Eat Your Own Dog Food, Restaurant-Style
September 4, 2009
Last month, Rohit Bhargava published a post with a compelling title, “Forget Eating Your Own Dog Food – Just Try Buying It …” His premise is built around the adage that the best way to understand your customer is to experience your product as they would and he means every step of the customer acquisition process, from the initial awareness of the brand up until purchase.
Have you eaten your own dog food?
You have no doubt sampled every offering on your menu, evaluating it for taste, appeal and presentation. Likewise, you’ve supervised the staff and guided them in providing excellent service to your patrons. But to Bhargava’s way of thinking, you’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to understanding your clients’ engagement with your brand. To take his advice, you must experience each stage of the diner’s interaction with your restaurant just as he or she would. Here are some tips to consider in putting his theory in to practice:
- Create a persona for your client base. Really this is just marketing-speak for creating a portrait of a prospective diner. Who are your guests? Has she heard of or been to your restaurant? Is he an out-of-town visitor or a local? Is the meal likely to be centered around business or leisure? Answering these questions and others like them will take you a bit down the road of creating personas for your target market. Personas have many applications but for this exercise the primary use will be to uncover the various methods and portals a potential customer may use to find your business online.
- Seek out your restaurant online. This is where your personas will come into play, as a regular customer will have a wholly variant way of looking for your website than someone who has no familiarity with your establishment. As we explained in our restaurant marketing whitepaper, the object of a successful internet marketing plan is to have visibility no matter how or where your potential clients are looking for you. Can your restaurant be found by those who may be searching?
- Search for “<your city> restaurants” in Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. Is your restaurant listed in the top 20? If not, the likelihood of someone unfamiliar with your restaurant finding it by way of search engines is minimal. If it is listed in the top 20 results, are the title and description accurate, appealing and compelling? What other phrases might someone use to find your type of eatery? Compile a list of various search terms likely to be used by a potential diner and use that list to gauge your website’s search engine market reach.
- Do a vanity search in each of the engines as well. Is your website listed first or are there competitors for your restaurant’s name? What other web pages are displayed in the search results? Is it easy for someone to find your website when searching for the business name?
- Look at your city’s CVB website and other tourism sites such as TripAdvisor to ascertain whether or not visitors can find you in those venues. Do you have a direct link to your website from these resources? If not, is your address and phone number clearly listed? Do they provide a map so that out-of-towners can easily navigate to your establishment?
- Search for your brand on Twitter and Facebook to see if you have brand champions or detractors in the social media realm.
- Lastly, do some searches on CitySearch, Yelp, UrbanSpoon and the like. Search generically (ex: Denver Italian restaurant) as well as for your restaurant’s name in order to determine what both new and returning customers will be presented at these sites.
- Test Your Website’s Usability. Now that you have an idea of what it’s like to try and find your website, it’s time to evaluate your customers’ experience in using it.
- Are the address, telephone number and email contact visible above the fold on every page of your website?
- Can your website visitors easily find a map and/or directions to the restaurant?
- Is your current menu readily available and easily read in its online format?
- Are the hours of operation clearly displayed for the user?
- If you had never been to your restaurant, would you want to eat there based upon the appeal of your website?
- If you utilize an online reservation system, is the link to the reservation portal prominent on every page of the website? Make a test reservation and note any deficiencies in the procedure that may cause the user frustration.
- If you utilize online ordering, can a user place an order from any location on the website? Test the ordering process to its completion and note any areas in need of improvement.
Admittedly this is a pretty long to-do list, one that is perhaps best done in manageable doses as your daily schedule allows. Once completed, however, you should be armed with a thorough understanding of what it’s like to be one of your customers. Your job now is to ensure that regardless of the online road your potential guests may travel to get there, your brand is visible at every opportunity and you have removed any obstacles along their way to your front door.
Get Your Restaurant Website Ready for Increase in Online Visitors
August 28, 2009
Recent article citing increase in online restaurant bookings: http://bit.ly/mMJ3W. Yes, I realize the article is about the United Kingdom and the main quote is from the COO of a major online reservation service, but the trend is real and it’s certainly not limited to the UK. Part of the reason Mindi and I settled upon food service as an industry was the incessant bitching we both endured from friends and family about the painfulness of finding restaurant websites and the sorry state of the sites once they got there. Yep, it’s true – for most of you owners and managers, at least – the general population hates your websites. And they hate trying to find your websites. And they want to do more research online, make more reservations online, and make more purchases online. You’re keeping them from doing what they want.
Now is the perfect time to get a redesign that focuses on usability and quality visitor experience, market your site so Internet users can find and enjoy it, and utilize social media and review networks to began establishing rewarding relationships with your diners. You have to accept and acknowledge the fact people are going to want to use the Internet more, not less. Believe me, those who heed the obvious and do the work will be reaping substantial rewards for years to come.
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.