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.

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.  

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.

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!  

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.

Does your restaurant serve the best Chicken Parmesan in town? People can’t stop talking about your gelato? Well there’s a good chance your dishes are on Foodspotting, Oink, and Instagram. If you pair that natural publicity with an irresistible social strategy, the customers will come to you.

You’ve seen Facebook and Twitter blow up over the last few years. Social dining is the next trend in restaurant marketing, and these two are just the beginning. Mobile applications and networks have recently taken off in the restaurant and hospitality industry, so here is a run-down on these social mobile applications, and how they can leverage word-of-mouth recommendations for your potential customers.

Take for instance the magnitude of these apps. Foodspotting had over 650,000 users on the iPhone alone at the beginning of 2011. It has since been released to the Android platform, more than doubling its potential.  Oink hit 150,000 downloads in a little more than a month and is just getting started – it’s backed by Kevin Rose, whose track record for founding Digg precedes him. Not to be outdone, Instagram’s user base grew from 100,000 to 12 million over the course of the last year.

So while you may be on Facebook and Twitter, there are a number of other targeted social networks and mobile applications that can grow your business right now.

Foodspotting

Foodspotting is a location-based dish discovery app. What does that mean? For example, Ann lives in Orlando, and she’s in the mood for pizza. She can pull up Foodspotting on her phone and search for pizza. Since the app is location-based, it automatically knows her proximity to local restaurants. Her search will bring back delicious pictures of nearby pizza submitted by other Foodspotters in the area. Once clicked, each picture entry gives Ann the location of the restaurant and other recommendations for that restaurant.

The app also has a social aspect. Each user can create a profile with a picture that tracks their Foodspottings, lets other users follow them and their food finds, and ranks them by ‘Reputation.’ A particular user boosts their reputation by posting dishes and getting people to click “Want it!” or “Recommend It” when viewing their posts. The ‘Reputation’ ranking helps establish users as credible food critics in their community, and thus have more users following them.

Encouraging Influential Foodspotters to Post Your Delicious Dishes:

1. Encourage patrons to photograph dishes and drinks with Foodspotting and share the photos on social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Flickr).
2. Offer incentives to encourage customer sharing, such as half-off dessert or a coupon for a next visit.
3. Post photos of your most popular or newest dishes to attract prospective customers.
4. Create an online Foodspotting menu guide featuring top menu options, and offer a reward to loyal customers who order featured selections. Alternatively, your restaurant could end up on someone else’s guide.

By Michael Bumby

The resurgence and the revitalization of the cocktail is well documented and undisputable. “Fresh”, “Herbal”, “Hand-Crafted”, “Artisan”, “Classic”, and “House-Made” are just a few of the descriptors we see on drink menus these days.

It seems the days of asking bartenders to be bottle flippers and to blow fire balls across the bar has somewhat passed. Now bartenders are being asked to be more of a “liquid chef”.  They are being asked to bring back the art of making true cocktails, to bring back the purity, the romance, and the mystique of cocktails that are being developed by renowned mixologists from all over the country.

The question is…. are you expecting too much from your bartenders? Let’s face it, most of them were hired because of their ability to wait tables or tell jokes. Maybe it was their dedication, or their tenure, or that they helped out with inventory, perhaps it was their gender. Is it fair that you continually change their job description, expect them to adapt to all your new programming and then are shocked when / or if the drinks are not being made properly?  Is it his or her fault?

I can tell you, as a consultant and a person that has opened well over 50 restaurants, including casinos, cruise lines, hotels, etc… that a bartender will be as good as the training that she or he has received.

Recently I did a training seminar for an upscale restaurant group who has enjoyed much success and has received much recognition. We were rolling out a new beverage program.  The inconsistencies and differentials in bartending styles between the bartenders were frightening. Something as simple as a rum and coke was being debated. One bartender had his own idea on how it should be made as the bartender sitting next to him had totally different thoughts (we’re talking about a rum and coke!). During the same seminar there was a debate on how to muddle a mojito… again, each bartender had different thoughts on how it should be made.

Pay per click, or PPC, is a common method of paying for advertising impressions. People who advertise via PPC only pay when someone clicks on their ad. Google AdWords is the largest PPC provider due to their massive reach.  The other major players are Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo.

The Quality Score
In the early days of PPC advertising, the advertiser who appeared the highest was the one with the highest per-click bid. But now your ad ranking is determined by both your per-click bid and your Quality Score. For each keyword you bid on, you’ll get a Quality Score (QS) between 1 and 10. Your ad ranking for each keyword is based on factors that include both the pay-per-click bid and the quality score for that keyword.
The QS is the search engines’ way of favoring ads that have a high click-through rate. Those ads are favored, both because people click on them (which makes them money) and because they’re likely to be the most relevant ads (which also makes them money). They also want to avoid favoring ads that nobody clicks on or that turn out to be misleading, because that harms the AdWords brand. The QS helps Google to make sure that ads are both relevant and high-quality – that is, so that visitors who click on an ad get to a landing page that satisfies them.

How is QS Calculated?
As with the engines’ methods of determining which pages rank for given queries, the search engines deliberately keep the inner workings of the quality score secret as proprietary information. But Google has released the following list of factors that affect the QS:
• The click-through rate for the keyword and the ad on Google.
• The click-through rate of the ads and keywords in your account.
• The click-through rate for display URLS in that ad group.
• The quality of the landing page that your ad leads to.

Social media may be one of the newer kids on the Internet marketing block but it has rapidly taken off over the last year. Just about everyone, from your neighbor to your parents, has a social media profile.
But social media is not just for individuals who want to share pictures of their pets or post random comments. Businesses are using it to their advantage too.

According to the latest research by StrongMail, 57% of businesses plan to increase their spending in Social Media in 2011, second only to Email marketing (65%) and ahead of Search Marketing (41%).

Hotels, Restaurants Benefit Greatly from Social Media If Done Right
Hotels and restaurants are some of those businesses realizing that they too can use social media to market like never before. But most are unsure how to best utilize the different social media networks and how to focus on the ones that will work for them.

If that’s you, you’re not alone. But first things first – let’s talk about the three social media platforms that are ideal for hotels and restaurants and how you can use them to generate revenue to your place of business.

So what is the Social Media Trifecta?
There are several types of social media platforms on the market but the key is finding the right mix for the hotel and restaurant industry. We’ve done the leg work for you upfront and determined the following three to be ideal for the food and lodging industry:

1.    Facebook
2.    Twitter
3.    Foursquare

Each one of these social media sites can stand alone or be integrated to work together for a more powerful marketing punch. They will help you brand your company, provide a platform for meaningful dialogue between you and your audience, and set your business apart from the competition that may have yet to harness the full potential of an effective social media campaign.

A customer and her family visit a restaurant on an otherwise slow night.  She shows her cell phone to her server and shares that she had received a mobile promotion on her phone that day from the restaurant offering free kids meals with each adult entree purchase.  “With three kids that’ll save us over $10, which is great,” the customer says, adding that her family had planned on going to another restaurant until receiving the mobile promotion.  The manager and owner are happy to hear about this exchange as they were able to reach this customer for just a few cents compared to the significantly higher per-customer cost of traditional advertising.

Many restaurateurs hear of mobile text marketing and wonder, “How can I get started?  What do I need to do?”  Relax!  It’s not rocket science and you don’t have to be a “Techie” to have a mobile media presence for your restaurant.  

The decision to add mobile to your advertising and marketing mix is an easy one.  Nearly all of your customers, and potential customers, carry a mobile phone.  As an ad medium, over 95% of text messages are read by the consumer within 4 minutes of being received.