“No one knows what he can do until he tries.”
Pete is a client who has a beautiful restaurant, but in a very secluded location. It is so secluded that even nearby neighbors didn’t know it was there. Relocating was not an option, because he owned the building. The restaurant is lovely, and a great place to have special events. As soon as I saw it, I believed that it could become a destination for customers, he just needed to figure out a way to let people know it was there. His budget was also a challenge; he couldn’t spend thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign.
I suggested, “Let’s do a social media campaign focusing on Facebook. We can build your page and set a conservative budget of $90 per month ($3 per day) to promote your business. We can hire a professional photographer for a couple of hours to take photos of the menu, the restaurant, the team, you, customers, event set-up, etc., to build a library. We can test the campaign for three months and then we can assess where we are.”
Pete liked the idea, since he had a personal Facebook account and had seen how many businesses advertised there. He didn’t have a business account for his restaurant and didn’t know how to use it to promote his business. We started the campaign and after only 30 days, he had over 1,500 fans and growing. After three months, his sales grew 10% over the prior three months, and people were mentioning Facebook as the way they’d found him. Facebook is part of what he does every day now to continue to promote his business and increase his guest count.
One of the biggest advantages of investing in a franchise is that as soon as you open your doors, you will have ready-made customers. These customers are familiar with the brand and trust that they know what they will get when they visit. They will try you the first time, but whether they come back will completely depend on the experience they had on that visit.
Every franchise, regardless of size and location, will need to do some ongoing marketing to maintain healthy growth in their location. Even when you first open and the curiosity and novelty bring in lots of customers, to keep them not only do you need to continue to provide a consistent product and service, but you will also have to continue to remind them that you are there and give them an incentive to come back. Even McDonald’s locations close every year. Many times, it is because the franchisee became complacent, had a poor operation, and didn’t market his location.
Sadly, many times when sales start to slow, marketing is one of the first things to be cut out of the budget. This is the wrong decision, because marketing is the best tool to help you get your sales back, at least in the short-term. If at any point in time you are tempted to cut your marketing because of performance, that is exactly the time that you should do more marketing to keep your customers coming while you figure out what is causing the decline in growth.
Anything that you invest in should have a measurable return that meets your objectives. Marketing is not the exception. For example, if you invest $1,000 in a marketing campaign, you define the return on that investment as an incremental 2% in traffic (orders), otherwise it is not worth your time and money. How much the ROI should be will depend on the maturity of your business, your goals, and what you know that marketing strategy can deliver.
Ideally, you will test various methods and venues of advertising, as well as various types of promotions and you will keep good records of the activity, the investment, and the results. The best way of doing this is by making sure that every promotion has a different name or code so that you can identify how that customer/sale was captured. Eventually, you will have a great source of data that will let you know what method, what venue, and what type of offer will get you what kind of results. This will allow you to make smarter decisions in the long-term and create a quality marketing plan.
Your primary three ROI goals for marketing are: increase transactions (number of customers), increase ticket (how much they spend with you), and increase brand recognition (they know who you are and where you are).
Keep in mind that different marketing strategies give you different results. It could be that a low-return promotion is one that you want to repeat because it is the only one that allows you to get into a college campus. As low as it may be, you need to be able to capture that market for your business’s long-term health. In that case, you do it, measure it, and make sure that you are capturing and retaining each of those new customers that were so expensive to acquire.
It is true that sometimes you make an investment purely on brand recognition that will not necessarily turn into immediate sales and that is OK, if that was your objective and you can measure it. That is usually done by your brand if you are in the US. If you are outside the US or in a small town and your franchised brand is not widely known, a lot of your initial investment will be this kind of marketing until you reach an acceptable level of brand recognition. At this point you can switch to more of the traditional marketing and ROI goals.
Nowadays we can separate marketing for small businesses into two types: traditional, which includes TV, radio, or print; and social media. Small business efforts and investments are shifting to this new type of marketing because it is accessible, more efficient, and effective. This is especially true for food franchises. While it is true that social media is very effective, it still does not replace all traditional marketing which, while it is old-fashioned, still works very well, especially when done locally. Let’s explore the two types of marketing and what they entail.
External marketing takes place outside of your location. The goal of these marketing activities is to attract customers who may or may not have been in your restaurant before. The idea is to convey a message that contains an offer, a new product, or an experience that is attractive enough to motivate potential customers to visit your business. The focus is on increasing your number of transactions by getting new customers or by reminding your current customers to come more often.
These are just a few examples of traditional external marketing activities:
Print – This is advertising that goes in a physical paper of some sort. Examples of these are coupons printed in newspapers, postcard-type coupons inserted in newspapers or mail bundles, mailed postcards, door hangers, etc. The use of this type of advertising is declining due to high cost and low return. Newspapers’ circulation is dropping and those periodicals that do make it to people’s homes are rarely read. Coupon bundles often end up in the trash before they are even looked at. The average return on a printed campaign is about 1-2%% of units distributed. This can still be effective if well targeted and the printed piece is properly designed to capture the customer’s attention and interest.
Radio – Radio can be a cost-effective way to promote your business if you are in an area where the radio spots are affordable, you are a multi-unit franchisee, and you partner with all your neighboring franchisees that cover the radio reach area. If you live in a large metropolitan city and you only have one restaurant in one town within that large metropolitan city, the cost of radio spots is prohibitive. It simply costs too much money for ads that will reach people who are probably not willing to drive the distance to go to your restaurant location. If, on the other hand, your restaurant is in a small city where the radio station reaches a lot of people that could be your customers, then it makes sense if the cost and the return can meet your ROI goals. The investment in radio goes beyond the purchasing of the spot. On top of that, you would need to invest in the production of the ad, which includes but is not limited to script, music, and voiceover.
TV – As you can imagine, a small business owner can rarely afford TV marketing on their own. This marketing tactic is usually reserved for large chains or is done by your brand regionally or nationally.
Cobranding – Cobranding marketing is when you partner with other businesses to promote each other’s product and services. An example of a cobranding partnership is when a pizza store that is located next door to a dry cleaner store, exchanges coupons so that every person who gets their clothes dry cleaned gets a pizza coupon, and every person that buys a pizza gets a dry cleaner’s coupon. This is how most businesses are able to reach customers that may not be their current customers but meet the demographics of the people that could be interested to try their products.
Coupon/Sample Distribution – Back in the day, Domino’s was the expert of door-to-door marketing via door hangers. I don’t know if they invented them, but they were for sure the first ones to put a coupon on my door. Nowadays, this type of marketing is restricted because many neighborhoods don’t want strangers on their streets. It is still possible in some areas, but it is limited. Something that you can do is business couponing. Nothing can stop you from going into local businesses and distributing coupons or product samples. When was the last time someone did that to you? Exactly – being different is not a bad thing. In this age of technology, a little personal contact can go a long way!
Community involvement – Community marketing entails any activities in which the business gets involved in community events. These are especially important when you are a small business owner. The more that you are able to connect with your customer base on a personal level inside and outside your walls, the more likely these customers will be to support you and your business. People are more likely to do business with people they know and who support their communities. The types of community involvement activities you can do are: sponsoring local school teams, donating food for local events, participating in local fundraising programs with your team, donating coupons for raffles, etc. Once you open your doors, many people will come to you to ask you to participate in these types of local community activities. Your answer should be “yes” as often as you can. If you proactively select from the start one particular organization to support, you can limit what you give, and not offend others on the occasions that you say “no” by explaining that your organization is committed to supporting XX organization/charity. They will understand that, as a business, you cannot give to everyone.
Social responsibility – A good way to make an impact in your local area is by adapting socially responsible processes in your business with things like recycling (used oil, cardboard, etc.) and donating good food that would otherwise be thrown in the trash to local food banks and shelters. You can share the kinds of things you do with your customers. and they will appreciate you and your business more for it.
Internal marketing means the activities that you do inside your building. These activities are targeting the customers that are already in your store. The objective is usually to upsell or to introduce a new product that they will come back for. The focus is on increasing your ticket by having your customers buy more.
Examples of internal marketing activities are:
Window clings – These are the communication materials that are on your windows facing the outside to start communicating with your customers before they come in and while they drive around. If that communication is compelling and attractive enough, they may choose you and come in to get it. It would be wise for those window clings to be double sided so that they have a message on the inside of the window to communicate to the customers that are already inside.
Counter cards – If you are a fast food or casual dining establishment, your customers will spend a little time at your counter, and that is the best time to expose them to counter cards with new or upcoming menu items, offers, upsells or combos.
Register scripts – Customers should never see these scripts. They are for the cashiers to have a consistent message for welcoming, guiding the customer through the order process, sharing any promotions that are going on, or doing upsells.
Menu board ads – There is always a panel or two dedicated to sharing a marketing message to the customer. If your customer is at the counter, they will focus on the menu board, and that is the best place to communicate the message that you want them to see.
Table tents/promotional menus – These are the marketing materials that are usually found on the tables in the dining room. They could be triangular tents or tri-fold menus with new or upcoming menu items, combo offers, appetizers, desserts, and drinks. If you have tables, you should always have some sort of marketing material on them to communicate with your customers. You have their undivided attention, and that is valuable space!
Take-out / Drive-thru / Delivery – If you have any of these service channels, you should never miss the opportunity to send the product to the customer’s home with your message in a small flyer or postcard. It could be an offer, a coupon or simply promoting a product or an event. Anything to keep you top of mind when they are home and eating your delicious food.
A great strategy to use as a way promote your business is occasion marketing. This gives you the opportunity to promote your business without having to promote an offer or a new product. You could add some sort of a value offer, but that doesn’t need to be the focus, therefore you don’t need to be as aggressive, unless you want to or you feel that you need to. You can celebrate many occasions. Here are a few examples:
Grand opening – The best way to launch your new restaurant is by having a grand opening marketing plan. The idea is to spread the word of your business as far and as wide as you can within the areas where your customers will come from.
Anniversary – Every year you can celebrate two anniversaries: the anniversary of your store opening and the anniversary of when your brand started. These are great opportunities to bring your customers in to celebrate!
Father’s Day/Mother’s Day/Valentine’s Day – These special days are an example of the occasions upon which you can promote your business as a place for celebration, as long as you have an offer or product that would apply. Pretzel Day is April 26th. February 9th is Pizza Day. Take a look at the calendar and see what other special days you can celebrate in your store and have fun with.
Social media is by nature mostly external marketing, and it’s taking the world by storm. It is actually not even in the physical world, but the Internet is the marketing of the now and the future. Soon we will not know how to get our information if not online.
When we need to know where to go, we go to the Internet. When we are looking for something to buy, we go to the Internet. When we are looking for someone to fix our refrigerator, we go to the Internet. When we are looking for a place to go eat, we go to the Internet. Once we find where we want to go, we look at what other people are saying about that place. If a lot more people like it than not, we are more likely to go there.
If you want your business to be successful, you cannot ignore all of these signs. You must be online! There are three main social media platforms that small businesses can focus on to promote their business. My recommendation is that you choose one and do it very well. It doesn’t do you any good to be on all three if you are not going to do a great job at any of them.
To make the most of this labor-intense, high-impact marketing of social media, you would be best served by finding a local agency that can help you manage and build your presence and manage your reputation. Unless you have an expert in your family or organization who has the time and the expertise, you can really make a huge impact in your business if you hire an expert.
Let’s review the top three business social media marketing platforms.
Facebook® is a free social networking website that allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages, and keep in touch with friends, family, colleagues, and customers.
As a business, you can pay to promote your posts to defined demographics and locations. You build a fan base of people that choose to “like” and “follow” your page. Visitors to your page can communicate with you, send you private messages, or comment on your public posts. They can also review your business and score you on a 5-star rating system. This will give you a good idea of how are you doing in their eyes. It also allows you to communicate with the customers that are not happy and try to make it up to them.
On Facebook, there is no limit on character count, however only the first lines show up on the post. Facebook also has certain limitations on the type of photos and messages you can post to promote. Learn the rules before your start your business page.
Recently Facebook launched “live video” that users can turn on and off any time. They want people to use this functionality in an organic, natural and fun way. You can literally get on your page and personally invite your customers to come visit you and give them a tour of your business “live”.
Instagram® is a free online program and social network that enables users to take, edit, and share photos with other Instagram users. The focus on Instagram is photos that users/followers will “like” and then “follow” your business if they like what they see. Posts can be shared and commented on. A restaurant or franchise with beautiful photos of appetizing food can do well in this platform.
In this platform, you can follow others as much as people can follow you. The people that follow you will have access to all of your posts.
Twitter is a free social networking microblogging service that allows registered members to broadcast short posts called tweets. With Twitter, you are limited to 140 characters, but you can add photos or videos, as well as links to external sources like your website.
Whether you are on social media or not, your customers can post reviews about your business, your product, and your service any time they want. They can build a Facebook page without your permission; they can add you to social media review places like Yelp!® and add whatever comments they want about your business. So, whether you like it or not, your business may be affected by your social media presence. If you are not managing it and owning it, you will not know why your sales are down.
You are better off creating and managing your own social media pages and profiles for your business. This will allow your customers to find you and have a place to provide you with feedback in a way that you can control and respond to.
Social Media Reviews – It is important that you are managing your social media accounts and constantly surfing the web and googling your business to find any comments that may be out there that are positive, but especially those that are negative so that you can manage the situation and protect your reputation.
Answering to feedback – When you receive or you find feedback on your business it is important that you react immediately, especially if it is negative. And if it is VERY negative, you should have a plan for how you will be handling such situations. At a minimum, you should respond to the comments and do everything you can to make it up to the customer (no matter what happened). Everyone will be watching your written reaction and whatever you put on the Internet will remain there for everyone to see, forever…so…be careful with what you write.
You should always have a marketing plan that includes your brand’s activities and your Local Store Marketing (LSM) activities. You and your team need to be aware of what promotions the brand is launching, and what, where, and when your local activities are planned. Ideally, you will have an annual marketing plan, but you only share one quarter at a time with the team because things may change based on how the business is meeting its objectives.
The marketing plan starts when you are doing your annual business plan and is driven by your sales projections. You start with the whole year vision and then go down to quarter, month, and week. Eventually you will lay it out in a calendar format.
Here are the 12 steps to build your annual marketing plan:
1. Define your objectives – Your goals are usually in terms of transactions (number of customers) or ticket (how much they buy) increases. There may be years where you want to focus on one versus the other, but most years, you will have a defined objective for each. Your objectives should then be broken down by month and by week so that you are able to track your progress.
2. Determine your budget – Usually you will define this as a percentage of sales. If you do it this way, you will have to adjust how much money you are spending if your sales end up varying from your plan. This budget is above and beyond the marketing fund fees that you have to pay for to your franchisor ((if any).
3. Plot the marketing from the brand – Your franchisor should provide you with the annual calendar. At times, you only get it in terms of quarters. This will let you know what weeks you will have the power of the brand pushing your business with national media and which weeks they are not, so that you can focus on those weeks.
4. Identify any occasion opportunities – This will help you have fun and create messages to communicate with your customers. Don’t forget your store or your brand anniversary!
5. Determine your activities and offers – In some cases your offers will be discounts and in other cases, it will be special combos. If your brand provides support for these, you may even have an LTO product. Your activities and offers should reflect the objectives (increase ticket or increase transactions) you have set for each promotion window. Each offer and activity should focus on one objective at a time. You can change the objective in each promotion window through-out the year so that you end up with a good balance.
6. Plot your offers – By putting each offer on the calendar, it will help you visually to see when you will have to execute those activities. I strongly suggest that you never have more than one or two offers at a time. This way you can focus your message and your budget.
7. Choose the media – These are the channels that you will use to execute your marketing. You should use external, internal, traditional and social media channels to share your message.
8. Define community activities – Look at your local calendar and past events that you participated in. This is the best time to reach out to those people whose events you definitely want to participate in again this year.
9. Finalize budget by channel – This will give you the best clarity of how much to spend on each channel.
10. Define the to-dos for each offer window – This will allow you to plan ahead for what you will need to do for each offer window that you will do for your local store marketing.
11. Execute the plan – At the end of the day, this is what counts. Remember that you don’t have to go at it alone. Recruit help from your managers. Don’t forget to consider the help of other people on your team that are creative and love marketing.
12. Track and measure results – It is important that you don’t skip this step, because this will allow you to learn what worked and what didn’t work so that as you advance in the year, you can adjust. This will also allow you to build a library of offers to refer to and make an even better plan next year.
If you do this every year, the quality of you marketing plan and the results that you get from it will improve. You will understand what channel works best for you and what kind of offer gets what kind of result. This will put you in a much better situation of control and confidence in your business because you will no longer be just hoping that things work, you will know it will. It is just going to take you a little while to get there. This is what it takes to build a quality marketing plan that produces predictable results.
Leverage Your Franchisor
If you are paying your franchisor a marketing fee, then you will be receiving marketing support from the brand. They will be doing all the research, planning, product development, testing, media contracting, and execution. You will receive a return on that investment if you support those offers utilizing all the tools and resources they provide. These are the only offers for which you need to follow the price point. Doing so is in your best interest, because many customers will visit you because of those offers and will expect to pay the price that is being promoted in the media. If you impress them with your execution, quality and consistency of product and service, they will keep coming back.
National promotions – If your brand is a national brand, you are probably paying toward the national fund and, in return, the brand plans and executes national promotions and provides you with the supporting materials to use to promote them at your location. The number and length of the national promotions will depend on the number of units the brand has, their sales volume and the marketing rate that you pay, since those define the budget size and how much they can do with the money.
Designated Market Area (DMA) promotions – Sometimes a certain portion of the marketing fund is directed towards a DMA fund where the individual DMAs can vote for the promotion that they want to have in their local areas. Sometimes DMA marketing is all that the brand does due to their size. The reach of the DMA is determined by the local cable TV area. This is where the term comes from. Even though it is based on cable TV, the DMA marketing can also include radio, local print and outdoor billboards.
Tools & Resources – As part of the benefits of having a marketing fund, the brand produces and makes available a library of tools and resources for the franchisees that they can use towards their local store marketing plans. This may include product photography, turnkey kits like school programs, catering, etc.
Reach out to your franchise consultant and find out what is available to you for your local promotions. Also make sure that you are always up-to-date on your brand’s marketing efforts so that you can get the highest ROI for your marketing contribution.