Starting, Owning and Marketing A Restaurant Blog|Starting and Owning a Restaurant - Construction, Planning, Marketing, Opening and Managing a New Restaurant

It never fails. Every time I travel for a brief vacation, I can’t get away from the restaurant business. You have to eat. My mind, eyes and ears tend to observe the events related to the restaurant business unfolding as you eat and drink.

In this case we were in Key west for a few days with a group of friends. While making some general observations like the lack of crowds due to the BP disaster in the northern Gulf, my perusal of the many menus we encountered were, as a general statement, very much the same. Little creativity. Fried shrimp, nachos, tacos and local fish prepared as you like were all ok. The high end restaurants like the old A & B Lobster House, Virgilios (La Trattoria) and Louie’s Backyard are all still great restaurants, but the casual dining restaurants who come and go have a strong element of sameness that you cannot escape.

The thing that stood out the most, however, was the lack of service standards found in this tourist dependent area. Here they have a perception that the customers will only be around for a day or two, so exceptional guest experiences are hard to find. For those of us that have to perform for the same people potentially three or four times a week, the bar is raised for acceptable customer care.

It is a lesson to watch the staff of dozens of restaurants go about their business with little guest attention and universally poor attitudes. In many places sales suffer from lack of attention and indifference. Each year we visit the keys there are dozens of restaurants that are closed, have changed hands and clearly in decline. I always wonder if they could survive by focusing more attention to their service. Would guests come back more than once during their stay? Would guests recommend their experience to other travelers? Could they build a LONG TERM marketing strategy by being one of the small minority of hospitality establishments that pay more attention to the individual guests rather than just the high volume of visitors who just wander in their doors.

Service IS part of marketing. I think captive markets like hotels, tourist centers and high volume walk-in locations can be a reminder for those of us who build customers one at a time through the formation of relationships.

As the 90 day mark approaches from the day we opened the new restaurant, it is time to focus on more marketing tools to get communication deeper into our demographic. One of the options is Internet social marketing. Essentially that involves establishing a presence on sites like MySpace, Yelp, Twitter and Facebook.

The publicity in hospitality magazines offers glowing reports about how useful these sites are for retaining customers and networking to gain new ones. I decided to do a little research on these sites and their potential. My research was limited to:

• visiting the sites named above.
• looking at the options, uses and types of postings.
• talking to a few restaurant owners that I knew were using these sites.
• reading the latest information from industry publications.

On the positive side, restaurants can easily and quickly get involved. Most have a quick form to fill outanswering questions either about you or your business. This is your “profile” that is displayed and returned from a searchable database. People who share your similar interests, location and contacts become your personal network. You can chat with the members of your network and comment on any subject you want to search - including your restaurant. As other people join in, they become part of your network.

Almost all of the social networking sites work about the same way. Most have cute names and phrases that go along with things you do on the site. On Twitter, the height of cutesy, a post is called a “tweet”. Very clever. Each site can become addictive and amusing, but the issue is value as a marketing tool.

On the negative side of entering the Internet social networking arena, consider these issues:

• Relatively few of your customers and prospects are being reached. While these sites are very popular and gaining strength, the reality is that your demographic should be 18 to 32 to maximize the value.
• As you get more involved, time becomes an issue. Are these sites worth the amount of time it takes to maintain a presence and communicate with your network members? Can you spend your time in a more productive manner?
• Are you willing to respond to negative and positive reports on your restaurant regardless of their truthfulness, validity or importance?

After considering all the options, for us, the time versus reward isn’t there. I am a firm believer in email marketing and feel that many of the same things can be accomplished using email, surveys and direct contact with a lot less time committed. If your prospects cover a whole spectrum of age groups, income levels, locations and ethnicity’s, many are not part of the digital communication revolution. You have to continue to communicate your message to all customer groups.

The restaurant owners that I talked to who have gotten involved with social networking websites offered a mixed bag of comments. Some were sorry they started because the time expands as your contacts expand. Each takes personal response and attention. One owner told me he had a disgruntled employee write several bad reviews of his operation on Yelp. This caused the owner to refute the dismal reports and forced daily monitoring. You can write whatever you want on the Internet. That is the price of digital freedom!

The bottom line is that we will monitor the value equation of Internet social marketing and ignore the rantings of restaurant marketing “consultants” who say this is a great tool. We will plan our next email and media campaign with the time we would have been “tweeting” on Twitter.

For more restaurant marketing ideas, visit On a Wait, a marketing blog.