Restaurant Marketing Case Study: How I generated 841 NEW customers in 5 months
Here’s the insane truth about restaurant marketing:
There are WAY too many restaurants today that think posting “great content” and “word of mouth” is enough.
They say, “if I have great food, people will naturally come to my restaurant.”
If only it were that easy…
If your serious about acquiring 100’s of new customers, you need to be very systematic with how you create and promote your restaurant.
Otherwise, you’re taking the “hope and pray approach”: throwing a bunch of stuff online and hoping something works.
Well, today, I’m going to show you a technique that “almost guarantees” that you get new customers every time you launch an online marketing campaign for your restaurant.
The Digital Diner Method: (Turning Online Traffic Into Foot Traffic)
On March 11th I launched our first restaurant marketing campaign for a local client.
After executing “The Digital Diner Method,” the number of potential clients in our new database shot up like a rocket!
More importantly, our online traffic went up 1000% in just 30 days.
As a nice bonus, that single Facebook post has driven more than 6,300 engagements and generated over 1000 new clients.
The best part?
You can do the same thing for your restaurant, even if you don’t have a massive restaurant group budget.
The 3-steps to Using “The Digital Diner Method” to get 100’s of new customers a month with predictability
There are three steps to the Digital Diner Method.
And I go over all of them in this short and sweet video
{Video Coming Soon}
Like I mentioned above, here are the 3-steps that make up the Digital Diner Method:
Step 1. Find successful restaurants in your area and COPY COPY COPY!
Step 2. Target the right people
Step 3. build a database of potential customers and gently market to them moving forward
Here’s why this method works so well:
Have you ever eaten at a restaurant and said to yourself:
“Wow, this is amazing! I wonder what the 10th best restaurant in the city is.”
Of course not.
It’s human nature to be attracted to the best.
And what we’re doing here is finding the best “restaurant” in your space and replicating what’s working and making it even better!
Suddenly, YOUR restaurant is what everyone wants to talk about (and eat at).
Step # 1: Find Restaurants in the area that are killing it
Find restaurants via a simple google search that is continuously exceeding the expectations of their customers.
See those shiny stars below? The more you have, the better the perceived customer experience is.
Usually…
Your restaurant’s reputation can mean the difference between a packed house or a slow Friday night with empty tables and no one on the wait-list.
Now that you have your list find out what they’re doing right.
Review 1: Excellent food
Review 2: Too expensive but great service
Review 3: All around excellent experience
Things you should be looking for:
*How long have they been in business?
*What’s on their menu?
*What are they posting on their Facebook pages?
* do they have a loyalty program in place?
Copy, Copy, Copy
Your next step is to take what’s working for your competitors and start implementing these into your restaurant.
Before we get into generating actual customers, we want to make sure you can keep them!
Thank me later for saving you a ton of headaches and angry customers.
PRO TIP: The digital diner method only works if your 4 walls marketing (hyperlink) is in order. In the restaurant business, the 4 walls, refers to the experience within the physical space — the food, layout, service, music, smells, lighting, signage, menu, atmosphere, training, etc
Keep reading…
We are now in the digital era, where potential customers have access to a ton of information before even stepping foot into your restaurant.
They have access to reviews, menu, website and how long you’ve been in business.
Most of the businesses you googled in step 1 have everything a customer needs to decide to visit their restaurant.
Here’s how you can take your existing restaurant to the next level:
Online Reviews
Oh yes, the dreaded yelp and google review. Many restaurants hate Yelp and other review sites, but you still must play the game, respond, and move the pendulum in your favor by being smart with how to handle them.
If you have subpar ratings, ask yourself why?
Feel free to shoot me a message to info@rivercrabmarketing.com if you are having issues raising your reputation, and I’ll gladly look at your reviews free of charge.
Consistent Service
Restaurant dining is not just about the food, at least from the customer’s perspective. When customers eat out, they seek an experience that leaves them feeling good. They’re likely to spend more money if they’re greeted warmly and treated with care and respect by the staff.
{{PRO TIP – To have excellent customer service, value your employees, teach them customer service skills, train them in problem resolution, encourage customer interaction and ask for feedback from customers.}}
Awesome Food and Drink Pictures
Let’s assume your restaurant serves good food, or you wouldn’t be in business, right?
People love to see what food and drinks are available in their area.
You don’t need a fancy camera or professional photographer to get people into your restaurant. Check out the picture below:
There isn’t anything fancy about this picture, yet it’s getting a ton of engagement from locals.
Or this picture:
Wow, that looks good! I’m starting to get hungry now! (These pictures were taken with an iPhone.)
Now that your restaurant is firing on all cylinders you are ready to start making money
Step # 2: “Targeting the Right People”
Targeting the right people is the linchpin of the Digital Diner Method.
Below is the targeting we used to generate 841 new customers in 5 months for our local client.
Age: 24-55
We want to target people who are going to spend money, right?
We have found on average people that come into the restaurant and spend money consistently are between the ages of 24-55
If you have a white tablecloth restaurant, your targeting will be different, and so on.
Location: 10 miles from the restaurant address
For this specific promotion (location targeting will vary based on the restaurant), we wanted to focus on potential customers within a 10-mile radius of their location. The larger the ad budget, the more people you will be able to reach.
If you are promoting a lunch special, you may only target 3 miles out, since most people are limited to 30 minutes to an hour for lunch.
Each promotion will have a different location targeting based on your conversion goals.
Gender: Women (we found that 75% of people who engaged in our local restaurants pages were women)
Look at the “insights” on your business Facebook page, and you can see the age, gender, etc. of people who engage with your page the most. Use these insights to set up your targeting.
Ad placement – (Facebook Feed Only as seen below)
PRO TIP – 99% of the ads we run are most successful when they run ONLY on the Facebook feed platform. I never recommend using “Automated Placement Settings” if you are a restaurant”.
Where you place your ads online is essential and will change depending on the type of ad you are running.
For this specific ad, our primary goal was to build a database of potential customers.
To opt-in to our loyalty database, our customers needed to leave a comment on our Facebook Ad.
Placing your ads on the “Facebook Feed” only will ensure we get the most engagement possible.
By leaving a comment above, the customer automatically received an opt-in message for our database followed up by a system-generated BOGO Coupon.
Pretty neat right.
Soooo how does all this work?
Step # 3 – Build a massive customer Database
So, you are probably wondering how we build this database in real-time?
Step 1. The customer leaves a comment on our Facebook Post. (The automation is set up within our platform)
Step 2. They receive an Opt-in Message via Facebook Messenger asking for their email address.
Step 3. After opting in, a message with your offer is generated and sent to the customer. (This promotion generated over 2400 customers opt-ins.)
Step 4. The customer comes in and redeems. (841 customers came in and redeemed their initial BOGO offer)
Step 5. We track your sales in real-time with our ROI dashboard ($28,968.68 in total net sales after the discount was applied)
Demo the above process by clicking this link (https://m.me/restaurantloyaltydemo?ref=w7843852)
Clicking the link above will generate a response in your Facebook Messenger. Make sure to click get started to see the demo.
(Below is the exact Facebook Messenger marketing flow used for this case study.)
This BOGO promotion generated over $28,000 in track-able revenue and 841 + new customers for a local restaurant client.
THAT’S IT!
To recap, every comment left on the Facebook ad will route into your new marketing database.
What’s cool is that it pulls the customer information from Facebook, which creates a diner profile within our system.
We now have a complete profile on our potential customer: What they like to eat based on the comment they left on your ad, where they live, contact information, and so on.
Once the customer comes in and presents the offer, it automatically tags them as redeemed and adds the sales amount to their profile within our database.
Now that we have a database of potential customers, now what?
Now that we have a huge database of potential customers, we can re-target them for free with additional offers and promotions through Facebook Messenger, email and SMS (mobile).
We run monthly promotions which consistently generate and extra $5500 – $15,000 in additional revenue each and every month.
And it cost us absolutely nothing in terms of new marketing cost as they were already in our database.
Click here to see the full restaurant marketing case study for this client.
Is your business ready to generate 100’s of new customers a month?
Apply here and see if your business qualifies.
Click here to watch the video on how we use Facebook Messenger marketing strategies to generate 1000’s of new customers for our local restaurants?.