MARKETING: 7 Ways to Establish Your Brand with User-Generated Content
If you want to improve brand loyalty and brand awareness, you should consider user-generated content as a key element of your marketing strategy. This article presents four ways in which you can encourage your guests to create high-quality posts about your restaurant. Let’s consider these ways in more details!
DID YOU KNOWS…
Even More Tariffs
Because one trade war isn’t enough, the Trump Administration has decided to start one with Europe now, too. The US is slapping a 25% tariff on Scotch whisky, Italian cheese, and French wine – among hundreds of other European products. This is in retaliation for EU subsidies on large aircraft. The tariffs go into effect as early as October 18th, so consider stocking up before prices rise.
$471 for Spaghetti & Fish?
A restaurant in Rome is getting some backlash after charging Japanese tourists $471 for two plates of spaghetti and fish, including an $87 compulsory service charge. Other diners have also been hit with similar large bills, such as $384 for two pizzas and water (including $88 service fee). The menu lists each dish’s cost per 100 grams, but leaves off exactly how large the actual plates weigh, creating a huge discrepancy in cost that the owner is defending. Oof.
Beer & Yoga
Beer Fit Club is attempting to make exercise fun again by offering yoga at local New York breweries and private events. The classes incorporate glasses of beer as replacements for weights, though beer “sipping” is often included in the workout. The idea is that having workouts at a brewery and not a yoga studio helps people not be scared for being bad at it, according to the owner.
REFERENTIAL TREATMENT
Why it matters to you: Can SEO work for to grow your restaurant?
We live in a digital world and it’s moving very fast. Email only became a thing in the early 2000s and now we think of it as ancient. The same for restaurant websites. It’s like we all know we need one, but we forget it exists. But it does exist and it’s also a significant source of referrals if you are willing to do the work to earn them. So when is the last time you even considered how to better execute converting searches in to new business? Exactly, but you can’t ignore it, especially if you are in a place where searches have more value. Let’s say you are in a cool neighborhood, but not on the main street. Search may be your most promising way to drive business. People search for well rated places in a neighborhood to visit and your efforts in securing it matters.
That’s why this really thorough post on Toast POS’s site is particularly good. It outlines exactly the steps necessary to convert those searches to butts in your seats. Much of the work needs to be done by others, so with this primer in hand you can ask the right questions of the nerd. For example, you need to make sure your metatags reflect what you want to trigger a search. That being said, you can’t blame the geeks if you haven’t claimed your profile on every for your restaurant that might review you. It’s on you, to get your web presence updated and then you can translate that into a more successful search results. Since few of us have the knowledge in search engine optimization at least this blog gives you some tools.
[Source: Toast POS]
CHEF WHO?
Why it matters to you: Chefs might become an endangered species.
Our industry is shifting and many of us haven’t even noticed. This is most obvious when you see the trends in chef to cook numbers dropping nationwide. In 2018, the total number of chefs working dropped 4.3% to 128,600 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, another study done by Chef’s Pencil found the number of cooks is growing and reached 2.4 million in 2018. Given the 20-1 advantage you can envision a lot of chef positions being consolidated and even eliminated. For those of us that have run a fine-dining kitchen, you know the value of a chef, but if you run a QSR concept you can keep your chef at the test kitchen because it’s systems that deliver value there and not haute cuisine. Don’t kid yourself, that’s the exact reason we are seeing the decline in chef employment. Maybe even more telling is the fact that chef salaries are invariably higher than local averages by community.
This is telling because, as they say in all thrillers: “follow the money.” With big corporations always looking to maximize profit, you get the winnowing away of local agency and more centralized activities that create economies of scale a small chain or independent operator cannot emulate. Hence the drop in chef positions. Now you may be thinking, my restaurant style also doesn’t require a chef to execute and you may be right, but fewer chefs will also mean less innovation from the people with the passion to create new cuisine. It also means if you ever wanted to upgrade your menu, now might be a time when you can secure the services of a qualified chef at a kitchen manager wage. Even if you pay a small premium over your normal kitchen leadership expenses, you stand to improve your food quality and by extension grow your sales. So why not let someone else’s mistakes benefit your business for a change?
[Source: FSR Magazine]
