How To Evaluate the Best Digital Marketing for Restaurant Promotional Marketing

I like to think of all advertising and marketing from a consumer perspective vs all the technical bells and whistles.  With direct mail, it’s the not the “piece of paper” or median that makes you money, but rather what you do with it that does.  Same with digital marketing.  Digital marketing for restaurant marketing should primarily be thought of as a tool to work with your existing customers to get them to come back more often and to help build stronger relationships with them. Digital marketing is a great way to put your restaurant at the top of your customers’ minds when they are thinking about where they want to go out to eat, because they always have so many choices out there. It is very important to know when and how to send out discounts with digital marketing so you’re incentivizing them but not over discounting which is very important.  It doesn’t take as much of an offer to get existing customers to come back if they like your restaurant as it does someone who is not visiting you now and going someplace else.

A common mistake I see many restaurants large and small make is blasting out many discounts when sales are down to try and get more business, which eventually erodes your margins and starts building a perception  in the consumers’ mind that you are desperate and they will stop coming at regular price until you run the discount again.  Our Birthdays 4 Business mailers is what I call “core” business marketing to invite every customer type up to your entire local neighborhood primary demographic market once a year in a high impact, way I discussed in previous blogs.  You don’t need any other types of outside advertising if you do this correctly. So, then the only other reason to discount is for promotional marketing which digital marketing is great to use if it is done right.

However First You Have to Build A Customer List for Digital Promotional Marketing

Digital marketing requires consumers to opt-in or give you permission to contact them. Again, first just think of what would incentive you to come back again to restaurants you know of beyond what you are normally doing.  Most regular customers still have a handful of other favorites or probably 2 handfuls of other places they like to go out to eat if they see you occasionally now.  Then think about what would incentivize you to give permission for “another” company in their minds to contact them by signing up to get on their list.  Then think about how all of us have preferences in how we might like to be contacted.  Some may prefer email marketing, while some prefer text marketing, or some would just would rather be contacted through the mail for privacy reasons.  When you take all these into consideration, the “ideal” digital marketing system is one that allows ALL these technical and sign-up capabilities vs just one or two like many restaurants do if at all.  

What Your Digital Marketing Should Include:

The best digital marketing program should allow one easy way using various methods for customers to sign-up using whatever method they’d like to be contacted.  It should have the technical capabilities to integrate all sign-up methods into one with intelligence software so it isn’t a separate process to send messages out separately for email marketing, or mobile marketing and prevents sending duplicate messages or offers to the same people without anyone missing out. Then you should have various ways for them to read the message to get them to sign-up and register on your marketing list, to enable you to have the largest list possible to reach your customers. The larger the list…the more you make. Don’t get caught up in which email or which mobile or text company or program is the cheapest.  Having the most names, with the most marketing capabilities with tracking should be your primary first evaluation.  

Automation and Expert Marketing Guidance for Digital Marketing Is Very Important:

Then you should evaluate if the promotional marketing can all be automated so you don’t have to do a thing because it’s all done for you.  if you have to take the time to send out whatever offers or message you are thinking of, that takes a lot of your valuable time you could be using somewhere else, and if you have to hire someone to do it for you, they may have limited marketing knowledge and cost you money just to process everything .  Then just as importantly, you should evaluate whether the company or resource you are looking at for digital marketing for your restaurant has mostly technical knowledge support, or can offer expert guidance with recommending the best overall marketing campaign for you. This could perhaps be the most valuable part of your evaluation with who you hire in itself.  WE are proud to say that we have that expertise for marketing recommendations and the resource for the best technical capabilities to work with. Bottom line, LePera Marketing and Birthdays 4 Business strive to make you the largest return on investment anywhere.

Low Investment Pricing

And our low pricing for what you get offers the smallest of businesses to have as good or better digital promotional marketing capabilities than the largest of restaurant chains , and those large chains if they worked with us could have more solutions and creative ideas at a fraction of what they are paying now typically.  With unique additional tracking capabilities to verify this.  If you have a marketing staff or company you’ve hired, we have worked with many to help coordinate the best overall advertising and marketing solutions for your restaurant whether we provide all the solutions or not.  We aren’t trying to compete with other marketing ideas and solutions because there are many great ideas out there, but rather work together.  I can promise you however that between out Birthdays 4 Business mailer program and our Digital Marketing solutions, we are “always” able to help fill HUGE missing sales opportunities you are not capitalizing on now.

Simple Secret Solution

We at birthdays 4 business we have created a completely automated digital marketing solution with our affiliate company FanCONNECT to maximize the benefits of everything.  For sign-ups:  We’ve created a way to utilize our birthdays 4 business mailers to have an incentive on the mailer to build email lists, mobile lists, and direct mail lists all-in-one.  This in itself can create huge promotional marketing lists to follow-up with those birthday mailer responses later.  Then use in-house table tents signage to incentive sign-ups. Giving a free gift for their birthday is the best offer to get customers to sign-up.  WE at birthdays 4 business also created special Thank you 4 business handout cards that can offer instant bouncebacks using “paper”, and get them to register for digital marketing at the same time.  Very powerful.  

Wi-Fi Intelligence Software Marketing

However, the BEST way to build customer lists in-house is using your Internet Wi-Fi as a marketing method.  This requires a special intelligence software router that is simple to plug into your existing connection. The way it then works is the consumer goes to FREE Wi-Fi at your place that you’ve incentivized them to do or they do on their own, and the first time they log in, it will ask them to sign-up giving either their email, phone, or Facebook account to usually get a free birthday gift for doing so or other reward.  Then every time they come back, and have their cell phone with them, the intelligence software knows they were there automatically and tracks that for you.  Doesn’t track what they spent with this programming alone, but have a promotional dashboard where you can see 24/7 what is happening.  This Wi-Fi marketing can help you build up to 5x more names to do promotional marketing with. Between the birthdays 4 business mailers list building method and Wi-Fi alone, you could have a larger lists than most national companies even dream of that you see doing digital marketing right now if it’s done right which is what we at LePera Marketing and Birthdays 4 Business specialize in.  You may be wondering why you would do birthday mailers and have a birthday digital program. The answer is simple.  To get more new faces and build a larger list for digital promotional marketing at the same time.

We have created a way to enable there to not be any crossover marketing or duplicate birthday offers when using both if desired, so you get the best of all marketing worlds.  In my next blog I’m going to get in to more detail about how to put together the BEST promotional marketing campaign using what we call Promos 4 Business.