Mobile Text Marketing

Untapped Potential for Restaurants to Connect with Customers

By Conrad R. Carney, II

“It’s clear that businesses who don’t embrace Mobile phone technology in the coming year will be left behind. Much as those businesses who sat on the sidelines during the early days of digital or social media are now playing catchup.”

– AdvertisingAge

Everyone with a cell phone carries it wherever they go.  Customers are already texting inside your restaurant – so why not take advantage of that... It’s simple... People don’t redeem paper coupons like they used to.  It’s a hassle to print them, cut them out, and remember to keep them in their pockets.  But people have their phones with them at all times and so the redemption rates for mobile coupons and offers are much higher when compared to paper coupons that must be printed out from a computer.

Reaching consumers on their mobile phones presents fresh marketing opportunities for restaurateurs by enabling them to push readily adopted and measurable offers right to the palm of their customers’ hand.  

The competition for consumers’ dollars remains fierce according to the Restaurant Association’s Trends Survey.  It stated that 7 out of 10 full-service operators agreed that their customers’ loyalty is more difficult to maintain than it was two years ago, making repeat customers even more important to the bottom line.  It is imperative that restaurant operators appeal to frequent diners’ expectations for value, because of how important repeat customers are to their success.

One way to satisfy customers’ growing appetite for value while encouraging loyalty is through frequent-diner programs.  According to the Association’s Trends Survey, 57 percent of adults said they would be more likely to patronize an establishment that offers a customer loyalty and reward program, such as a Mobile Loyalty Club.

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Help from Yelp!

How to Respond to Negative Social Media Reviews

By Casey Pritchard

These days everyone talks about engaging customers through social media. Whether you prefer Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Foursquare, this article will help you better manage your online reputation and boost your online credibility. While having a strong social media presence could be extremely beneficial for your business, it could also potentially cause harm if customers, or competitors,  post about their “so-called” bad experiences and you either a) do nothing or b) respond negatively.  So that leaves us with the million dollar question: “How on earth should I respond to online complaints?”  Thankfully there are experts out there willing to help.  Darnell Holloway from Yelp suggests following this framework when managing your online reputation:

1. Start With Great Customer Service
   As a business owner, you want to ensure that your customers are happy.  Happy customers translate to better business and lead to success.  It is important to maintain a high level of customer service to minimize the chances of a customer having a bad experience.  Many consumers actively engage in social media and it’s important to expect that they will post about their experiences via those mediums.  Businesses should prepare for this by providing a great experience for customers.
2. Stay Cool
   Don’t let your emotions get the best of you when responding to negative reviews.  This is a poor reflection on your company and could cause even more harm.  If you have to, give yourself some time to cool down before addressing the review.  If you still find yourself getting upset, don’t hesitate to delegate managing your business’ reviews to another employee that can remain level-headed.  Remember, responding negatively could turn into a PR disaster and you could lose credibility.  

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How to Grow Your Business Through Effective Marketing

By Mandy Cole

There is a lot of confusion within the restaurant industry about the marketing tactics that do and don’t work for restaurants. The reality is there is no one-size-fits-all marketing program or tool that makes sense for every restaurant, but there are a few things all restaurant operators should think about when it comes to creating an effective marketing mix to grow your business.

Connect online

The National Restaurant Association and LivingSocial recently partnered on a research study, which looked at restaurant usage and preferences for certain marketing channels and how consumers engage and respond to those channels. The study revealed the power online marketing has to elevate a restaurant’s brand and help attract new guests. What’s more, the research found restaurants that use online marketing (emails from restaurants, emails from a daily deal provider and websites) tend to be viewed by consumers as both modern and popular.

87 percent of consumers polled in the NRA study said customized marketing messages that included a savings offer would motivate them to go to that restaurant.

Customize

The message you relay through your marketing communications efforts is just as important as the marketing channel you choose and the key to effective messaging is tailoring to your guest. Customization can be achieved in a variety of ways. Here are a few examples of what’s worked for our restaurant partners:

• Where everybody knows your name: Guests want to feel like you value both their business and them as people. By tailoring your marketing messages to reference a guest by name you are making the relationship more personal and are earning their loyalty. There are various companies that specialize in creating flexible email marketing templates that can help streamline this process for you.

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Using YouTube for Self-Promotion

By Lauren Searcy

Lights, camera, action! It doesn’t always happen that way anymore, but thanks to technology you can become your own video director anywhere, anytime. Today, many businesses are harnessing the success of YouTube to draw in customers locally and from across the country.

In the past, a restaurateur’s best advertisement was word of mouth. People would share their dining experiences with others and encourage them to try it for themselves. You have the opportunity to facilitate that word of mouth with a quick press of the record button.

4 BILLION
Page Views Per Day

Consider having your own YouTube page where customers can share a quick 15-second testimonial about their dining experience. Think of them as mini-commercials. You can show the dish, maybe give a glimpse of how it was prepared, and have the customer tell you their favorite parts. Voilà! You have an instant commercial from real patrons to sell your product. You can then use other social media outlets to advertise the videos and direct web traffic to YouTube. The best part? It’s free!  

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Optimal Channel Mix

by Cindy Estis Green

Every hotel has an optimal channel mix. This is the ideal mix of business from each channel that results in optimal profitability for a hotel, given its position in the marketplace relative to its competitors, taking into account its physical configuration, amenities and condition, management quality, brand strength, marketing prowess, and consumer perception.

Figuring out the optimal channel mix can be difficult and managing to achieve it is the ultimate challenge.
Realistically, a hotel with a brand flag (and this varies quite a bit by brand and location), will receive 30% to 70% of its business from the “mother ship” through group leads, central reservations, corporate promotions, national account production, loyalty clubs and other brand-sponsored programs. Most hotels still have to fill the rest by closing on the leads in their local/regional markets or through local initiatives. Contribution by a loyalty club in a chain hotel may be as much as 50% of the transient base but that raises the question as to what the individual hotel can do for retention of the other 50% of its customers. For independent properties, they may get some lift from affiliation to reservation or sales consortiums, but most of the time, they source 50% or more locally.

Demand Generators
Given that 30% to 70% percent of the business (let’s call it 50% for the purpose of discussion) is the local hotel’s responsibility, even with the help of a strong brand, getting half of the business requires some promotional and sales savvy. A hotel with diverse demand streams may have enough meeting space to fill a big part of its share of the occupancy pie with local groups, meetings, and citywides, then it may only have another 25% to fill with the amorphous unmanaged corporate or transient segments. Sales calls to local corporate accounts can fill part of it, provided this type of business exists in a market, and that a hotel has suitable facilities for it.

In an attempt to provide as much of a hotel’s business as possible, brands and reservation representation firms are building their infrastructure to step up qualified corporate traffic, especially since this segment is growing once again.

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