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To learn more about Marquee, go to marquee.com m a r q I I.com to learn more about this and all of the incredible features they have. Okay, so today we're talking about marketing. Specifically, I wanted you to get two points. Number one, it is. There's no one thing you do to market your restaurant. It's a series of little moves, right? It's all these little things you gotta button up. There are a million tools. There are a million different channels at our disposal. And you need to make sure they are all working in coordination with each other. It's a series of little moves. I like to think of it like a hotel, right? So I lived in New York City for 20 years. We have the. The Plaza Hotel, right? The Plaza is right at the corner of Central Park South. It is like a mecca. It's the middle of the world. And. And what happens is they got all these doors all over the place. The front door, a bunch of side doors, the back door. When you are a guest at the Plaza Hotel, you can walk in any way you choose, right? And a really great restaurant is just like a really great hotel, and the Plaza is a great hotel, right? They don't really much care which way you come in, obviously. I think they. They hope you come in the grand main entrance and you get the bellhops and all of that. But I don't know, maybe you're going to come in the side door. Maybe you check in at the front door, but after you go out to dinner, you come in the back door. Maybe after you go to a show, you come in the side door. The bottom line is they need to make sure that every door is beautiful. There's doormen at every door, right? And you are greeted the way that you would be at the Front door. It's the same thing when it comes to marketing your restaurant, your people, right? Your guest or your prospective diners will discover you from a lot of different ways. Maybe they'll read a review. Maybe they'll find you on Yelp. Maybe they'll trip upon a listicle where you're listening to listed as the top 10 brunch restaurant. Maybe their friend is going to tell. Tell them about you. Maybe they then go check out Instagram. Maybe there's a million different ways they could come to you. And you got to make sure that you are buttoned up in every place. Maybe the place they discover you is on Yelp. You got to make sure you have a really great presence on Yelp. Good reviews, great pictures, a great rating that you're. You're responding to those reviews, all of that, right? Maybe they find you on. On Google. You got to make sure your Google my business page is optimized, right? Maybe they find you on. You got to make sure that that presents your restaurant the best way possible. There isn't one set door that they take to get to you. They take all kinds of side doors, front doors, sunroofs, back doors, basement doors. They come in and find you in a bunch of different ways. And so you have to make sure that whatever way they come in to get you, however they discover you is taken care of. Is all telling a cohesive story, right? Now, the key to that, to understanding that there are tons of different channels and tools at your disposal, is you have to get organized. And that's really what I'm hoping to talk about today. You have to get organized. The best way to get organized, right, is to look at your year. Beginning of the year, planning is huge for me and it should be huge for you, right? Planning from an operations standpoint and also planning from a marketing standpoint. Now, I wrote about this in my book, the Restaurant Marketing Mindset, but there's a relationship between operations and marketing, right? They keep passing the baton back and forth and back and forth, right? You can't market a bad restaurant if a restaurant is bad food and bad service. You can't. You can't put out enough photos and videos that are going to. They're going to trick people into coming. Eventually they're going to come. You're going to trick them once and they're going to go, that place sucked. We're not going to go back there, right? So operations and marketing, right, go hand in hand. You need a great experience to tell people about, right? If you tell people it's great. And it's not great. You're not going to be in business very long. Of course, we know that. But it's worth mentioning, it's worth pointing out. So when it comes to marketing, right, it's the same thing as it does with, with operations is at the beginning of the year, you've got to do proper planning for the year ahead. Now, I want to specifically talk to you about the importance of a marketing calendar and how a marketing calendar can help coordinate all your efforts. And I'm giving this marketing calendar away for free. The way you get it is to email me personally, Chip close dot com. My name is spelled C H I P K L O. That's right. You have to write me a personal email and personally request it and I will send it back. I respond to each and every email I get, chipclose.com and I will send you my 2025 marketing calendar. It's the basically a template I've used for, I don't know, 15 years marketing restaurants. It's a way to get all of your different channels organized. Right now, you don't need mine. You can put together your own. You can go rip one off, you know, off the Internet. I don't care. It doesn't matter. What I care about is that you take the time to get yourself organized. Now, how do we begin this? How do we begin this task? You begin by looking from the opera, from an operations perspective and looking at your year, your 12 months, your 13 periods, however you arrange it, and looking for the high points and the low points and the midpoints, right? There are months where you're crazy busy. Depending where you are, what market, what kind of restaurant you are, you will be busy at certain points of the year. Likewise, depending what market you're in, what kind of concept you are, there will be slow points during the year. Guess what? There is an ebb and flow. There's a seasonality to every single one of our restaurants. I don't know any restaurant that is consistently packed every single night of the week, every month of the year. They're not. There's an ebb and a flow to this, right? What you need to do from an operational perspective is look at your year and look at your high points and your low points. When you look at your low points, right, Those are the areas where you need to come up with some sort of promotion, where you need to do something to create a push to get people to come in. But just as important and not to be forgotten are the high points because the high points are where you don't have to work very hard at all, right? So if you run a fine dining restauran, the holidays, December is going to be huge because people are taking out clients, people are celebrating with their office parties, people are going out to celebrate with friends. They're going out for Christmas Eve, for New Year's Eve. People will come to you without you having to request that people come. But when you've got all those people who are used to coming to you just for a high holy day, let's say there's an opportunity to convince them, right? To make sure we get data and convince them to come back at a later point, at a point when it might not be as intuitive, when they may not be thinking about you. Let's say in January and February and March, there are things we can do in December to help us in January, February and March. We just simply have to acknowledge the fact that there's an opportunity to be had. For example, I always use this example I was doing. I was working at Gotham, right? So Gotham in New York now closed, sadly. But Gotham was open for 40 years before they closed. And back when I was there, we ended up doing holiday brunches, right? So the Sundays between Thanksgiving and Christmas and really that restaurant never did brunches in much of its history. But we decided to do it for the holidays, right? But what we did is we said there are probably people coming out just for these brunches that don't usually come out and join us. So we did basically a bounce back program. We gave them a gift, gift certificate. We had these beautiful like envelopes made that got them two free glasses of Tattinger champagne. The following month they bring those back, no questions asked. Anytime in January, they didn't have to do a minimum sped. They could just come in, sit at the bar, get two glasses of champagne and go on their merry way. We didn't care. The idea was if that brought them in the front door, then our servers, our bartenders, our managers, it was their job to try to get additional sales. Somebody comes into the bar, says, I'm just going to get these two glasses of champagne. It's the bartender's job to say, absolutely. But might I recommend this appetizer or these two appetizers just as a little something to nosh on while you're enjoying the champagne? You know, it's their job to bring the menu. So yeah, I know you just wanted the champagne, but just take a look at the menu, right? There's a lot we could do. Once we get the butts in the seats. We didn't get the butts in the seats. There's nothing we can do. But once they're there, we can be personable, we can be hospitable, we can be charming salespeople. And we were. We did. And so we gave those out to everybody who dined with us. So we would do these brunches. We would do 200, 250 covers on a Sunday afternoon. And we gave out 200, 250 of these. Right. Over the course of the four Sundays. It's about a thousand of those we gave out. And we got a whole bunch of them back. And a lot of them came back from people who wouldn't have otherwise thought to join us. We gave them an excuse. We put our thumb on the scales, right? Good food, good service. Of course they'll return to us. Yeah. But maybe not quickly or maybe not at all. But if we put something in their hand that gave them an excuse to come join us, well, then we just. We just tip the scales in our favor ever so slightly, right? So even at a fine dining restaurant, Michelin Star, we found an elegant way of doing this, right? That's what I mean.
