INFOGRAPHIC: Reviews Impact a Restaurant's Ability to Attract New Guests
Are you having trouble attracting new guests to your restaurant and building your business? If so, have you checked what your restaurant’s online reviews are like? 90% of potential guests will check out your restaurant online before deciding if they’ll dine with you. But if you have a slew of negative reviews, it can severely restrict your ability to bring in new bodies. Worse yet, you don’t have a lot of wiggle room in your star rating before a guest will move on.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Holiday Biscuit Sweater
Wendy’s may be the queen of bizarre promotional materials, but that doesn’t mean others can’t challenge them. Enter Red Lobster which has opened a pop-up shop with an array of Red Lobster-themed holiday items. Our favorite? The Cheddar Bay Biscuit Holiday Sweater which has a built-in insulated pocket to hold all your Cheddar Bay biscuits and keep them warm.
Self-Driving Cars a Concern for Pedestrians
While many vehicles may be ready to drive autonomously from a hardware perspective, most Americans aren't ready to trust self-driving cars yet. According to a survey conducted earlier this year, 60 percent of U.S. adults would feel unsafe as pedestrians in a city with autonomous cars.
Thanksgiving Weekend: A Billion-Dollar Holiday
Over the past few years, Thanksgiving weekend has grown to become a huge shopping extravaganza both on- and offline. Retailers try to outdo each other in offering the best Black Friday & Cyber Monday deals and consumers willingly jump at the chance to kick off their holiday shopping and snap up some bargains. Unsurprisingly, this year’s Thanksgiving weekend is expected to shatter online shopping records once again.
GOING ORGANIC…DIGITALLY
Why it matters to you: You can grow your social media without paying for it, organically.
We recently discussed the importance of creating and following a marketing budget if you wish to successfully promote your restaurant. With the current benchmark of 3% of sales as your investment, many of you won’t have that much cash to put against that enterprise. That’s why you need to find ways to stretch your dollars. One of the remaining ways to reach guests that doesn’t cost you dearly is social media, and the good news is you can do that organically.
When most of us think of organic, we imagine something that is grown without extraordinary human intervention. The same is true of your social media efforts that can be achieved without spending money promoting your presence (well at least everywhere but Facebook). This may take a bit of effort to achieve, but the results are worthy of the energy required and far less expensive than driving traffic by paying for it. There are several basic ways to achieve organic audience growth on social media and this post lists a few of the highlights.
The first step is ensuring that your website is mobile friendly, so when guest arrive on their mobile phone, which some 70% do, you are ready to accommodate them and capture their attention. Owning your online presence is another crucial step to driving social connection. Have you looked at the search protocol in Google lately? Restaurants come up in their search feature on a map, but if you haven’t claimed your presence, you will be at a disadvantage. No pictures or offers made and you miss the chance to entice a guest for free. You can also identify local influencers and work directly with them to highlight your restaurant. None of these steps will cost you any money, but they will require you do the work and care about your business -- which sounds like what you do every day anyway.
[Source: Modern Restaurant Management]
FIXING CLIMATE THROUGH FARMING
Why it matters to you: What do the Democratic candidates have to say about climate change and farming?
Do you know what regenerative agriculture is? Yeah, we didn’t really either, but once you learn that it’s a national policy initiative that will support farmers in growing crops that will sequester CO2 while improving supply chain and boom/bust cycles for agriculture, you might want to know more. This election cycle, climate change has had more urgency than ever before and many of the candidates have produced policy planks that directly address farming’s role in not only causing climate change, but also how we address it.
Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are suggesting national policy changes that would better coordinate what farmers grow to avoid wasted crop and also incentivize them to grow crops that would sequester more CO2, thus reversing the 10% of climate change that is caused by agriculture. Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg take less imaginative approaches, but both point to ‘ag’ as a direct opportunity to improve the lives of farmers, keep family farms vital and address climate change.
For restaurant operators, this could be good news if farming was better directed towards climate change policy. With sustainable farming, our volume would contribute less to climate change and we could further embrace local models for farm-to-table. Either way, the conversation surrounding improved agricultural policy can only be a step to sustainability that we should all embrace.
[Source: Mother Jones]
