in to sell them something I didn’t actually know they needed wasn’t my style. I was walking in and having conversations with people to find out what sort of help they really needed within their business. I would then evaluate the opportunities we had and let them know if I could help. Many times, against the wishes of my managers, I wouldn’t present anything. “I don’t think I have the product that you need,” and I would then do my best to refer them instead to the person who could help them with that issue.

This led to a lot of great relationships. What I discovered in my early years of selling advertising is that most of my peers were just simply there to sell something. I was fortunate enough that my father taught me how to listen and how to become a trusted advisor.

A few years later, a buddy of mine told me that he wished he had taken the route I did in marketing, having thousands of conversations with small business owners on an annual basis to understand everything they were doing in their marketing. You see, he took the path of being a marketing director at a nonprofit and was stuck in an office, listening to himself and reading textbooks, while I was on the street talking to thousands of business owners about all of the marketing campaigns they were doing and what they loved and hated about them all.

Now I tell you this story due to the irony of the last phrase what they loved and hated about” all of their marketing campaigns. The vast majority of them had no clue as to whether it was working or not! By not knowing what was actually happening, they HATED marketing. I didn’t know it back then, but, looking back, it’s exactly what got me to where I am today. Those conversations are what got me so concerned with understanding the process of marketing as it relates to return on investment.

As a 23-year-old brand-new salesperson, the worst part was not knowing if it was working. I didn’t want to ask my clients if the radio spots were working. They didn’t want to tell me that the advertising wasn’t working. It was a very awkward dance. Oftentimes, people bought advertising based off of emotion because they loved the product, or based off of their own predetermined thought process of why my radio station was the right place for them to advertise.

The one thing that all of them had in common was their uncertainty. Let’s face it, not many consumers walk in off the street, especially to a restaurant, and tell the server, “I’m here eating because I heard your commercial on WGRR.” Are people going to eat at that restaurant from the advertising? Of course. To what extent? No idea. Over the four years of selling radio advertising, I began to understand and see that there was a lot of hoping and praying in people’s marketing plans.

When asked why they bought other marketing, clients would say, “Because we always have.” “The rep’s a friend.” “It’s the right place to be.” There weren’t facts backing most of the marketing decisions being made.

Now let me go back to the beginning again. In the fall of 1999, my brother, father, and I got together and came up with the idea to start a side hustle together. My brother had a full-time job. He had just returned from the Navy a few years prior. My dad had a full-time consulting gig in the boat business. I had my full-time radio job. My dad had fallen into the boat-consulting world due to his expertise on helping start a consignment RV business, selling campers and motorhomes on consignment. The problem was, they soon realized that, due to laws in the state of Ohio, you couldn’t sell boats and campers on the same lot, so the campers were quickly removed, as it was already an established boat business.

After seeing the huge opportunity for RV consignment sales, my dad, brother, and I decided we were going to start an RV consignment business in Northern Kentucky. I knew nothing about the business. My brother knew nothing about the business. My dad knew everything about the business. However, none of us had a clue how to market it. The one thing we knew would be pivotal was the internet. If you think back to 1999 to how restaurants were using the internet, you’ll remember that they weren’t doing much of anything.

I turned to a friend, Glenn Warner, who owned SNS Computer Solutions, and bought a book at his store on how to build a website. The software was called Adobe Pagemaker. By September of 1999, I’d built the website, and we were live with our company, Outdoor Consignments. The website mainly listed the inventory online and explained our process, since it was not a commonly known way to buy and sell campers.

Our marketing at that point consisted of calling people who had units listed for sale in the newspaper, in the trader magazines, and on other websites every day, every night, every weekend. We knew two things:

1.The majority of the people who had their unit listed needed help selling it because they weren’t good salespeople, and they didn’t have the resources that a dealer had, like warranty or finance, and

2.The majority of people selling a unit were looking to buy a unit. They were selling the unit on their own because they didn’t want to get hit with the huge loss by trading in it. We knew we could market the business on one side and then also find inventory at the same time. That led us to quickly create a website with a very large inventory of local campers for sale.

An accidental byproduct was optimizing the website for search engines. It was natural for me to give deep descriptions of the units for sale and to tell stories, but I had no idea that would help with this thing called “SEO.” And I’ll be quite honest with you: It wasn’t until about 2003 that I actually knew what search engines were or what they did. Until that point, we did a lot of stuff by complete accident.

What we did correctly was load our website and the units for sale with very in-depth descriptions about what they were, what they had, and why people needed those options. Long story short, from 1999-2008, we built one of the largest boat and RV dealerships, mainly from our use of the internet. Through that time, I cut my teeth to become known as one of the best digital marketers among all the boat and RV dealerships nationwide.

I discovered the power of the internet and what it would do for small businesses. By 2005, I’d been published in many magazines and newspapers around the country because of how our dealership had excelled at marketing our business nationwide online. Several former radio clients started calling. “Matt, tell me about Google. Matt, tell me about the internet. Matt, what’s the website? Matt, how did you grow your website? Matt, how do you get traffic for your website?”

You name it, and they were asking it.

That’s when I got back into the marketing game. Sometime around 2005 or 2006, I started fielding calls and visiting old clients.

As I mentioned early on, my dad taught me to be a consultative seller. A consultative seller builds strong relationships because people understand that you have their best needs at heart. These previously established relationships led me back to those people, and I started doing little side gigs for them, oftentimes for free because I didn’t need money. I was teaching them what the internet was, what their website could do, what it shouldn’t do, and what I had learned about search engine optimization.

By the way, if you want to hear the story about how I learned search engine optimization on a very deep level, it’s a funny story. There’s a video link below that’ll take you to an explanation of how I figured out SEO and threw gas on the fire. With that, I re-ignited my love for marketing. In 2008, I started consulting as a part-time job, knowing that we were exiting the boat business in the fall of 2008. Those plans changed in the summer of 2008 when the economy collapsed and we were pushed out a little quicker and a lot poorer than we had planned

www.americasbestrestaurants.live/mystory

By the end of 2008, my marketing firm was in full swing. We started with one basic principle: to help people spend their money correctly and actually see a return on what they were spending. In other words, I wanted to help businesses see an ROI with their marketing. The biggest thing I saw right off the bat was pure laziness in terms of how they were spending their money on mass media, and pure ignorance regarding how they weren’t spending anything on the newest and biggest emerging technology on the internet: social media.

By early 2009, I was helping a handful of clients manage Facebook, LinkedIn, their blogs, and YouTube, all of which was inadvertently done through Google.

From 2008 to 2015, I worked with many businesses in all industries, and we bought and helped market through all mediums When we had the boat dealership, we were spending upwards of $300,000 per year and having a lot of success in our marketing. Based on that, I was soon forced into helping businesses with their radio, TV, and billboard advertising. I was able to give them really good advice to help them be better at what they were doing in mass media and, at the same time, take over all of their digital marketing.

By 2015, we had amassed nine restaurant clients, which was the only part of our business that had a niche. I loved the restaurant world because I could share my successes across all nine restaurants, meaning I could do a marketing campaign on email, Facebook, or YouTube and see how it worked, then take that same campaign to the other restaurants. And that got me excited!

In April of 2015, everything went to the next level. One of my clients, Nick, along with a few other gentlemen, owned a really big brand called Hofbräuhaus, but they were skeptical of online marketing. They owned Hofbräuhaus Newport, Columbus, and Pittsburgh. Nick would frequently say that he couldn’t deposit social media likes and had tasked me with showing him how to do so.

I needed to prove to him how all of the money we were spending on social media was working. Keep in mind that at the time, about 5% of their marketing budget was going to online marketing, and the other 95% went toward mass media, which, honestly, was even harder to measure. He wanted me to show him how the people from Facebook and YouTube were walking into the restaurant and spending money, because he didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe in social media. In fact, at the time, he still had a flip phone.

A few weeks later, a great American holiday sprang up: National Pretzel Day. It was April 26, 2015. We put together a promotion with the owner’s approval to do 50% off their number one P-Mix item: pretzels and beer cheese. On that Sunday, instead of spending $10 on an order of pretzels and beer cheese, you could spend $5. On top of that, we marketed it exclusively through the Facebook pages of their three locations to see if it had an impact. If it didn’t, I agreed to quit bugging Nick and the team about social media. But if it did, they would let me do things my way and do what I knew was right.

The promotion was simple: Bring in your phone and show the promotion to receive the discount, which you’ve all probably done at some point. Ther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. My Story
• 2. Five Steps
• 3. Getting Attention
• 4. Gaining Engagement
• 5. The Power of Database
• 6. Tools to Build a Database
• 7. How to Track the Sales of Your Database
• 8. Offers That Don’t SUCK
• 9. Email and Text Marketing — Your Long-Term Nurture
• 10. Online Ad Retargeting
• 11. Putting It All Together