A Few Days In Big D for the Southwest Food Expo
June 28, 2009
We landed in Dallas yesterday afternoon, getting ready to exhibit at the Southwest Food Expo, held June 28 – 30 at the Dallas Convention Center. We checked out the preliminary set up yesterday and it looks like there is going to be a lot of great stuff.
If you’re headed to the Expo, stop by and say hi…. we’re in booth 2216, near the culinary showcase and the education session stage. We’re releasing our new white paper “Feast On This: “Big Picture” Internet Marketing Will Fill Your Tables” exclusively at the show but don’t worry, if you’d like to get a copy we’ll make it available on the website next week.
Are You Maximizing the Marketing Potential of your Restaurant Website?
June 18, 2009
There’s a post over at Synergy Restaurant Consultants’ blog, suggesting that restaurants resist the temptation to simply slash prices to battle the sluggish economy, but instead offer an alternative value proposition to attract potential diners. We couldn’t agree more and would add that once you settle upon your tactic, employ the most powerful marketing tool in a restaurant’s arsenal to get the word out: your website.
In the not too distant past, restaurateurs would rely upon ads in local newspapers, radio spots or other offline means of reaching their target market. In 2009, successful restaurant marketers will rely upon a blend of website marketing and social media to communicate their unique value proposition to their customers.
There are a handful of restaurants that are successfully utilizing their website’s homepage to promote distinctive offerings. Check out Fuse Restaurant in Dallas, where they are spotlighting a novel feature of their establishment: a rooftop party every Friday evening. Blackbird Restaurant in Chicago devotes prime homepage real estate to their special events, and while you may not have a recent article in a national foodie magazine to tout, you could still take a page from Stephen Pyles’ playbook and incorporate a mention of your unique proposition into your homepage text and graphics.
Another great way to use your website to its full advantage is to add a blog component. There are many choices in blogging platforms; we prefer WordPress for it’s flexibility and the variety of plugins available to accommodate almost any need. The benefits to blogging are many and include the ability to keep website content fresh, the potential to prominently highlight any seasonal or new offerings, and the preference that search engines tend to apply to blog posts in their rankings.
While quite a few chefs are blogging these days, not nearly enough are making sure that their fans can find their blog. If your restaurant or your chef maintains a blog; include a link to the blog on the restaurant’s homepage. L20 in Chicago and Lola in Cleveland are two restaurants that are giving their blogs top visibility on their websites. L20 gives their blog equal billing with their website’s homepage in the intro. We don’t necessarily recommend this design method for search engine optimization reasons, however the prominence of that chef’s blog in their marketing strategy is noteworthy. It’s also interesting to see that Michael Symon’s blog is front and center on the homepage of Lola’s website.
While these examples are good; even these sites aren’t utilizing their blogs to their full potential. TwoTables suggests an integrative approach to get the highest return from your investment. We recommend including recent posts on the homepage and incorporating a blog with other social media sites. Using an application such as Twitterfeed to automatically add blog posts to a Twitter profile and displaying tweets on your blog are two effective ways in which to synthesize these elements of your marketing program.
Weathering the economic storm may not be easy, but implementing some new and innovative marketing tools to set your restaurant apart from the competition is. To get a free analysis of your website’s internet presence, simply complete the online RFP form or call TwoTables Internet Marketing today.
Keep searching, and you will find…NOT!
June 12, 2009
After reading an interesting mention about a restaurant in Miami yesterday, I went to my computer and searched in Google for <name of establishment><Miami>. The results were intriguing, to say the least. Their own website was not listed in the top 100 search results; that’s the first 10 pages of SERPs if the viewer is using the standard setting. To add insult to injury, there was one local listing placed at the top of the page and it displayed the name of another restaurant, hyperlinked to a hotel website.
Two questions immediately came to mind: How many potential customers read about the restaurant, searched, as I did, for their website and came up empty? This led, inevitably (I’m a marketer), to a much more pressing concern: how much money is this restaurant leaving on the table by not utilizing effective internet marketing strategies?
I’m by nature a bit obsessive and bossy when given half a chance (just ask Matt) and I couldn’t let it go without using this eatery’s misfortune as a tool from which others in the restaurant industry could learn. Below is a synopsis of the top lessons to be gleaned from this restaurant’s plight; I’ve omitted the establishment’s name and any other identifying attributes to protect the innocent.
When TwoTables contracts to promote a website, our first undertaking is to perform extensive marketing research, measuring more than 50 distinct internet marketing benchmarks as they relate to the client’s website. These elements fall into various categories, including SEO, local search, social media and reputation management, among others. When I put this Miami restaurant to the test based upon our 50-point assessment, I was not surprised to find that it received poor scores in almost every category. While it’s clear that the owners had not had any guidance in internet marketing to date, I would offer the following advice to them, which is applicable to any brick-and-mortar entity with a website:
- Lesson #1: Own www.YourBusinessName.com. This critical step may seem elementary; however, it is one that this restaurant overlooked. Their branded domain is registered to someone else until 2018, which could prove very costly if they are forced to try to buy it back. Had they owned and promoted a branded domain in the past, they would have ranked #1 in the results when I searched for their website by name.
- Lesson #2: If you don’t invest in search engine optimization, your website risks being invisible. If your website can’t be found on search engines, you are losing out on a lot of potential business. Unfortunately, as Matt mentioned in his previous post, this seems to be a common happenstance in the restaurant trade. You may enjoy great reviews and lots of buzz but where do you rank for <your city><restaurant> in Google? Yahoo? MSN? Can you afford to remain in those low positions on the most utilized research tool in the world?
- Lesson #3: Focus each page of the website on one keyword phrase. Each page of the website offers the chance to rank for targeted searches that are performed by potential diners every day. Do an experiment and check out Google’s keyword tool. Type in the name of your city and restaurant in the keyword box (ie, “Miami restaurant”) and view the results. Likely the list is much longer than you expected. There are many, many ways in which people phrase their queries. Each page of your website represents a golden opportunity to target each of these phrases and gain more customers as a result.
Lesson #4: Create a consistent local presence. As I mentioned earlier, our test case’s local listing was inaccurate in Google’s results, displaying a defunct restaurant’s name which linked to a hotel website. Had management claimed the local business listings on Google, Yahoo, MSNLive and many other sites, they would have control over the information displayed for their company. In order to rank in local search results, the information out there needs to be consistent, correct and complete.- Lesson #5: Engage your customers. I’m obviously not the first person to search for this restaurant’s website. Had they conversed with their patrons via a company blog, social media sites, city/regional sites, or face-to-face in their restaurant, I wouldn’t have had any material for my post today.
- Lesson #6: Include your website address whenever and wherever possible. www.<your domain name>.com should be listed on every marketing piece you generate, every press release submitted and with as many articles written about your business as possible. If you can get a link directly to your site from the piece, do it. A website is the single most powerful marketing tool in a restaurant’s arsenal; make sure your customers can find it.
At the risk of sounding a familiar refrain, in this often brutal economic climate it is necessary to work hard to gain and retain clients. If, like our unfortunate test case, your website can’t be found by people looking for you or the services that you offer, those guests and the revenue they generate will be enjoyed by your competition.