Fanminder Blog

With so much on your plate, it’s seductive to just stop communicating with your fans. Avoid this by rallying the troops to promote your fan club. There’s simply no more effective way to grow a large fanbase.

1.  Start Here: Motivated staff promoting your fan club in-store

• Your staff should be selling your fan club in your business. Period. Motivated staff are 100X more effective than signage alone.
• Staff will be naturally resistant, since this is “marketing”. They can’t sell anything unless they believe in it and know how to do it. So your job is to take the time to continually reinforce the details of your fan club and how it works. Remember that REPEAT CUSTOMERS ARE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
• Make it SIMPLE and CLEAR: Write a 2 sentence script of the key benefits that fans get from your Facebook page and/or fan club.
• Rehearse it, role-play, and monitor with staff until it becomes second nature.
• Explain how customers can like you on Facebook or subscribe to your email/mobile lists.

2.  Designate staff members as Facebook Administrators for your Business Page

• Go to your Facebook Business Page
• Click the Edit Page button in the upper right hand corner
• In the left hand navigation, click Manage Admins
• Type in the email addresses of each person you want to become an Admin

3.  Have staff engage your fans on social media

5.  Have your staff compete for a prize

• Motivate staff to get sign-ups or likes. Ask them to encourage customers to pull out their phones and like your business or add their email to your mailing list. Keep a chalk board where staff can keep tally on the honor system.
• Hold a competition by different store locations if you have more than one location. See how Crazy Dough’s did it.

And for when your staff alone won’t cut it, ring us: 800-335-0520

With restaurants feeling the effects of the recession, it has gotten harder for small restaurants to spend on marketing. If your restaurant cannot afford expensive advertisement or an over priced marketing consultant, you can start building your restaurant by using these 8 simple marketing tips.

1. Talk to Your Customers. Ask how they found you. If it’s not your usual source, follow up to see if you can connect with that niche market.

2. Don’t Play by the Rules. Think outside the box to come up with ways to create buzz for your restaurant or an attractive offer that is considered too good to be true. For example, honor your competitors coupons; this is a great strategy because you are essentially creating a coupon campaign and avoiding the print and setup costs.

3. Use Technology. Make sure you are connected online through the many different channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, and others. Start a blog about your restaurant, filled with news about your food. Technology is a great way to stay connected to your visitors.

Read the Full Article.

McDonalds’ may have an expensive marketing budget that will never come close to that of your small business or local restaurant; however, there are some things to learn from this major food chain. Although, the majority of McDonald’s marketing spend is used for more large scaled campaigns, there are is also a number of smaller, more local marketing strategies that can be used to improve the image of your own business.

For example, one McDonalds hosted teachers from a local school to work the restaurant for a day. This event allowed the chain to get closer to the community, as well as help raise money since a small portion of the sales from the day were donated to the school. Another chain offered a chance for people of the community to come and learn the operations of the restaurant. Simple ideas like these can help you to promote your business’ image and involvement within the community, thus creating more business in return.

To read more about other ways you can learn from McDonalds’ small marketing efforts, Click Here.

We’ve invited Tony Marciante, owner of Visions Restaurant in Bethesda MD, to write a guest blogger series on his use of social media and mobile in his restaurant. Tony is a prolific user of both technologies, so welcome aboard Tony.

As a student of the restaurant trade for over 23 years, I have always been a natural marketer.  While we are all operators – front-line kitchen employee, General Manager or Accounting Executive in the “home office” – we are also marketers.  The reason for my belief is simple: without more “butts in seats” we don’t grow revenues and no one is able to maintain their status and therefore their company or job.

A popular phrase, “ABM”, or always be marketing comes to mind.  As a real world operator of Visions Restaurant in Bethesda, MD, I can speak to the realities of the operational side, the difficulties of managing so many facets of the business, the financial struggle, the struggle of finding good staff, etc.

So I hear you saying: “And now, I’m supposed to add in this ‘Social Media’ thing into my already loaded day?!?”

Well, my answer is a resounding YES!   Before you hate me, realize this: more responsibility on your shoulders can be related (or blamed) on lack of sales. If sales are weak, you need social media. Even if they’re not weak, with more sales, you can afford to hire more people to handle the details. This will free up your time and mental resources to do work that drives both short and longer term goals like long-term strategy, menu design, and effective marketing programs, such as SOCIAL MEDIA!

Depending on your level of familiarity with Social Media (I’ll call it SM from now on), you can go forward in a number of ways.  Read along with me on my series contained here on Fanminder.com and we’ll cover many strategies to CONNECT with your guests or customers of whatever business you have, uncovering the very real power that will drive your customers back to your place day in and day out.

There is no doubt the impact of SM on the world over the last several years.  Once dismissed as something “my kids do”, SM is now realized to be one of the most powerful changes in Marketing for us ‘Brick and Mortar’ businesses. Business operators now realize that if you don’t CONNECT through SM with your guests and potential guests, you are missing out on conversations that are happening every minute about your brand.

As an example, a recent guest of mine tweeted live as they were dining about how much they loved their lunch, down to each course that was served and the flavors, textures, etc.  That data, going out to their followers, does everything to brighten our reputation online and spread the word to what could be thousands (4,400 in my case) of followers for FREE!  Also, hearing the word from their friends makes the message so much easier to digest, knowing that it’s NOT from me, the natural marketer.

Whether these conversations, reviews, and opinions are texted, tweeted, or statused on Facebook, they are increasingly conducted in real-time and will happen with our without your input. For instance, a recent “vanity search” I conducted (search on the web where I continually scan for keywords related to my business, like my business’ name or my name) found a NOT so happy customer who blogged about a recent experience at my restaurant. I reached out and actually turned around the situation to where now the guest is a friend of mine and comes at least once a month for a nice dinner out with his girlfriend.  This is not only over $1000 a year in new business, but also turning a guest around who would have spoken negatively – and effortlessly through the web – about my restaurant to countless friends.

Wise companies then, monitor their online reputation and respond in near real-time to what is being said about their brand, whether negative or positive.  Check out another great example of this phenomenon with this quick video about PF Changs and their active to-the-minute use of Twitter, all the way from the other coast!

And it doesn’t stop with the internet. Every patron walks in and out of your restaurant with his/her mobile phone, happily texting, surfing and GPSing with this new-age computer in their pocket. As never before, your patrons can review a meal, complain about waitstaff or glow about that perfect bottle of wine – all by pecking 140 characters on their phone. Like SM, mobile also offers innovative and powerful ways to listen to, reach, and chat with your customers – text marketing, mobile websites, and smartphone applications are rapidly proliferating – and in some cases without the signal-to-noise ratio that plagues popular SM sites. In short, mobile significantly ups the ante for savvy restaurateurs and it’s the reason I’m guest blogging on Fanminder’s blog.

When you use these tools to build your tribe, you’ll be able to develop relationships that stretch far beyond the simple customer/provider relationship.  Take the opportunity to share valuable links, events in the area, and of course specials or events coming up in your business.  Taking the relationship out of the proverbial “four walls” of just your garden ensures the fact that YOU’LL  be the point of reference, the local expert, and ramps up your level of respect and trust in the community.

Consider this your appetizer…My next few blog posts will highlight various means of furthering that relationship between you and your guests.

With great respect,

Tony Marciante

www.whatdoestonydo.com

Summary: a) Place Mobile Fan Club signs in your customer flow, right in the places where your fans look. b) Create interactivity using text-in contests and other ideas to spark true engagement and therefore, sign-ups and sales.

The Story:

I recently visited Psycho Donuts to see how our mobile fan club was faring with its customers. Sign-ups weren’t yet what we had hoped for, despite the wonderfully creative signage plastered all over the place (disclaimer: Signs were in place for just a few days so perhaps my expectations were a wee bit high

I brought a clipboard, a customer questionnaire, my eyes and my two (big) ears. It was a busy Saturday morning and the store was hopping – an ideal environment to observe the store’s fans.

After an hour of watching, listening, and conversing with customers, I learned that few people even saw the signs, despite their perceived prominence by me. Why? Well, the store is a visual delight for the eyes, with gorgeous, mouth-watering donuts and artwork all over the place competing for the attention of the store’s fans.

I watched what patrons did in the store. In order they:

1. wait on line (if there is a line) and gaze at the artwork on the walls
2. Peer intently at the donuts in the donut case
3. Look at the cashier while paying
4. Then leave with a bag or a box, with a few sitting down at the four counter stools.

Nowhere in this flow were our signs scrutinized. So I learned mobile fan club promotions need to be in the flow of where customers look. Once we realized this, Jordan and I began brainstorming all kinds of interesting placements: stickers on boxes, place cards in the donut case, being on the menu, etc. Not precisely rocket science, but then again, lots of little ideas become…The Tipping Point where lots of little things can make a big difference.

I also observed our sign is very promotional: Sign up, get specials. That’s ok and important. But Jordan has done an amazing job of grafting entertainment with donuts. So the store has great artwork by local artists, an Ad-Libs contest, a padded cell, and of course, those eye-popping donuts.

So, Jordan and I asked What if…we had a “Vote for your favorite donut” sign next to each donut in the donut case, where each vote is an entry into a contest to win artwork every X months? Or turning the paper Psycho-Libs game into an instant text-version? I could go on, but you get it: use the phone’s interactivity to power a higher level of customer engagement.

As I left Psycho Donuts Saturday morning, I felt like the time spent in the store, “in the trenches”, was time well-spent. As usual, there’s no substitution for getting out there and being on the front lines. And Jordan and I have an emerging plan to gobble up Mobile Fans.

In a future post I’ll let you know how it turns out.