MARKETING: 5 Tips to Improve Your Restaurant's Online Brand Reputation
These days, people are more likely to check out your restaurant online before they check it out in person. With some more competition out there, it’s extremely important that your restaurant stands out from the crowd and to continually attract new diners. Without your great food and ambiance to sway diners, you’ll need to rely on your restaurant’s online brand to make a great impression. Here’s how.
SCHEDULE: The Football Weekly Preview – 9/6-9/9
Each new NFL season brings hope to all those long-suffering fans from Cleveland to Miami. Couple that will the second week of the NCAA and you have a weekend of excited fans whose teams are still in the hunt. The NFL Sunday Ticket remains the most successful content service in restaurants and bars across North America. The key to really taking advantage of it is to know your audience. However, no matter who crosses your threshold to watch football this week, they’ll still be very much engaged.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Fortnite Slurp Juice
Gamers love their Fortnite. Like, really like it. So much, in fact, that they’re creating their own “slurp juice”– a power-up drink players can pick up in the game. Here’s how one gamer is making it and it sounds absolutely disgusting. However, this shows that there’s definitely a market for game-inspired drinks. What sort of power-up drinks can you think of?
The Rise of “Ninja”
When Twitch gamer 'Ninja' played in a Fortnite event in Las Vegas in April, the livestream attracted a peak of 667,000 concurrent viewers -- a new record. The record he broke, incidentally, was his own which he hit while streaming a Fortnite game session with megastar rapper Drake. With 10.8 million followers on Twitch and a huge 17.4 million subscribers on YouTube, Ninja (real name Richard Tyler Blevins) is a pretty big deal. As our chart shows, as well as huge subscriber numbers, Ninja boasts incredible video view figures -- having amassed over 1.23 billion on YouTube and 298.71 million on the longer format streaming site Twitch. His rapid rise to this level is also incredible, having been a comparable nobody less than one year ago.
American Dreams
The developing world was the most open to a relocation abroad with 90% of India's respondents and 70% of people in Brazil saying they would be willing to move to another country for the right job. In 2014, the U.S. was named the most popular work destination worldwide and it remains in top-position this year. 34% of the survey's respondents said they would be willing to move to the U.S. for work reasons. In Europe, the UK was the most popular destination for foreign workers in 2014 but due to Brexit, it has now slipped down the ranking to fifth place overall.
FERMENT OR NOT TO FERMENT?
Why it matters to you: More and more restaurants are fermenting and pickling.
When it comes to culinary aspects of our industry, we’re pretty innovative and willing to try new things. One way we’ve done this is trying to make more of our menu in-house. An easy first step many of us have started is making our own pickles. By adding subtle touches to our menus, like freshly made pickles or other fermented foods, we can really add incredible depth to our menu’s palate. Sure, there are many health codes and restrictions to keep in mind, but that isn’t really any different to how the rest of our day-to-day work life operates, so why not look a little further? After all, we could all probably use some house-made kimchi or miso to add into the mix, right?
You’ll obviously want to figure out what you’re fermenting, but we also all need to consider other things like the brine and storage and how you’re adding this to your menu. After you figure out storage, you’ll figure out your brine mixture. Norberto Piattoni,The executive chef at Metta in NYC, says 2.5% is the magic number to “ferment just about anything, though some vegetables work better than others.”
Now, we may not all start off with a kimchi as good as Momofuku’s or pickles as good as Grillo’s but down the line after some trials, (likely) failures, and tweaking, you’ll have a great addition to your menu and another way to set yourself apart as an establishment. It’s definitely a great way to make your fried pickles and pickle backs stand out among the pack…
[Source: Restaurant Business Online]
EMBARRASSED TO GO VEG?
Why it matters to you: A recent study finds that men are embarrassed to order vegetarian meals.
We all know the stereotypical standards for men vs women when ordering in restaurants are the man get some big prehistoric, Flintstones-style piece of meat and the woman orders a salad or something healthy -- a very sexist and dated model. That said, our culture still haven’t shaken this model as a recent British study proved. According to their study, a “number of men relayed different experiences that indicated shame, embarrassment, or conflict-avoidance” that forced them to eat meat. It’s pretty reminiscent of a classic Seinfeld episode where Jerry is embarrassed to order a salad when his date orders meat because it “isn’t manly.” That was in 1995, so even almost 24 years later we haven’t changed.
As leaders of the industry, we decide what to put on our menus and how it is marketed to our guests every day. Keeping that in mind maybe it is time that we start the attempt to leave behind this dated train of thought soon due to vegetarian eating being so much better for our planetand health in many ways. Let’s explain why this way of eating is so much better to our guests instead of forcing brontosaurus burgers on them and maybe just maybe this stigma will slowly disappear. There’s nothing wrong with a good slab of steak, but guys shouldn’t be shamed when they want to eat some greens. Next time when considering a menu change why not look into more veggie options and go easier on the meat for the planets sake, even if “it isn’t manly.” ;)
[Source: Munchies]
