Get More Restaurant Customers

1. Introduction: Welcome to this class on restaurant marketing. If you're a restaurant owner and manager, maybe you're just thinking about opening a food outlet. This class is for you. I'll teach you are ten step formula for building a successful restaurant. Now we're not going to use any tricks, gimmicks, all belly, even going to mention discounting. What we're going to focus on in this class is building long-lasting relationships with our customers. Because the people already come and dine with those are the easiest to sell to. And if we can convince someone that they want to start coming back on a regular basis, consider that someone who comes to your food outlet every week is worth 50 times as much as someone who gets columns once per year. So if we can build these relationships and convert casual diners into regular diners, then we're going to have a successful restaurant. Part of the class project. We're going to work through and build a marketing plan so you can work through a seawall, changes you want to implement in a step-by-step fashion. 2. 5 quick wins for restaurants: Before we get into the 10 step formula, which is the thing that will bring you loads of customers in the long term. I just wanted to give you five quick wins. These are things that you can implement today in your restaurant to stop bringing you more customers immediately. And the first thing is to ask people to check in at your restaurant. So on things like Facebook and other social media platforms, you can say, I'm at this location and tank yourself. And while it does, is that when a customer does that, then all that friends on Facebook and whatever else, cnf feed that they've checked in at your restaurant. And so it's kind of like they're doing some viral marketing there for you. Because they're telling all of their friends that they think this is a good place to come and eat. And nothing then brings, nothing works like a recommendation from a friend. So if they're saying it's good enough for them, all of their friends will think, I am. Maybe actually check that out. Take second one on a similar line is if you get a group in, so maybe some friends, a big party, that kind of thing. Make sure you offer to take a photo for them. Because again, if you get a photo of light, you're at a party or you just catch it with some friends. People love to post these photos on Facebook and Instagram and all the other social media sites. And again, if someone posts a picture saying they're having a party at this restaurant, then everyone on who's friends with them on that social media platform will see that they are there and having a great time, and that's a great place to go for dinner. So again, if you a lot of time they might forget to take a photo or ology or crappy selfie. If you offer to take a nice photo for them, they're more likely to post it. They'll remember their experience, they're more likely to come back and all of their friends see that I have been at your restaurant as well. And so again, lows a great viral marketing. Okay, number three is make sure you fill up your tables by the window first. Sometimes I see restaurants put in customers in the back and the tables in the windows are empty. And I have no idea why they do this. Because if you're someone walking past a restaurant, then what we want a social proof, we want to show that over people like your restaurant. And so if they walk past and see all the tables in the wind, they're already full. Then they're going to think more highly of your restaurant because clearly all these other people have chosen it. It's a popular restaurant. So make sure that any table it can be seen for the window is failed before tables further back. Number 4 is make some noise about your gift vouchers. So maybe you don't even sell gift vouchers at the moment. Or if you do, are you promoting them as widely as you could? Because of course, to when you monies to sell a customer gift voucher, that they're not going to use it themselves, they're going to give it to someone else. So again, they're making a recommendation on your behalf to a friend or family member, whoever they giving this gift to, to come to your restaurant. And then so you get a brand new person the door who then hopefully fall in love with your restaurant. And you've turned one customer into two customers. So make sure that people know about these gift vouchers. You can tell them you can sign up. You can just somehow make it clear that get fractured are available and they're a great gift for to give to someone they love. And finally, number five is making sure you claim your business listing on Google. So when someone searches Google for like restaurants and leads, or they might take for Chinese restaurants in Manchester or highly rated restaurants in London, something like that. What you can get is they use a low pin will be on the Google map. But also if they set for your name, they can see the restaurant with like a phone number and a website link and all your views. And you can post photos on there too. And all this is called Google business. And it's completely free. It doesn't cost you anything. All you have to do is go in and register and claim your free business listing. And then when people search, it's not just like your website that will come up, but they'll actually be all the information with a little map and a little Call button with your phone number and they can see your opening hours. And it's just a super convenient way to put more details about your business in front of potential customers. 3. Creating a great experience: Hey, this is Chris and welcome to this lesson on creating an awesome experience. So why are we tackling this first? Well, the truth is that it all starts with the experience because before we even go into getting more customers, getting out there and yeah, bringing people in. We need to look at the experience because if we bring people in annex not awesome, Then, then I'm going to come back. They're not going to think, oh, this their restaurant I must visit again. Let's get it scheduled then. And so a lot of the time you only get warning shot with this. And if we create an awesome experience, then people come and they will love it, and we will turn them into repeat customers. So bad experience, it doesn't matter how many strategies we use to get people through the door. It's not going to work, it's not going to build a sustainable restaurant. Great experience, people will come back. And when you do that, you don't need that many people because you just bring a few customers in and then they turned into a peak Christmas they tell their friends the whole thing, snowballs and suddenly books restaurant makes pack out because you create a great experience. So that's what we need to focus on. So why focus on experience? And for the reason I've just said that the easiest way to fill covers is with repeat customers. Because reach new people is really hard. You have to falling them and tell them about your restaurant and convince them to come and convince them to try it. And actually getting regular customers back, it's far easier because if they've been and they like your restaurant, they want to come back, they want to hear from you. And, you know, people love to go to the same restaurants time and time again because they know they're going to get a great experience. So when you deliver not, you can make a customer for life. And that shoots make getting more customers so much easier. Not just because of network effects, but they're just gonna keep coming back time after time. So what is it that customers really warm? Yeah, what's the magic sauce that will bring them back time after time? And there isn't a secret ingredient. Hey, really is focusing on the basics. So yeah, comes with great food that comes out Hall That's well-cooked, well-prepared, well for our nicely designed dishes, speedy service that they're not left hanging there. They didn't take an hour to get the food out to them. They know they can come in on their lunch breaks and edit can comment on an evening when they're hungry and not be sat around for too long. Reasonable prices, we need to be somewhere competitive. Clean bathroom. That's a surreal off poetry. If you go into a restaurant and the bathroom is horrible, it just speaks volumes about how much people care about the restaurant. He's not I'm not sure how directly pour off. People obey. But if you look at the restaurants and my 16 yeah, McDonald's care so much about the cleanliness of their bathrooms. Right? Let's let's go for that. So it really is just making sure you've got clean reasoning products, restaurant that delivers great food, speedy service. And really all of this gives us the baseline for the rest of the course. Because if not delivering this, then the whole thing is going to be a disaster. We'll get new customers in for you. But they won't stay, they won't come back and you won't build a sustainable restaurant. So how do we go about kindness, great experience. Well, the kidneys is actually restaurant psychology has a free guide about this. It's called the restaurants arrival checklist. And it looks all the things like maintaining really high standards, which has a restaurant owner, a restaurant manager, you really have to be on top of. No one else is going to keep the standard TI except you. But if you set that standard from the top, then everyone else will follow. Maintaining cleanliness again, needs, someone needs to be on top of that menu design. That really people get Menu Designs so wrong. And if you have these huge sprawling menus thinking that that's what customer wants, it will end badly for you. And it's a trap that a lot of restaurants volunteer customers don't want big menus. Check out our survival checklist on that it will, it will transform your, your view. I hope if you're a big menu person, service training, what I mean by that is making sure that your servers are properly trained. And it's not chips, things like delivering dishes. It's making sure that they know what's in the food so that when customers ask they can recommend dishes, it can answer questions about the food. And they know to do things like introducing the dishes. This is a really big thing to make people enjoy food more. And this is, this is in our book as well, is that you can really make people into the food more simply by telling them what's in it. It's incredible. Portion sizes. Again, another big one. A lot of restaurant owners thing that people want big portions the down that leaves people uncomfortably full and they don't want the desert which reduces your revenue. So and the woman and stock levels again, if you have high stock levels, then you're not going to be turning food ever. It's fast, it's not gonna be as fresh. You're going to start thinking it's okay to free stuff because he just can't keep the stock in otherwise. And it's a whole mess. So. Yeah, it's really about focusing on those core things are a free guide if you want to check them out. But mostly it's true, it's about getting the basics right. There's nothing super advanced here. It's going back to basics. And this is, this is one of my favorite quotes from every restaurant it's ever been and is an idea, great food, everyone loves my food and yet the restaurant's still go bankrupt. What's going on there? Why does that happen? What's happening is that they think they do great food, but actually they're not really measuring what people think about that food and that's, that's really important. So why is it so important to measure? Well, you might think that you offer great experience and that everything about your restaurant is good. But does everyone else feel that way? Because obviously as a restaurant owner of the restaurant manager, you are the most biased person in the world about wherever your restaurant is good. Obviously you think your restaurant is good. The only way to be objective about it though, is to get the opinions of others. And that's not as straightforward as you think, because if you ask people, well, mice Paypal will be really uncomfortable of her being honest and they think don't like your restaurant. They probably don't want to tell you because they don't like confrontation. Most human beings try to avoid that. And certainly more of a problem than others. Some cultures, a farmer honest. But there's very few cultures, I think where people fail. They have this huge sense of loyalty to a stranger. And if they've had a bad time, they never were already upset. They want to get into an argument with you and tell you what's wrong with your restaurant because they think that you'll take it the wrong way. So it's really difficult just to go out to a customer and say what's good, what's bad, because they're probably not going to be honest with you. So how exactly do we measure whether our experiences good? Asking people is a good start, because sometimes people will be honest with you if you get the right person or you can generally get a failing based on, hey, there's a massive difference between someone saying, yeah, it was pretty good and yeah, that was amazing. I love this. I'm going to tell my friends about it. So that's the kind of gauge. But a much better way is things like comment cards. At the end of a meal when you bring the bell, leave a comment card, leave a little pen or pencil. Hopefully, you've probably got a few then Nick, but they'll be worth it. And just let people fill out feedback, maybe a foldy thing, right? Because a lot of the time customers are worried that you can read it before they leave and say they're all good about being on x-dot, maybe even have a box you can post in. So it's anonymous. Like people are really worried that you'll be offended by their feedback. And we want them to be honest. So anything we can do to make them fill out that comment cards and feel that they can be honest. Mystery diner programs, these are really good. This is why you'd hire. I said mystery dennis. It should be mystery diners. This is where you would pay someone, an anonymous, someone normally dig for a company to come in and they will great your restaurant giving you a view, give me feedback telling what you did well and what you didn't do so well. And have a great one these days, especially is to monitor things like TripAdvisor and Yelp. Because people are really honest a lot of these times and it's very popularized. People will generally say they loved it or hated it. So the feedback's not always super in depth. And I try not to take it personally if people are just mean on the Internet, but it does give you a good indication of what's working, what isn't working, and sometimes really specific issues come up on there. So it's definitely worth monitoring their sites. And we'll discuss that more in building social proof because that's important, that too. So in summary, the foundation of a successful restaurant, It's a great experience. And we achieve this by just going back to basics. Because when we create a solid foundation that makes a really nice evening for someone to come and have dinner, then they'll come back. And that means that every time you get a new customer, you get end customer for life, not just a one-off customer. But to know that you're doing this well, you need to measure, you need to be able to genuinely take on that feedback as well. Seem to be getting people's honest feedback in whatever way that is. And you need to be able to take that feedback on board. I'll just say are now not listening. My, my restaurant, my food is really good when people didn't want to do give you that feedback. You really need to take it on board and really less than, and that's difficult to do. But it is totally worth it because once we achieve that kind of baseline awesome restaurant experience, everything else we do in this course will be based on that. So I encourage you to take some time now to really consider your monitoring processes, your feedback processes, to make sure that you've got that great experience in place. 4. Building trust: And it's crest and welcome to this lesson on building trust. Say, Well, why are we doing it? As saying, a quote by Timothy mock, really, this applies to selling anything, but certainly applies to when you're asking people to come to your restaurant is there's only really two reasons why people don't buy from you trust and desire. Even though you don't desire what you're offering enough. Hopefully they do because most people like food and you did great food, so no problems there. And then trust. Do people trust you to deliver on that promise of great food? And so what ways are people trusting you when they come to your restaurant? Obviously, they're trusting you with their money. They're giving you money. You are giving them a meal. Hopefully that'll work out. They're also giving you that time. Of course, if customers are worried that they're going to come and be stuck there for hours because of poor service. That's a worry that something they have to trust you with, their trusting you with their digestive system. And as when I'm working as a restaurant critic, there are definitely some restaurants that I go to where I'm thinking I really trust these people were my digestive system because this place does not look clean and it's scary. One of the great things about say, going to a big chain restaurant is, you know, they're probably not going to poison you. And you hear this a lot of travelers when they go to foreign countries and the tunnels. And you like what you in this amazing place where all these amazing local food, why you eat McDonald's? And the answer is because you can get to a McDonald's and you know what you get in. I'm you know, that you're not going to get polished and and, you know, people really want that if they're on a business trip, they want to be worrying about it. So there is a big thing to have your customers trust you with their digestive system and also with their social reputation. If you bring friends to a restaurant, and I've done this and I've said, it's really good, the food's great. Services gray and then service has been all for. I'm apologizing to my friends as if it's somehow Molly fault because I'm really embarrassed that yarn ball my friends here telling them who is good and it wasn't. And say when people bring friends to a restaurant, and it's not just them money in that time, in their digestive system, they're trusting Good. It's also that social reputation and that's hunting with their friends. And these are all huge things, right? Like we all finally money, we all value time, we hopefully not being ill, and we all value our friends think. And so these are really massive things. And yet we need to find a way to build a trust quick. If we want people to trust us and come to our restaurant, because these are huge hurdles to overcome, especially if they've got or for restaurants they already loved the already know, there's already trust bill up there to overcome that barrier when they could just go to somewhere else, they could just go through and make tunnels and know that they're not going to be locked down. These are the things that we need to overcome to convince someone to come to your restaurant. So how do we build up trust as quickly as possible? Will a lot of it comes in first impressions. What do people see when they first set eyes on your restaurant? In some ways, it doesn't matter if you have tattered signage as long as you save great food. But actually in winning the trust Bao, people need to look at your restaurant and think this is a warm, inviting, trustworthy place to eat dinner. And the same thing when they walk first through the door because until that until they sat down, they could easily just walk out again. They could do that when they sat down as well. But generally you wouldn't the battle by then. So what did they say? Yeah. Is it clean? It's an obvious one, but is it What did the floor look like? Is it well-maintained? Yeah, It's the sine h out for broken or one of the lights. How to issues like the Odyssey look like a professional, well-maintained place. What's your average time between a customer walking in and someone getting to them and saying hi. Because if they're left hanging around, it doesn't create a good first impression. Whereas if you can get them straight away, even if it's only to say, so really busy, we'll get around to ceasing you in a minute. It shows you care about them. And I think that's, that's half the battle. If you can show a customer you care about them, they're going to be found more open to trusting. You have all these things and have a huge 19. This is so important for small restaurants, is the food hygiene rating. Many cities will offer you some kind of certificate based on your food hygiene. That logo I've got on the slide there is just from the one from the UK, but every, most countries have some kind of food writing system, either done by the city or by central government. And I would totally recommend putting these in your window. Because if you get a chain restaurant, then you can be pretty, pretty confident they're not going to poison you because they have a big reputation to protect and there are massive lawsuit target. If you've got a small restaurant, that's not true. They don't have an international, national reputation to protect, not a huge lawsuit target. They could just declare the restaurant bankrupt if they got sued for millions of pounds for giving someone a horrible disease. And so because you don't have that trust of being a huge brand, then you need to show customers that you are clean, safe place to eat, and there's no better way to do the item thing then showing your certification by whatever food hygiene or restaurant approval body is in your country. Because that not really builds trust because people know that someone who's been in to check on you that's independent, there isn't going to be biased. So in summary, this step is really simple. It's just making a great first impression, showing people that you are clean, safe place to eat. And it's simple, but it's super important because people are trusting you with so much that social reputation and digestive system, their money at a time. And you really not going to be able to convince anyone to come to your restaurant until you win the trust battle. So you really don't want to get this step wrong. It's worth spending some time looking at trust markers you have and working out on how you can improve them so that you can win the battle of trust. 5. Building social proof: Hey, this is Chris and welcome to this lesson on building social proof. So what do you think? Why is important? Let's start over. And I couldn't work out who originally set this query, but it is such an app Tuan. And that's when people are free to behave as they wish. They usually copy each other. And we see this all the time in society, people would love to follow a crowd, even if they don't think it's the right thing to do, rather than go in the opposite direction. And risk looking stupid because there's a lot of kind of sexual anxiety about there. And said people generally just tend to do what everyone else does. So why is that important? Well, it's because people will eat at a restaurant purely because they're popular. So let's start with a definition. What exactly, yes, so foolproof. Will people use the behavior of others to influence their decisions? So we ask friends for recommendations, say when we're going to go out to dinner, when we're going to buy something. Well, what we're going to do anything, really, the first people we go to generally, these are friends to see what they recommend. When we're looking to buy something, say on Amazon will go and look and we'll look at the ratings and ideally will try and find a five-star rated product. And yeah, I just said we would refer act irrationally single ourselves and so it's better to go with the crowd. So what does this mean for restaurants? Well, people want to eat at the best restaurants, but they don't have time to go and try them. All right. I mean, I do because I'm a restaurant critic, but most people don't have time to get it to 100 restaurants in their city and then pick the best one. So what do they do? They ask people for their opinions and they see popularity as a sign of quality, right? So if there's a really popular restaurant, people assume that the restaurant is popular because it's good. And because they assumed that they then go and the whole effect snowballs because everyone is going there because they think it's the best restaurant in town. And because it's so popular, that kind of makes it the best restaurant in town. So how do we build this social proof? Of course, it's really, it's chicken and egg, right? How do you get the people in to make your restaurant look really popular? And it's dots in the real world, I guess, intensive making the most of the customers you have. So that means that the first customer should always go in the window of your restaurant, right? Because then when people walk past, they see the Dina's straight away and if they're hidden in the back, people are going to look in and think like them empty chairs by the window. If you can fill all of those tables, then that's great. You can also post local reviews. There's things like the TripAdvisor's buckets or local media. Or you can just testimonials from customers, anything that you can stick up there so that when people walking past, and I think, wow, this place must be pretty good. And then in the digital space, There's lots that we can do to build social proof as well. Because again, people use online reviews as a signal of quality. So this is things like TripAdvisor, yelp, Facebook, Google, all of them. You can go on and leave reviews on. And if people have really positive reviews, then people are going to think much more highly of your restaurant. Says, I've got Yelp and Tripadvisor on the screen. And as I'm sure you're familiar with the sites, you can go and you can review restaurants. And a lot of the time when people go out to dinner, they will go on to one of these sites and they will order local restaurants by their rating. So the higher rating you get, the more likely you are to appear on that list. So how do we maximize social review sites? First of all, we want to aim for, for 4.5 stars, like realistically narrow, but he gets five. If we go back to the previous screen shot, you'll see that that's the factor. And the French Laundry, both of which are quite famous for a Michelin starred restaurants. Both I've been named the best restaurant in the world. I think the FAQ doc suddenly house if it's the best restaurant in the world on TripAdvisor, 4.5 stars, it's basically impossible to get five. So 4.5, you doing great. Anything less than three is a disaster. I have seen a few restaurants go below for a. But generally the way that people use sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor is that you always get at least three because a lot of people give you five-stars. So if you're going less than three, hits a write-off, and it's important to engage in people in a positive way. So similarly, sites likely to reply to people's feedback. And it's important not to do the kind of Amy's Baking Company thing where they just go crazy. Anyone who post a negative review. Instead, you want to be really constructive. If there was a problem, you want to apologize, you want to explain why? Say the service was a bit slow on that night and just be really nice to them. Say that they feel they can come back and maybe they'll have a better experience and posting more positive review on a later point. So you wanna make sure you're monitoring these sites to see what's happening at least once a week. And in general, will look a bit more sexual media in step 8 of the program. So reputation is an avant, like the best restaurants in the world will book up six months in advance if you try and book a table at the Fat Duck now, I always having a look into a table of free. Thank you. I was looking for free people and it was it was something like October and I was looking in March. It really does backup really far in advance. How did you get that? Well, it's about building up that reputation so that people talk about you and say, Wow, this is amazing. And I've actually got a screenshot from the from the factor IX booking site and it's not cheap. And how do they get people to pay two hundred and, two hundred and fifty pound ahead, six pounds. It's all based on reputation. How to get a great reputation? Well, you've got to have people talking by you. And there's a number of ways we can do that. We can do that with the local media. And we'll look at that in step nine. We can do that with local bloggers will also look at that in step nine. And there's also awards and recognition. So if you can go after any, any local or national awards for anything, especially if you have a speciality food, which she showed them. We'll talk about a lot later than getting those awards. Getting talked about building a reputation as a destination, foodies will really help you. So in summary, people want to eat at popular restaurants and they look at existing Dina's, the internet and media to find out which places hands that might have social proof and that most reputation. So we want to, we want to hit all of these up by position ourselves in the best light wherever that's making sure that they see it's visible from outside, are always busy. That we're asking people to go on to Yelp and TripAdvisor and tell them about the great time we had and responding positively to anyone who doesn't do that. And making sure that we're trying to build up our reputation in local and online media as well. 6. Building a customer list: Hey, it's Chris and welcome to this lesson on building a customer list. Let's dive straight into it. So new versus existing customers, we've already kind of covered this. But many ways restaurants have it easy because finding new customers is hard for any businesses. Bit easy with restaurants, because people generally do just walk past sometimes and think, I'll go there. But it's still difficult, right? We'll still wishing that we have more customers. And it's expensive because it takes time and money to reach people. So keeping existing customers is way easier once you've got a customer who likes you'll food gets keeping them coming back is a ways your way to fill KOBAS then isn't going out finding new ones. And I just want to illustrate this with a graph because we consider hand which, you know, onetime customer is worth. This is comparison to a customer who loves you. And in fact every week for dinner. Then the, the, the actual financial different details don't really matter. But you can see just a onetime customer doesn't come back, is worth almost nothing compared to a customer who will fall in love overview and who you can get to come on a regular basis. So we really want to go for this idea of building repeat customers. Stay with us for life. And how do we do that? How do we build those repeat customers? Well, we build relationships. And this might be as simple as chatting to people and getting to know them a bit and just adding a bit of banter to the evening. But now that we're in the digital age, it's more easier than ever to build up a relationship digitally as well and to do it on a bigger scale that we wouldn't have been able to do before. And the one thing that I always come back to is whereas if my chin that you're not a restaurant manager, the works that dinner rush every night. Where is the one place you would dine when you've got invited? And then the answer is your friend's house. If your friend invites you to dinner, you gotta have a really good excuse not to get right because you've probably, you probably excited, you really want to go and see your friends and share some food with them. And That's essentially what we want in a restaurant, right? Because maybe you are running a huge chain, but I think most of us are running small individual restaurant, right? And so in order to compete with the big chains, we really need to get that personal touch him for customers to feel like they've got a relationship was which hopefully they have. Hopefully we can be friends with them so that they keep coming back time and time again every time we reach out to them to say, Hey, don't remember to remember to come anywhere, then they feel like a friend is inviting. So how does this work in terms of building up a customer list? One way is that we gather up the customer's details and we'll look at each of the steps in this lesson. Next, we add them to a list. Three, we send them engaging emails about events and promotions and things like that. And we keep doing this regularly so that we stay in touch with them and we build up this relationship. Because of course, every time we speak to someone, then we kind of cement this relationship a bit further and make it stronger. And as we do that people who remembers they likers and then come back to our restaurant, which is what we want, right? So this, I mean, this is more geared towards the digital side of things, but you can do this in envoys as well. Say we've via mail or via phone. Or you can just be conversational and ideally do all of them. But in terms of, let's look at each of the step. So acquiring customer details. A good way to do this as maybe leaving some cards on tables and saying and sign up to our customer less than well. We'll give you sales and promotions and we'll send you all of that. And we won't send you any spam because we're very nice widgets, a little restaurant and you trust us, we're honest. Try. Another one is to ask for them. When someone takes a booking. If you just ask, get the name, get contact number, contact email. Most people will give you an email address. And they're quite happy to do that. Or at least if we will find it very hard to say no when you ask them. Which again works at the end of a meal because then you can explain a bit more. You can say, Look, it's a small restaurant. We'd love to remind you that were here and tell you when we do things like menu changes. Would you be willing to you for us to send you an e-mail every few weeks and just remind you that were here. And when you put it like that and you're honest and sincere, a lot of people will say yes, yeah. And then if you take the time to explain what you're going to do, then they'll often give you that real e-mail address, which is a rare thing in online marketing. It's a kind of known phenomenon that most people maintain an old email address, like a Hotmail or maybe a Gmail or Yahoo, that they give out when they don't wanna give people their real e-mail addresses. So if you can get get someone to give you that primary e-mail address, then that's absolute gold. And if you take the time to explain to them at the end of a male, That's a good way of doing that. You can also, if you go a website, just sign-up form on there. Whichever email provide the US public has an integration where you can just drop in and then people can sign up if they want on your website, which hopefully there will because they're how they're searching for information on you. So tips for acquiring customer details have already covered some of these, but you're asking people really helps. That's number when you can do is actually ask people in person. Because most people want to be now I want to please, and they're happy to do that using some credit promotion or special offer. So that, you know, a lot of restaurants say things like if you sign up to our special VIP club, then we'll give you 50% off your next meal. And at first you think were 50 percent off, That's a lot to lose, right? But actually, if we go back to that graph, are there still if you can turn a one-off customer inter, peak instrument, That's worth so much money over the lifetime of the customer that it's worth giving them a male for half price, given them for free wherever turns him into a peak customer is totally worth it. When you think about the lifetime value of the customer. And it's also worth thinking about the more details you asked for, the lower your conversion rate will be. So do you really need anything other than the first name and their email address stuff? Probably. All right. Because then you can send them an email saying, Hey Jane, the South got this special offer. You may be one as surname, that it can be useful kinda matching people up. Not essential though. Probably not their postal address, a day of birth, their mobile phone, anything like that. Because the more personal details you asked for, more uncomfortable people become doing that. I know some places like Subway do want your day of birth so they can send you a free cookie on your birthday. But people are very protective about the information, especially if you're new restaurant they're not really familiar with. So my advice would be to keep it as limited as possible. So you've got the you've got the details. And now we need to send them some messages, sending some emails, right? And a key to getting people to read your emails, get people to open your emails, which is a battle like most people will not open an email that less than from a company. And that's the statistics are small. Maybe a third of the people you send two will actually open your email. It's, It's shocking the low if you're not in that kind of online marketing world. So the way that we keep people engaged and we keep people reading them, is to really add value to their lives. So it's not just a case of saying, Hey, we need some customers. Can you please come to dinner? That's not going to inspire anyone. What you need to do is give them some genuine value for their time they are spending to read that email from me. So for example, you could tell them about the specials you for the honor, the movement, or if you're changing your menu, tell them all about the exciting new changes and the opportunity for them to come in and try the new menu and see what you think. And this is especially good if, if you've got anything else exciting that's happening, Tell them about that. But more importantly, make them feel special. So using things like Anza has one of our VIP customers. We wanted to let you be the first to come in and try out new menu. If you got that in your inbox, you think, wow, this restaurant values mean they're excited to tell me about this new menu. Had a good experience last time. I think I'll come in and try them. And that's not kind of, again, we're talking about building a relationship here, right? And if we can get them feeling like that, we really value them, which we do of course, because their valuable customers, then they're more likely to come in. So on the technical side, if you know a big technical person, then there's loads of really easy to use software out there that will allow you to send out these e-mails. Are we one thing? You could just keep it on, say an Excel spreadsheet and just keep up and then just send it from your personal e-mail account. But there's a number of reasons that you don't want to do this. First of all, it's quite difficult to personalized e-mails. Second is email delivery rates seem that loads of people from your personal account than a lot of the aggressive spam filtering will probably detect your e-mail as spam because you were e-mailing so many people. And we don't want that. We want the email to actually arrive in people's inboxes, right? And that's why you need a proper mailing company because they they set up to make sure that that doesn't happen. So I'll provide a, a bunch of links to them. But there's people who like Mail Chimp, convert kit, GetResponse, drew it a Weber. There's loads of them. And they're all super easy to use. You don't need to be technical to use. Let me just put the details in and you can use that pre-made templates to send emails out. In terms of that, Egypt's want to keep it super simple. Like, just like a restaurant name, that body of the email might be images. Images look great, but don't use all these fancy templates because it actually decreases the chances of someone reading your e-mail if you do that. So keep it simple when you sending out these messages. So that, that's really the whole process. You get. You get people's emails, you get their names, you put it into some kind of custom management system like these solutions. And then you send them regular updates about what's happening in your restaurant. So just to summarize, the whole idea of having a customer list is so that you can build a relationship. Because every time someone reads one of your messages, they are building up that relationship. And it just keeps reminding them to come back to your restaurant and try the new things. Try that special offers what I'd be doing. And this really allows you to generate diners on demand, right? Because if you're having a really hard time, if you're struggling for customers, you can get onto your email list and say, Hey, we've got this new item, we've got this special, we've got this special offer and see response pretty quick from people reading and hopefully booking. And it's easy, right? Because all you have to do is send an email and Sydney, get more customers, which is what we want. So it's, it's a really great strategy. If you have any problems with the technical implementation, you can post a question on the cost as well. And it's just a wonderful strategy for generating Dina's on demand. 7. Creating memorability: Hey, it's Cress, and welcome to this lesson on creating memorability. So let's start with the obvious question. What exactly is memorability? Well, it's anything that causes customers to think about your restaurant and to leave an impression in that memories. Because there were a lot of restaurants out there. There were there were loads, there are hundreds and hundreds. Just send in my city alone. And so the question is, why should someone remember yours specifically? And if we can find a way to create memorability, we can give them a reason to remembers. And it also gives them a reason to tell overs of hours, which is really important as well to get a network effect of having them talk to their friends about odds because you trust your friends amongst. So if your friend is talking about a restaurant, you really going to pay attention. A lot of this comes down to emotion versus rationality. So we want to tap into people's emotions to create memorable. Why? Because people make emotional decisions. So for example, if you have cheap prices at your restaurant, then, you know, rationally people are going to like that. But emotionally, we're not going to create a memory that causes them to come back. So, you know, juice creating awesome product is good, but it's not something that's going to get people thinking about because people think based on their emotional memories. So, yeah, unless you can make it like so cheap that it fills people with the emotion of surprise. Which if you can well done, you're probably not making that much money on that. Then what we want is we want to invoke people's wow factor. We want them to just walk into the restaurant and think wow. And walk out thinking wow, and that will really trigger them to our members on a regular basis in the kind of place where people go and think, Oh, that was so good. And you really need that elongated. So because that's, that's where the emotion is that if we can get people feeling that, then we're on to a winner. So we can do this fear customer service by having great serve as right and looking for opportunities to create what I call magic moments. Where they really take the service up to an Alpha level to the point where people know any really enjoy that, but feel the need to tell that friends about how good the service was and how above and beyond the way to when. And, you know, a lot of restaurants do things like they'll sing when it's your birthday and not come out with like tambourine and allow the waiters will command and saying and bring you a little cupcake with a candle on. Because it creates a kind of a moment where you're like, yeah, you don't forget, even if you really embarrassed by it. Probably not, not probably not looking to embarrass people, but it certainly just stick in the memory. And yeah, any opportunities you can do to do something special, especially this is more important when things go wrong. If things go wrong and you can put it right in an amazing way, then you'll create something that oil. Yeah, people will tell their friends, if you forget someone's made in, for example. And all you do is you fix the problem, obviously should fix the problem, but no one's going to tell their friends about a time the restaurant forgotten the main and then fixed it. Whereas if you fix it and you give them around free drinks and you give them a desert, that's extra good, then they're more likely to when they're talking about a friend. And so I go, Well, there was a mistake, but they really put it right. Then. That's the kind of thing where you've got the opportunity to show that you really care about people. And that when you make mistakes, you own up and you fix in a big way. And avoid is unforgettable dishes. And this is one I highly recommend. The best example of saying is what Jonah Berger discusses in his book contagious is the steak restaurant in Philadelphia called Barclay Prime, because they're famous selling a $100 cheesesteak sandwich. And you think, wow, that's amazing. He would buy a $100 cheesesteak sandwich. We tend to do. And it, first of all, it's a really amazing sandwich dry. It's not some crappy sandwich. They've marked up to a $100. It's made of wacky beef, it's got truffle shavings for alcohol, and it comes with half a bottle of champagne. It's really put together. And so people tend to go in and they'll buy it to share like a group of maybe eight people will share one sandwich because then the heat get the parking right. So I'm saying, yeah, I had a $100 cheesesteak at this restaurant. And that's something that won't. You remember, that you never going to forget a 100, $100 Chase sticks and we July two, you're going to tell every week you will have met about this cheesesteak sandwich. It's going to be the volume of thing you can do and that's what happened. Box-like prime, everyone was talking about this because it's literally an unforgettable dish. And it's important to point out here that memorability is not gimmicks. It's not some nonsense that does get people's attention, but doesn't really impress them. The dish really needs to deliver value. So if we look at, we look at the cheesesteak sandwich, it had, it was worth a $100 because it had the most amazing beef in and especially baked roll. And it came with the champagne and the frog law and the truffle shavings on all of these really super rich, super expensive food that justified the price. It wasn't that they just marked a regular crappy sandwich up to a phenomenon value. I think, contrasts this as they used to be a restaurant in my town called spice quarter. And they have a chocolate fountain. And yeah, it was kinda cool, but it just didn't taste that. Now, excellent, you could dip a marshmallow in it, but the chocolate wasn't that good. And so it wasn't somewhere. I ever told people are yet go to spy squad. They've got chocolate fountain. It's amazing. Because it wasn't amazing. It was a gimmick, It was just a novelty. And it wasn't, didn't taste amazing. And that's completely the opposite to what Barclay Prime did. Why they made something that was genuinely amazing and say, people genuinely talked about it. And the line between these two isn't always clear thing Hooters is a good example of it. Like they have the gills in skimpy outfits to try and impress man. And in some ways it, it could be seen as a novelty, right? Because really that's a pervert for women. There's plenty of pornography on the internet. But in otherwise it kind of does our genuine value because clearly men like that sort of thing. And, and also you don't want to be memorable for the wrong reasons. For example, peeling wallpaper is a great example. If you got wallpaper peeling off the walls, then yeah, a lot of people are going to tell their friends about that, but not for the right reason. So I think you chances to create amazing customer services is a great one. Having an unforgettable birthday, she had one, but it really needs to deliver on how amazing is it needs to be worth every penny challenge for it. So in summary, you need to give customers a reason to remember you and to tell their friends about you. You want to be famous for something, right? And he doesn't have to be a super market, really expensive dish, right? You could, you could be famous for say, making your own really awesome gravy thus. And so really tacky example. But there was an Gordon Ramsay was helping to pull back and that's where he said in that you don't need to do fancy stuff here. You just need to pick something that can be really proud of, like doing the best pies and the pest gravy in town. And that really is true. Like what are you going to be known for as a restaurant? Pick a dish and just make that dish awesome, awesome enough that people need to tell their friends about it because it's so cool and just run with that. And that will give people an emotional reason to remember your restaurant and to keep coming back. 8. Creating urgency: Hey, this is Chris and welcome to this lesson on creating urgently. So what is urgency? Well, people hate making decisions. If you really do. Most people hate making decisions. And it's no wonder they do, because when we have to make a decision, it triggers our body's stress response. So making decisions actually makes people L. So if people are given the chance they will put off making a decision. And of course, we as restaurant owners, restaurant managers, which we want people to decide to come to our restaurant. So the question is, what can we do to make someone decide to visit our restaurant? Now? We want people have a kind of natural fear of missing out. And so how can we make it so that they feel the need to decide to eat, not just to come and eat at our restaurant, but to do it now to do with some kind of urgency. So why do we need it? Well, if people can come to our restaurant anytime can come now a lighter, they'll probably change later because they can't come late to and then they don't have to make a decision now. And maybe Leighton never comes and enters restaurants. Only thing. I really should go back to there. It was really nice, but it's just now in late and never comes and I never think today's day we're going to go. So how do we give them a reason to come now? How do we kind of give them no option? Don't let them make the decision, forced them to say, No, now's the time and have to come. And this is especially true if your competition is creating urgency, right? Because if a customer has a choice between two restaurants, one of them, they can only get some special thing by going now. And your restaurant. They can come any time, what they're going to choose thing going and getting a competitor and think that they'll come to you later, but mainly that later never comes. So we really need to create that urgency just to compete. So the question is, how do we convey some urgency? Well, we need to offer them something that they cannot get next week, something where they have to come now to get the benefit of it. And you sometimes this happens by itself. Holidays are a great example of this. Fits news. A Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, That's the free days where we'd expect all of our restaurants to be busy right? Then they have to come back on Tuesday because the day after Valentine's Day, it's not Valentine's Day. So sometimes it's happened naturally, but we can also have artificially engineer it. What do I mean by that? Well, things like limited time offers. So specials, for example, if you have a special dish that they can't get next week, then they have to come this week if they want to try it. And this, this, everyone does, McDonald's do this for example. They have the regular you, but then they also have things like the big tasty and tastes of America and things, dishes that come and go or the little monopoly scratch card things. All of these things are a limited time offer so that people know if they didn't come this month or this week, they're going to miss it. You can also do things like food ignites. One of the steak houses near my house ran a special wacky now and it was it was quite a good price. It was 55 pounds, which about $50. And you've got to try it. It's beautiful wagyu steak, but it was only on 19. And if he didn't come that night, you missed out and you'd have to get to really expensive steak house and pellicle, a $100 for a while. So they create that urgency. And that night the restaurant is packed and it's now subpoints. You can also do things like food festivals to the Pub chain near me. That they sometimes they weren't. Again, festival where they do all kinds of game. But you've gotta go for those few weeks. Or that's the only time that you can get it all. You just miss out on this disk. Great food that do. And you can also do coupon to have expiry date. So if you have any kind of special offer, you want to put some kind of expiry date on there to make sure that people don't just pin it to a board and forget about it. I think have to use this. I have to go back to this restaurant within a month so I can get my special offer, whatever that is. So you can all say partner up with things our office size. So there's a bunch of production or sites outlets such as Groupon and confidential. And the two examples I have here, Groupon is a coupon psi with limit every day they'll have a different Offer and you can sign up and you can grab that offer. And Roffey quite a big discount. Normally, I'll only be available for that day. So there's a lot of people subscribe to these things and only eat at restaurants that have agreed upon two points available. So obviously, with the kind of Groupon system, you're having to give up something in terms of the office. And I'm not having to give people a discount, but it can bring a lot of customers in. Equally confidential, which is moreover, reviews and office sites. There are always looking to partner with restaurants to create these limited time special offers where they'll send out to their e-mail list, that customer list, and promote your restaurant egg next chain for some kind of offer a discount for them. So in summary, it's not enough to get people to love your restaurant. You need to give them a reason to visit now, because otherwise, if you don't do that and your competitor does do that, they'll get the competitors now and they'll say, I'll go to this restaurant later, and maybe that later never comes. So we need to tap into people's fear of missing out. And we can do this by having offers that expire, by having specials food unites things that people have to come now this week, this month to get in on or they will miss out. And by doing that, we inspire people to take action and come down to a restaurant straight away. Well, I'm thinking I'll come at some point. 9. Using triggers: Hey, it's quests and welcome to this lesson on using triggers. As ever, we start with the question, what exactly are triggers? Well, people have busy lives and they have loads of things to think about. So what is going to get them to think about your restaurant? And that's where the triggers come in because it's, it's anything that can Cause people when you're going to see something and think, yes, that's what we want. And a classic example of this is associations. So that's a famous kid can have a for the kind of KitKat and coffee campaign. And the idea behind this was to associate KitKat as being a great snack to have with coffee because people drink a lot of coffee. And so if you can get that association in their mind, every time people have coffee, they'll think about KitKat and that's great for KitKat sales. So what can we associate with our restaurant that will people run into in everyday life to get them thinking about. So the first thing is to have an identity. And we'll, we'll talk about that. In fact, we'll go through all of these. Second is day associations. So can you be really good, something that is relevant? And I think the main example of this is Sunday ROS. There's lot of places in my town that specialize in Sunday routes. And a great reason to do someday routes rather than just doing say, be a great burger place are great. Pizza place is every Sunday, people will be thinking, it's Sunday. We should go for Sunday roast, wherever it's really good to go for Sunday roast. And then I'll start thinking of the places that specialized. And that happens every week. And never got example, it's TGI Fridays, it's in the name by every Friday. Thinking, why should I go for a restaurant, TGI Friday's sinner, the name. Oh, yeah. Advertising campaigns work really well when the things like, it's what we can do a, made for, I think a lot b, Here's do this just to get people thinking it's the weekend we should go here. And also branded products which we'll discuss in more detail as well. So having an identity, and by this I mean having a really clear identity in terms of the cuisine you do. Why? Because this is how people really pick restaurants. And this is a conversation that happens all the time. You've got a couple that trying to decide where should they go when one of them says, what restaurant you wanna guys here? And they're like, I don't know, I hate making decisions because I'm a human and decisions as stressful as we learned about in the last lesson. And so then if a person gets what kind of food G1, and then they pick, They say Mexican or Chinese or whatever, Italian, whatever kind of food they want, they pick a cuisine type. And then he think the best restaurant in that category. So if you don't have a clear identity, you're just kind of anything restaurant like a lot of change there really specialize in anything. And so you don't have that claim identity you never going to come up on unless dry, no matter what cuisine somebody picks, you're not going to be on the list of things they think are because they're always going to be thinking of a specific type of food. Whereas if you have a really clear identity, like you do the best caries in town, the minute people trying to pick a restaurant and think, I didn't, I didn't know that I want to make a decision by doing fancy occurring. Then boom, straight triggered to you that thinking on one occurring, this restaurant is best Curry house in town. So obviously will go there. And if a great one is branded products, so this is things you can take home and have in your kitchen. Customers can buy it and taken home, have them in the kitchen. And nanos are really good at this because none there is a, a chicken restaurant and they do a lot of periphery sources and over kinds of sources. And you can buy them all and you get them in supermarkets. But equally, the law restaurants to sell our products directly in stores like Carlos CIOs or bells. They sell branded products and you can take them home and you buy an under associate, put it on your kitchen table every time you get to put salt on your food, you reminded of NAMD. It's brilliantly pervasive marketing. So and 10. Using social media: Hey, this is Chris and welcome to this lesson on using social media. So you probably know what social media is, but let's just briefly go over the ones we're going to cover in this lesson on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. So why use social media? Will people use social media to get their information? If people are looking for information on your restaurants, social media is one of the places they're going to go just to look up general information about your business, but also to find that social proof, to see what people are saying about it. And people are familiar with the idea of following a business on social media. So if there is a brand that they like, they used to go onto Twitter and clicking follow ago none of Facebook and clicking like so we can tap into that for our restaurant because people are already familiar with this paradigm of liking businesses that they'd like in the real world. And by doing that, it means that you can get your message out there TO fans for free, right? Once you've got the followers, you just post people say it. Obviously the algorithms are becoming more complexities days or how many people see, it's questionable, but at least some of your funds will say it. Let's start by taking a look at Google Local, not strictly social media, but I think fits best into this lesson. It, Google Local is a free service where you can register your restaurant and you might already have you on there and you can just claim it. And this will allow you to put details in your restaurant. So if you search on the desktop version, you'll see you get the right-hand column on the left of this slide with some information. And there's also a mobile view which you can see in the image on the right. And this list, things like opening hours, address, phone number gives you a map and it's all free to do. And the map, It's particularly useful on say, mobile devices because people can search for local restaurant, yours can come up. And I'll show you a star rating. Hope you've got a great star rating. And they can give me directions and take them straight to your restaurant. They can call and colleagues that they can book a table. And it really allows people, really allows you to tap into that sensitive people are looking for a restaurant now they can find you and find the details to need to get straight away. So it's an absolute no-brainer to count it. Google Local, register your details, putting as much stuff as possible and make it really easy for potential diamonds to find you. We want to Facebook here we're really talking about creating a page. If you go into, you can use business dot facebook.com to create a page for your restaurant. In fact, I think we've got a blog post about how to do this step-by-step on the restaurant psychology blog. But basically you want to create a business page. And then people can come on and like your page. And it can also leave reviews which helps build up that social proof so that whenever people come along, then they can see a star rating. And then you can share posts, photos, videos, wherever coined the media, just like your personal Facebook. You can go on and share, share things like photos of your food and that will come up in your fans timeline, just like your personal posting. Facebook also has support for offers and coupons. So if you've got some kind of special offer, a discount, you can post that on Facebook and allow people to register it via the Facebook website. An unfair advantage you building up an audience on Facebook is then you can run localized advertising. So you can, you can run localize that the Taizong anyway, just saying I want to target people in my city. But you can also do a lot more advanced things like target people specifically who like your page or people who have friends, who are people who like your page or Facebook will even build you a custom audience of people similar to those who liked your page. So it will go out there and find similar paper to the people you know, are already customers of yours and let you and emphasizing to them. And that's really powerful. Next platform we'll look at is Twitter. And this is not necessarily wound where people go to Twitter to find information. But it's a great way to push time sensitive messages out. So if you've got some kind of special offers, something is happening right now. Twitter is a great place to do that because that is what people often get a 24 to find that what's happening right now. But the real power of Twitter is gathering testimonials and social proof because people love to take photos of the field and they love to tag you. So they'll put in and then the name of your Twitter account and you'll be able to see all the people are acting. You're saying, I love 18 at this restaurant app. Whatever you have Twitter handle is, and you can just tweet, even just build an entire Twitter account. And people talking about how much they love. Restaurant and that builds up a lot social proof. And this really works well for if you have any kind of competition or an offer. Where you can say, here we've got this new menu, tweet this, and you get a chance to win a free male. Say that the whole idea of retweeting, which is where someone copies your tweet onto their timeline. So it goes to everyone who follows them. That's really embedded in Twitter's culture. That's one of the key parts of the platform. And so people are really familiar with doing that. And there's a lot of brands use it for this kind of competition where they're giving away something and they get all the fans to retweet it. And then they randomly select one of the people who have retweeted the message and the winner. And this is a really great way to go viral because people are used to doing it this way. There's nothing new or crazy. There is just part of the way Twitter works and people are comfortable doing that. Instagram, one of the fastest growing platforms, probably the fastest growing social media network in the world at the moment. And it's a great way to share photos of the food you produce. So if you've got some really lovely failed a humid day, then it's great to just take photos of them, post them on Instagram. People can love them, people can comment on your photos. And there's lots of built-in filters. If you want to go filter, maybe you just want to show your food in its natural light. But the filters do make photos look really nice. If you do go that route, the best course of action is to pick one and filter that you love and you stick with it rather than using a different filter and every photo for some reason that seems to work better for most brands. Develop some downsides of Instagram. One is arguably less viable because Facebook you can share people's posts. Twitter, you can retweet Instagram. You don't really do, unlike in you can comment, but it doesn't spread the same way as Facebook and Twitter do. Secondly, Instagram's big user base and big growth areas are women, young people. And that might be who you're targeting. We are asked to a 100, but generally, people don't have that much money to go out and spend money eating in restaurants. So maybe that's not your ideal target audience. And one other caveat is that you need to use a mobile device. So a lot of it you can do on a desktop computer. But we've Instagram. The only way really to post photos is to use your mobile. And so if you'd like to do a lot of editing on your desktop, It's quite difficult. And it means as well, if you're sharing the social media responsibilities between you and maybe like an assistant manager or anything like that. It's more difficult to do because you've got set all the fans up and it's a bit more complicated. Not, not allowed blocker, but maybe not quite as easy as managing a brand on say, Facebook. Next platform, Pinterest, not massively used by restaurants. I'll tell you that. You don't think getting a high S Pinterest, everyone must be on Pinterest, actually a lot of restaurant on. But it's a great way to share photos and equate which recipes. Share your recipes as a kind of In a way to get people. It's another trig awry. If you've given someone a recipe and every time they make you, think of you, that's an integrate triggers we learned about in the previous lesson. Then pinterest is a great way to do that because again, people read pin stuff, so you get up viral effect like Twitter with people or re-posting the content and sharing it would leak children. A few tips for maximizing your impact on social media. And one is to pick a platform and focus on that first. So the way you really build an audience, He's not by very occasionally posting on loads of different social media platforms. You'll probably have far more of an effective time by just picking one platform and regularly posting for that and really engaging people in that. And so when you start out, you want to pick one platform. Probably Facebook is a great shout at the moment, given the downsides of the platforms. And you wouldn't go out there and research what really works well for that specific platform. So some things will work better on Facebook, some things that work better on Twitter, some things that work better on Instagram. And you want to have a really clear strategy, why, why you on that? And probably to engage existing customers to get them to come back right, and to build up the relationship that we talked about in the building customer lists lesson. And see you want to have a really clear strategy in that and be consistent over time, which goes back to the picking one platform and posting regularly, rather than trying to do all the platforms and posting irregularly and make sure you engage with your fans. So when people post a comment, when people ask a question, make sure you engage them, apply to those and don't just ignore them. And that will get form of that relationship bill, which again, what we're looking for. Let's summarize this lesson. So social media is a great way to inform new customers in terms of Google, Local, and Facebook allows you to put business information on that too. Since great way to inform new customers of details about your company. But also really importantly, it's a great way to remind old customers that you exist. But this really works best when you have a clear strategy about what you're doing. And all cells with focusing on one platform and really engaging fans or map till you become really popular, gotten established routine going. And that's how you get the most benefit out of it. 11. Using local media: Hey, and welcome to this lesson on using and the local media. So what do I mean when I say local media? Well, the kind of obvious answer, I guess is local newspapers and magazines, or maybe even national ones. If you're doing particularly well, then a reason not to him for the top-right. Also bloggers. So any, anyone based in the area who writes some kind of foodie blog and also internet celebrities. And by that I mean people that say have a large following on Instagram or Twitter. And they're not really famous in a classical sense. And they have a large following and a large audience that they can share your restaurant with. So why use local media? Well, the main reason is that you have access to a large audience. And generally for free, right, even free newspapers, they get quite big circulations, especially compared to the amount of people you could reach on your own. And it also gives you a lot of instant social proof because people respect the opinions of bloggers, that they follow all local newspapers and magazines. And really if you think about it, if you read a review by a blogger that you already follow already have a relationship with a newspaper that you trust, then it's like a friend recommending you somewhere, right? This instant trust there. So their entire readership will get a positive review of your restaurant from someone that they trust and look up to and take the advice off. So it's not just that you're reading and you're reaching a large audience, but you're doing it in a far more effective way than if you were to just do direct paid for advertising. Because people see direct advertising for the is, it's advertising and they know who that you're trying to influence them to come to your restaurant where it is, if they read a review by a blogger or local newspaper, then they're far more likely to take that on board and trust that opinion. So ultimately, it's low time and low-cost light. You just have to invite, invite these people and pay for them male. And happy days. That's all the work you really need to do. So how does the system work? Well, starts with some research. You have to find suitable publications and blogs. In the case of local media, national media, then you probably already know the publications that are out there. It's where sniffing around to see what extra local magazines and newspapers you can uncover. And in terms of if you want to reach out to the national papers, you really want to find the food critic who writes for that paper and email them directly. And a lot of the time you can just guess that email. Like an I in the UK, we have a famous food create culture. Irena, who writes for the observer, which is partly guardian. Now, I don't know his email address, but I can probably guess it right at the guardian.com. And you can always fire off an email and hope for the best. Maybe I'll come back, maybe when it's worth a try. And in terms of like a plug is Google is your friend searching social networks like Twitter and Instagram. And if a good source. And you can literally just search the web and see what comes up. Try and gauge what kind of audience they have if they're doing this kind of thing for over restaurants and then reach out and invite them for mail. Hopefully, they say yes, they come down, you make a booking for them so you know, when they're coming and when they arrive, you know who they are and you be extra nice to them. And of course, I hope you're extra nice to all of the customers. But obviously, in a review context, you wanna make sure that your restaurant is children. It's best that you don't make mistakes and then it's a true reflection of your restaurant running really well. You give them the mail for free. I imagine it's kind of implied, but I think that's less just state that, state the obvious right now that they shouldn't be paying for the Mayo. You give them that for free. And then they go away and they write lovely things about your restaurant. They share with their audience and everyone reads, I review things. Wow, that sounds like a great restaurant. Everyone else comes and your sales go up. And it's a real win-win situation for everyone because you have, particularly if you're a big publication, then you have a lot of column inches to fail. It can sometimes be the case that just overburdened with the map of places wanting them to come. But I'm actually a lot of time for the big publications they need to keep putting that content. Because if they're publishing articles every day, that's a lot of space to fail and they need to find information to fill it. So if you can reach out and help them in that than a lot of journalists really appreciate that. And in terms of bloggers at everyone loves free food and especially in a fetus run, some local bloggers, celebrity or anything, you probably quite honored to be invited for air for some failure because it shows that people value your opinion and everyone likes to be validated. It really increases our self-esteem. So if you can be, if you can make these people feel special and feel like you really value their opinion, which it's true because he do, because we want to get our message out to their audience right? Then people loved that stuff because it's really empowering for them. So in summary, we can use local media and bloggers. And that allows us to tap into their already large audience for a relatively low cost to ourselves. And it comes with instant social proof because their audience trust them and said When name of the nice things about it is it's not direct advertising that people are adverse to these days. It's coming from a source that they trust. And so that's really beneficial for our restaurant and get a great way to break through that barrier. Trust that people when they don't have a relationship with us. 12. Using network effects: Hey, this is Chris and welcome to this lesson on using network effects. What are network effects with using over people to spread the message for you, essentially viral marketing. And there's a number of ways that we can do this. Recommendations, social media and branded merchandise at three ways that we're going to cover in this lesson. Recommendations is probably the most important. Because as we discussed in the lesson, local media, what we really want to, when we try and reach a new person that we don't have a relationship and we don't have trust with if we can get someone who they trust to recommenders, Then we're going to break through that trust barrier and be able to reach them and convince them that they want to come and have dinner with us. And the people that people trust more than anyone else is that friends? So if we can get people to recommend a restaurant to their friends, then our friends are going to be impressed by that. And hopefully they're going to come and have dinner there. So how do we get people to recommend our restaurant? Well, I think it's worth stating that a good way is just to ask people. We recommend is. And you can just do it at the end of the meal. If people ask the method, we enjoyed it. If yes, then just ask them for a favor and ask them to tell their friends. And people like to please other people and they like to apply in these situations, especially if they think you're an honest, small, small restaurant, which we all are obviously, then there'll be more than happy to help out local business and recommend some friends your way as long as he experienced as being good. So put up this stack frame helps care, which I think is, is really good. I, I always had the ratio is higher than this. But apparently had people tell nine friends if they've had a good experience. But they tell 16 if they've had a bad experience. So it's really important that we get the basics right and it comes back that up early lesson on creating a gray experience. Because if you had a bad experience, actually you will get network effects multiplied doing you home, rather than having the network effects benefiting you. So it's really worth spending time getting that ground-level in. Because otherwise, as this slide illustrates, it comes back to bite you in the ass. And people often tell their friends anyway, let you didn't ask. But generally if I've been out to dinner, then I will tell people anyway. So again, this comes back to creating a great experience because I'm more likely to tell people if I've had a wonderful evening rather than an okay evening, I'm more excited to tell my friends because people do this for essentially social currency. Like if I can recommend a good restaurant to my friends than on-field luck and doing them a favor. I feel good. And so I want to do that. I want to be able to tell my friends about your restaurant as long as it's great. And this also comes back to our lesson on making it memorable. Like in kind of imagine that when you're trying to create experience, like imagine someone who's been to your restaurant with friends the next day. What are they going to say to their friend? And that's where you really want to nail down your identity, that food that you do really well, so that you can imagine that conversation of them talking to that friend and saying, Yeah, I went to this restaurant, it was awesome. I had this really nice dish. It was really special for this reason, the service was great and kind of work back from that imaginary conversation to make your restaurant as good as you want that recommendation to pay. Social media is an overlay. Now, there's some research out there on exactly why people share things. And the answer is surprise and delight because these emotions and really gets aroused and low arousal emotions just like being pleasantly full. They're willing inspire us to action, whereas surprise and delight do so if we can find a way to really delight the customer and really kind of blow their mind. Wow, there are far more likely to share something then if it's two, it's pretty good. And this is why memorability works so well, right? You can then share an article about a $100 cheesesteak sandwich. Whereas you probably far less likely to share a story jets if you had a dish that was pretty good but not mind-blowing. And again, it comes down to people share things for social currency, they want to look good by being first to bring information to their friends. So if you can just give them that information, really impress them with your restaurant, they're likely to share it. And competitions work great here too again, people will share branded merchandise is another great way. This isn't even an official Nando's T-Shirt, but I'm pretty sure they do some official ones. And the reason this works well is that if people like a brand, they like to support that brand, especially if it's a local restaurant. They love to show people the support local business, and they love that kind of identity. And this is brilliant because it turns everyone into a walking advert for you, right? In terms of Nando's it, everyone who Python, I love Nando's teach isn't walking advert for them. And that's really powerful. So the reason that a lot of restaurants, human-like small independent restaurants, put together a few t-shirts or hoodies with their logo on, is because if you can get someone to buy that even at cost or even if you're losing a bit of money, you've then got an unfair walking around out there. And that's amazing advertising feel business. So in summary, network effects are essentially about creating viral marketing, scanning over people to spread your message for you. And we do this by creating an awesome memorable experience because people want to naturally share those anyway. So if you can create that, then you'll do really well. But we can also enhance that by doing things like posting on social media, by offering branded merchandise, and simply by asking people for recommendations. 13. Profitable menu design: Let's look at some of the design changes you can make to your menu to increase sales, make my money. So first off, if, let's say you've got state menu and you've got the fill is he must expensive. You're not selling as many Philae stakes as you want there. What can you do? Well, you can add a more expensive steak. So let's say we were going to add a wacky. So let's stick that on our menu. And we'll say that's 40 parents. So you might think, well, how's that going to help? Well, you'd be surprised it will actually increase the sale of your Phillip stakes because people make price comparisons all the time. And they'll say, Well, I don't want the most expensive oil. And now when you're old menu, they're going to see the Fill. It is a mess expensive, probably by the rabbi. Once you add the wagyu than people who are going to say, well, I don't want to whack you saw just get the Phillips state look come it's cheaper, isn't the right view? And you'll sell more Philip steak. Does that mean you have to have loads of wagyu in and it's going to be really expensive to maintain that. Well, no, I would just keep warning. That will allow you to have it on the menu. You can sell at one and then run out and then say R. So it is now more. And in fact, if any of your service or talking to people about the wagyu, they can say, Oh, we've only got one left. That's going to increase sales of your why'd you as well? Because people will think, oh, it must be selling really well. People was like if they've only got one left, that means it's a good dish and it will also create bit scarcity. They'll start thinking, well, I best to order that before someone else beats me to it. So by doing that, you're going to get more sales of your fillets steak and hopefully more of the wagon as well. Now if that's still not working, There's a particular dish you want to push. So you want to sell more of the rib-eye. Really super simple thing we can do is just highlight it. If put a box around, it takes almost no FL, same restaurants do little chefs recommendations in the corner as well. But literally juts a box super simple. And it makes big difference. And everything you can do is price dishes per person. So let's say you want to add a shutter Brianne stake, and that's going to be super expensive. And you don't think anyone's going to buy it. Instead of saying, well, it's going to be 60 pounds. You can just say 30 pounds per person. And that it's for two people. So mistake costs 60 pounds. But you're saying it's for tail and it's it's fake pounds eight, again in-line with probably more than they would spend if they were getting on their own. You're guaranteed to get essentially too expensive mains that fake pounds eight. But it doesn't look that expensive because you priced it per person. And typically the people who ordered this are going to be couples. Maybe they're on a date night maybe. And so then how can we wanted to look cheap that we're going to want to indulge because there were even married and having an eye out, or it's an early on day in a relationship and who wants to look cheap? So you price it per person, works great for couples and they're more likely to pay for that. So everything about that is brilliant. So another thing you can do is to discourage people looking at prices is to center align them. Because if you write a line anything people will just go down and they'll see the clay differences between them. So they'll say crayfish, so much more expensive than soup. It's not that much more expensive, but it is a bit more. And it's really obvious when everything is right aligned. So if we get rid of those, and instead of doing that, we just want to right align your menu items as well. But when you put your price is just center align the entire text all the way down the menu. And then there is a bit less focus on the price, more focusing on people choosing what they actually want and allowing them to treat themselves. They're gonna get better mail. Your customers are going to be less focused on the price. So it's really a win-win situation. One more thing you can do to enhance your menu, and this is controversial, but I totally recommend this is just get rid of some of the items on there. Because it's really hard for people to choose when there's a million items. You might have even gotten to yourself going to a different restaurant and say, there's like a 100 items on this menu. That's super expensive for you. It's a restaurant because you're having to maintain all the stock levels and training for staff on how to do all the dishes. And it's really stressful for a customer because they find it really hard to change. And compare that to somewhere like a cavalry where you get chicken or beef or pork. And those are your only options. People don't moan about how are we saying join them. They go back because you just go in and it's super simple. And if you've got a choice, couple of start as couple of mains, people find it way easier to pick what they want. You can have lowest levels because you know, you're only doing a few dishes and everyone ends up happier. And it sounds a bit counter-intuitive because we live in a society where we think choices amazing and we want as much choice as possible. But the problem is, the more items you add, the more you raise people's expectations that they're going to find a perfect dish. Whereas when you have fewer choices, ironically, kinda lowest people expectations. And then because you've got fewer dishes to manage, you can make those dishes absolutely amazing because you can really focus on them and just smash people's expectations and they come away thinking, wow, that was so good. I'm definitely going back there. Which is, of course what we bang on about for this entire course is that you just wanna get people coming back. 14. Wine list design: In this lesson, we'll look at how you can redesign your wine list for fun and profit. So Gerben, two wines, yours is probably way longer than this, of course you wouldn't normally just how free winds, but it's a different example. Now you probably know, as someone who knows wine, that the price you pay for wine and the quality of the wine. And not often linked. Sometimes they are, but a lot of time they're not. So as long as you're buying in decent wine and selling it to customers, the price doesn't really matter. So first off is that people are going to buy the house wine a lot of the time. They just after the cheapest bottle of wine. So you wanna make sure that it's a nice, a decent bottle on your first item, but one that you're making plenty of profit on. But then a lot of people also, they didn't want to look cheap. So they get straight to the second bottle on your list. So really you want the top to, to be good profit ns, because that's what most people are going to order. We've already learned as well that you can make more money by just adding more expensive wines or food so that people buy more of the overhang. So let's say you want to sell some more of the mail back. What you could do is get in getting a really nice old bottle of red price it really expensively, let's say. So I'm Albert was 40 pounds. We're going to put a 2003 vintage and a 150 pounds. So when people are looking at the wine less suddenly 40 pound for the Mao vaccines, a lot more reasonable compared to the 150 pounds that a vintage wine. And it's wine, It's not like it's going to go off. You can buy in one bottle, you can put in your seller. You can leave it there forever and it will only mature and get better. And so there's very little cost implication from there. And you will sell, more of them are back. And maybe you will sell some of the vintage wine and that would be brilliant. And you don't make loads of cash on that. So good profit and is here and ends here, which will ironically sell more of these wines. Everyone's happy and everyone enjoys themselves. 15. Simple or complex dishes?: How simple or complicated D1 and your dishes. For some high-end restaurants, the answer is complicated because experience and you're trying to impress people. But for most of his outlier, most restaurants, keeping it simple is really effective. And to give you a good example of this, Mario Batali, the celebrity chef, enzymes the restaurants. He talks about. He loves it when restaurants do to kind of fancy, ridiculous new pizzas like chocolate and banana pizza. He, he loves it when people do that because they go to that restaurant and they have the chocolate banana pizza. And the thing it reminds them off is that what they really want is to go to Mario Batali every week and get a really good Margarita. Because that's the kind of thing you can eat every week. And the new weird fun stuff is something that you are only going to eat very occasionally. And again, what we've been banging on and on about in this course is the way to fail covers in your restaurant is to get people to come back on a regular basis. It might seem fun and cool to deal with these weird and wacky dishes. But what you really want is food that people are happy to eat week in, week out so that you can feel your covers weekend. We count. Sound, again, sounds a bit counter-intuitive, but keeping it simple and doing it really well, doing a brilliant margarita pizza, for example, is what will keep you busy all of the time. 16. How to handle one-star reviews: What do you do when someone gives you a one-star review? Well, let me tell you, I feel your pain. Luckily, I honestly never get one-star reviews. But the way the algorithms work is that anything less than a perfect five for me, it's really bad. Like four-star reviews are damaging to my course. So I know how you feel when someone goes onto TripAdvisor or Yelp and leaves you a one-star review. It's horrible. But how we respond to this is more about our psychology than, than anything else we can do because people are going to eventually couldn't go and leave you a one-star review and it sucks. And if you're anything like me, you like, well, this is just completely unfair. And the reality is they probably are severely horrible, spiteful person who hates you for no reason. That's a genuine possibility. But the world isn't fair place and sometimes we have to, sometimes we have to deal with that. And there's a number of reasons we should be upbeat when people do this. First of all, it gives us a real insight into what people think. So if people leave a comment and it's just completely unfair, like there was building noise across the street or it was super busy and we have to wait for a table. It's not your fault if you run a super popular restaurant. But what it does is give you a really good insight into how people think. So even though it's not fair, it is a good insight to say, Well maybe I could set people's expectations of it better that they have to wait. And therefore they're going to be less annoyed. And it also gives you, it will get to get that insight because most of the time people will just go away and it will just badmouth your restaurant behind your back without ever letting you know. At least the horror was spiteful person that comes onto TripAdvisor gives you one star and ramps in this massive essay about all the things they hate about your restaurant, given you some feedback, some insight into people, even if they're rational, that's just how we have to deal with, right? We have to deal with irrational customers. And so it's really useful to get insight and it's okay to be angry and upset when you get that wouldn't start with you, but try and remind yourself that in the long run, it's way better for you to get that feedback than it is for them to just be trashing you and not giving you anything where you can think. I'll maybe we could change that even if it's not fair on our restaurant. If it's not our fault, we could do something to mitigate that. 17. Delivery services (Deliveroo, Uber Eats, etc): Delivery services are really popular these days. Things like delivery, Uber, Eats, Amazon restaurants. Are they a good thing for your restaurant? I would say definitely, yes. But let's look at the pros and cons and then you can make your own decision. So big pro, I think, is more sales, you're going to reach more people. It's simply more customers. Now, the downside of that is you might think, well, actually I'm gaining sales, or in many ways, I might just losing revenue because those people would have come in to the restaurant anyway. And so what they're gonna do is rather than come into my restaurant, they're going to just kinda go on Uber Eats and they're going to lose a load of money to Uber Eats because I'm paying with Uber Eats When they would have come in. The answer to that, I will tell you is categorically know, people decide whether they want to go outside or they want to get a, a delivery first and then they pick their restaurant. So if they're not willing to come outside than you haven't lost the sale there and no one's going to decide to get Uber Eats from your restaurant rather than getting a restaurant. A few people, well, not many. Compare that to when people just go on to the app and they see a list of restaurants and there was maybe 50 restaurants. Getting your name on that list will drive a lot more sales. Now, there's over potential virus. So first of all, the services charge charges. So you're going to have to pay some commission to the delivery service. And this this can really vary because most restaurants individually negotiated prices. So it can be anywhere up to 50 percent of the total bill will go to the delivery service. But you can negotiate that. Hopefully you can get it down to about 20 percent. And the way to do that is to play them off each other because you've got if you've got at least more than one, so you've got delivery and Uber Eats say, you didn't get the delivery and say, okay, what will you get me? And they say, oh, we want FAPE. And then you get an Uber Eats and they say 25 percent. Then you accept Uber Eats and you go back to deliver you and you say, Uber Eats have done it for 25 percent. So I'm going with Uber Eats and my restaurants going to be on Uber Eats and it's not going to be on new delivery. And so everyone's going to go use Uber Eats. And because there's all this competition between a delivery services, delivery can't afford to have you on Uber Eats and non-delivery because they know that if they lose the restaurant, everyone will switch to Uber Eats. So that point there way more willing to negotiate the commission price and give you a lower commission. Once you're on one of that competitors, then try and talk delivery down to 20 percent and then go back to Uber Eats and say, I'm pulling out Uber Eats because delivery, we're doing it for 20 percent. And yet it is just negotiation, right? You just keep playing them off against each other and battling them down. Now one other thing that you need to be careful about here is the experience. Because if you're offering a great experience in your restaurant, you're going to lose a lot of that when it's delivered. And that, that is a potential risk. If you're a really experience heavy restaurant, then that is something to consider. The way you can partially mitigate that is to make your delivery stuff really good. So in terms of the packaging that it comes in, sometimes some restaurants, they just slap everything together and by the time it gets here, it's rubbish. I got something from Wagga mama few weeks ago and they have special trays. So you get your main career in like a dish, but the source comes in a little. Continue at the top that you then pouring yourself in a solid come separately. So everything turns up and you mix it all together and it's still fresh. It hasn't been just sat marinating for like 20 minutes on the delivery, hasn't been splashing around. They put really nice napkins in there. It's all really nicely packaged. And it just makes it a really nice experience compared to restaurants that just throw everything in the same box. And the n is just all been sitting there for ages and it's a bit rubbish. So make sure you maintain the same high experience levels. If you're gonna do delivery service, takeaway stuff as you do in your restaurant. 18. Final thoughts: Congratulations on making it to the end of this class. If you've been following along, you should have now written a marketing plan for your restaurant or food outlet. And 10 step strategy doesn't promise overnight results, but it will help you build those long-term relationships that ensure success for many years to come. Share what you've learned in the class projects. And I look forward to seeing you soon and good luck.