← RESTAURANT STRATEGY
RESTAURANT STRATEGY
Social Media: Organic versus Paid
00:25:48
#398 - Social Media: Organic versus Paid ***** This week's episode is brought to you by: AVERO Increase your profitability using the industry's best kept secret weapon. VISIT: https://averoinc.com/ ***** This week's episode is brought to you by: CHOWLY Chowly Off Premise Platform helps restaurants create, capture, and convert demand to help drive more profits into the bottom line. Empower your restaurant with Digital Marketing, Chowly Online Ordering, Smart Pricing, and Third-Party Marketplace POS Integrations. VISIT: https://chowly.com/chip/ ***** Social media is not marketing. It's a tool available to the marketer. And the best way to leverage these platforms is to utilize both sides: ORGANIC & PAID. On today's episode, I walk you through exactly how to do that. ***** You want a FREE copy of my book. Just DM me the word 'BOOK' at our Instagram page! CLICK HERE: https://www.instagram.com/restaurantstrategy/ Ready to learn more about the P3 Mastermind? CLICK HERE:...
Loading summary
Transcript3 lines
- [00:01]
A
We know social media is, has become continues to be a key tool that we use to market our restaurants. But I think people misuse the tool. I'm going to talk about, I think how people should be using it. On today's episode of Restaurant Strategy. There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is Restaurant Strategy. We do two episodes every single week. Operations episode on Monday's marketing episodes on Thursdays, it's Thursday. This must be a marketing episode. Just so you know a little bit about me, get to 25 years of experience in the industry. Most of that time was spent in New York City opening and running Michelin starred restaurants. I care deeply about what I do. What do I do now? I run a coaching program. It's called the P3 mastermind. It's geared towards independent restaurant owners and operators that are busy, have successful businesses, but struggle to generate a consistent, predictable 20% profit. I show them how to do that. So we got two podcast episodes every single week. I travel all over the world giving talks and keynotes. I do webinars. I wrote a book called the Restaurant Marketing Mindset. And again I do that. My P3 mastermind. If that sounds like you. If you got a busy restaurant but you're not making the kind of money you think you should be making, then it's a conversation that we should probably have. Best way to start that conversation is to grab some time on our calendar. You'll chat with me or someone from my team. You go to restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule, grab some time. You'll see a bunch of times available there. We'll get to learn more about you and your restaurant. You'll get to ask questions about the program and let's see if it makes sense. Let's see if you're a good fit. If you're a good fit, I think we'll know almost right away. Those calls go one of two directions. Either we can help people or we can't help people. And if we can't directly help people, we'll point you in the direction of somebody that we think can. Or we'll give you advice, actionable insights that you can put into practice. And we will say do that, come back in three months. But for those that we can help, it will become very, very obvious over the course of that conversation. Again, there's no pressure to join. It's a 30 minute conversation just for us to get to know each other. Restaurant strategy Pod as always, that link is in the show notes. Okay, are you ready to revolutionize the way you run your restaurant? Unlock the power of data to optimize your restaurant operations with Avero, the trusted technology partner for over 40,000 hospitality professionals worldwide. Avero understands restaurant operations. They have a data back to answer for every FB challenge and are focused on delivering the right answers to the right people at the right time. With Avero, you can make better, faster, more profitable decisions. You can drive customer traffic. You can raise, check average and ensure consistent guest experience across all of your locations. Are you ready to drive more sales by leveraging the hospitality industry's best kept secret weapon? Unlock your restaurant's full potential. Today, get started for free and transform your business by visiting Avero Inc.com that's a V E R O Inc.com and yep, you better believe it. That link is in the show notes. Okay, on today's episode, we're talking about social media and I want to talk about the differences between paid and organic because there are two different sides of this tool and if you're not using both, you're missing out on a really, really big opportunity. So let me be really clear before we get started and we're going to. And we're going to, we're going to tear this apart in a quick and efficient matter. But before we start getting into the guts of this thing, let me be really clear. Social media is not market marketing. Social media, even the paid tools on the social media platforms are tools available to the marketer, but they on their own are not marketing. Don't think that you can just post a couple times a week and that will let everybody know and they will automatically just all come in and eat your food. That's not how it works. I think most of you know that. But for the rest of you that maybe are on the fence, haven't heard this before. I'm telling you, it's not marketing. It is a tool available to the marketer and it is one of 50 tools that should be in your arsenal. P.S. many of those tools that I mentioned, those 50 tools are automated. In fact, a lot of the paid tools within social media are automated. We'll get into that. Automation is great because it's efficient. It happens behind the scenes. It's something you don't have to expend energy on. Right? But it is not marketing. A marketer is interested in two things. Getting people to raise their hands, meaning, hey, who needs this kind of thing? Bunch of people raise their hands and say, great. All those people who raise their hands, follow me. Marketers interested in two things. Getting people to raise their hand and getting people to change their behavior. So you identify the people who want, need, or could use the thing that you have, and then you get them to come have your thing. You convince them to change what they're already doing to what you need them to be doing. Hey, you used to go to that barbecue joint. Come try our barbecue joint. Hey, you don't usually go out for dinner midweek. Let me give you an excuse to come out and dine out midweek. That's what marketing is interested in. And there are a bunch of tools at our disposal to do that. There's email, there's websites, there's SEO, there's Google, there's paid advertising on Google, paid advertising on Meta. There's other organic social media channels available. There's direct mailers, there's community events, charity events, there's other sort of four walls marketing. There's all kinds of tools available to us. But when it comes to social media, it's really crucial that we understand there are two sides to it. And of course, this is mo. These are most of the questions that I end up getting right. Most of the questions I am getting are about social media. So let's talk about social media now. We're going to start first talking about organic social media. What it can do, what it can't do, and how you should be using it to get the most out of it. And then the second half of the episode, we're going to talk about paid. We're going to talk about what it can do, what it can't do, and how to get the most out of that. We're going to stay very, very structured and focused. Cool. Cool. Let's get into organic social media. Typically, when we're talking about social media for restaurants, we're talking about Facebook, Instagram, and maybe Tick Tock first, right off the bat, should you be on Tick Tock? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. A lot of Gen Z and younger are on Tick Tock. But Tick Tock is not a place where you sell or advertise, although you can advertise there. It is a place where you entertain. So your content on TikTok should be different than your content on Instagram. It should be entertaining. And if it's not entertaining, it's not going to work there. It's not going to get pushed out to more people. It's not going to get picked up, it's not going to be shared. It's not going to be liked. It's not going. It's going to. It's going to fall like a lead balloon. So mostly what we end up talking about when it comes to marketing restaurants on social media, especially when it comes to organic social media, is Facebook and Instagram. The parent company, of course, is Meta. When we utilize these two platforms, it's important right off the bat that those two platforms do different things. Just like TikTok does another different thing. They have different benefits, they have different tools. Right. There are different ways that people engage with them. So understand that you can't necessarily take the same approach for Instagram and Facebook and TikTok. Really, really crucial that we understand that when it comes to posting organic content. So when I say organic content, that means you take a picture or a video, you add a caption and you post it for people to see. That's organic, right? It's really important to understand when it comes to meta, let's say meta only shows your organic content to roughly 3 to 5% of your current followers. So you do the math. If you've got a thousand followers, that's like 50 people max, who are seeing that. Unless something goes viral and it picks up speed and gets spread beyond that. But, man, we are not talking about virality on this podcast because I just don't think it's anything worth reaching for. It's not worth expending our energy on that. But again, if you've got a thousand followers, only 50 people are seeing this. If you have 10,000 followers, only about 500 people are seeing it. It's as easy as that. So it becomes a relatively inefficient platform, an inefficient tool, especially when we see that, like text Messaging gets a 99% open rate when emails, you know, if it done well, can get a 30, 40% open rate. Right. The fact that your quote, unquote open rate on a social media post is about 5%, you can see right there that it's inefficient. More than that, there's no way to guarantee that the people who actually see my content, right. There's no way to guarantee that my followers are actually within my market. Right. I follow dozens, probably hundreds of restaurants that are all over the country, all over the world, simply because I want to keep track on what they're doing simply because I've been there, or I'd like to go there at some point, but I am not in market and I can't go to them this week or this month or maybe even this year. So I'm a wasted follower because I, I cannot be a customer anytime soon. So when you post something on your Instagram page, there's no guarantee that the people who are even seeing it can even be a customer in the near future. Again, it makes it a relatively inefficient, inefficient platform. So then the question is, how should we be using it? Do I even need to be using it? I think yes, you do need to maintain a presence on the platforms. There are tools available to you there, both in the feed, in reels, in the stories, or the story highlights. All of those are ways to get yourself out there, to get yourself in front of people that matter. People who might become customers, who might be customers. Once again, we just have to be really clear on what it can and can't accomplish at this point. It's also really important to talk about purchase intent, right? When we talk about Instagram, let's say, think about the times when you yourself use Instagram. It's in between things. It's when you're bored, it's when you're killing time, it's late at night, you don't usually go there when you're looking for something to eat, maybe on rare occasions. But the majority of the way we use it is to kill time. It's to fill in the gaps while we're waiting in line at the bank, while we're waiting for the commercials in the middle of the game, while we're waiting for our kid to get out of the fitting room, stuff like that. This is how I use it. This is, I'm sure, how use it. This is how many of your customers use it. So it's really important to understand there's no purchase intent or very low purchase intent on a platform like Facebook or Instagram. It's not like somebody's gonna see a juicy burger and be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, babe. Gabe, get your keys, put your shoes on. We gotta go right now. We gotta. There's this juicy burger I just saw. It's not. There's much, there's much greater purchase intent on a platform like Google, on Yelp, on TripAdvisor. People are looking actively on where to go, right? OpenTable, incredibly high purchase int. They are looking for a reservation, they're looking for a table at a restaurant near where they want to Dine. So comparatively right to Google, to Yelp, to TripAdvisor, to OpenTable, there's much lower purchase intent. So then what's the point of it? And do we need to do it again? I said a second ago, I think we do need to do it, but we have to understand how it fits within what we call the customer journey. The customer journey has to do with how the path someone takes from when they first discover you to when they become a customer. Right? And that customer journey is different for every single customer. What happens is, I think Instagram and Facebook end up being a place where people go to confirm the things that they've heard or they want to believe. Again, I think they use it to confirm the things they've heard or they want to believe, right? They read a really great review. They say, man, that sounds like a really great restaurant. Let me go check it out. They go over to Instagram to scroll and check it out, right? I think they hear from a friend, right? You're out to lunch and say, hey, where'd you guys go for your anniversary? Oh, my God, we went to this great place and blah, blah, blah. I don't know it. Let me go check it out. You pull out Instagram and you go check it out. That's how people tend to use Instagram and Facebook right now, which then, if we think about that, well, then we can better understand where we are, where it fits within the customer journey. If people use it to confirm the things they've heard or the things they want to believe, well, then let's think about what needs to be there. Then I think we need to use those feeds as something of a lookbook, right? As a way for people to check in and get a pretty good understanding about what we're all about. Right? So I think the feed, I think the wall has to be filled with pictures of the dining room, of our people, of our food, of our beverage, to give people a sense of what we're all about and what it's like to have a meal here. Right? That's how I believe it should be used. The organic social media presence. And if you do that, you can be really successful. I always talk about having five content pillars. Content pillar means every one of our posts fits within one of these predetermined pillars that we feel is important. Right? So a pillar for a restaurant, I think, is food, beverage, the decor or the space, the people, either our employees or our guests. And then the fifth one is like, dealer's choice. It could be the neighborhood or a Different wine, dinner or our catering or we're hiring or some limited time offer or something like that, right? So if we feature the food, the beverage, the space, the people and then the dealer's choice, whatever we want to do, if we rotate it that way and maybe food is one out of every two or three posts, maybe beverages one out of every five posts. Maybe your dealer's choice is one out of five posts. I don't know how you use it, but if you think about your pillars and again I think this is what they are, if you need some guidance here, just do food, beverage, space, people and the dealer's choice, then what happens is that your feed has variety but focused variety. So it's giving people a sense of what you're all about. If you can run your organic feed like that, it will fulfill quite an important gap in the customer journey. Now, there are other best practices, right? Having a making sure to have a link in your bio that takes people to everywhere where you want to go. Using a tool like link, tree or milkshake to have multiple links so that you have your website, you have your reservation page, you have your catering page and you have your page for your special wine dinner, right? So that in your, you know, in the caption you can say, you know, proud to announce the next in our wine series on this date, blah blah, blah, featuring this winemaker, click link in bio to get tickets. Then people can go click the link and see, oh, we got our website, we've got our online order portal, we've got our reservations page. Oh, we've got our wine dinner tickets. They can click there and go right there and get it. So if there are things you're going to call out in your captions, they should be in your bio. There are some best practices there, right? Making sure we're using calls to action in our captions. Say, see a beautiful picture, they read the caption, okay, now what, what are they supposed to do next? That becomes really, really crucial. But on the bare bones basics, brass tacks, nuts and bolts. Think of it like a lookbook for your restaurant because this is where people go to confirm what they want to believe or to confirm what they've been told. That I think is how we utilize our organic feeds to the best of our ability. Right now we're going to talk about paid in just a second after a word from another one of our sponsors. Now, Sterling Douglas is the co founder and CEO of a company called Charlie. Charlie does so much for this industry. And I want you to hear a Little bit from Sterling.
- [16:16]
B
We talk a lot to our restaurants about this idea of return on time. Everybody talks about roi, like return on investment. And a lot of restaurants do that when you're a smaller operator, when you're one, two, three stores. And as the owner or kind of the lead operator, your time is actually your biggest resource. And making sure that you're spending time on the things that are getting maximum impact is critical. And so when I think about operators and I think about optimizing for Google and making sure that that's done, it's less about the money, it's more about the time that it takes. Because not only the one time, kind of like set up and fill out all the fields, there's constant upkeep and Google changes it so often there's a bajillion different metadata fields that you can put on there. And the way that Google tends to rank whether your restaurant shows up is how much information you have given them, because they believe that the more information you give them, the more the customer wants to see it. Right. And typically the more data you have in Google, the more likely you're going to be to answer that question and give the information that consumer is looking for. And that's what Google loves.
- [17:24]
A
If you want to learn more about, shall we go find the link in the show notes? Okay, so today we're talking about social media. I get a lot of questions about social media. Social media, we know, I'm not an idiot. We are living in the world we're living in. It is important, but it is a tool. It is not marketing on its own. It is a tool that fits within an arsenal of tools that we use to market our restaurants. And there's two sides to it. There's the organic side. And we talked about what it does well, what it doesn't do well, and I think how to best leverage it. That's how we spent the first part of our conversation talking about. And now the second part is the paid tool. And specifically, again, when it comes to restaurants, we're mostly talking about Facebook and Instagram. The parent company is meta. So if you ever hear somebody talking about a meta ad strategy, that's what they're talking about. They're talking about running ads on both Facebook and Instagram. Usually the beauty part of the platform is when you build an ad, you can tell the platform whether to send it to one platform, the other, or both. Right. The answer usually for us is both. But we do, we digress. When it comes to using the paid social, the paid tools on these social media platforms. It's really crucial to understand Metta is an advertising platform. In fact, it is perhaps the most sophisticated advertising platform ever created. It does that really well. The reason it does it well is because of its incredible ability to target and to segment our audiences, to get really granular and just focus and send our message to the people that absolutely need to hear our message, right? Because you can cut it up geographically, you can cut it up based on income or age or gender, you can cut it up based on interests and hobbies. And all of that is important, right? If we want an older crowd that lives in this area that has a certain, is it within a certain income bracket that likes restaurants like ours, let's find other restaurants that they might like and target those people. Facebook, Instagram, the meta platform allows you to do that. What's really interesting is when you use the paid tools, you can measure everything. So I've talked about this in the past, right? There's two ads that I always love to run. The one is an engagement ad which is really about raising awareness, right? So you just take an ad or you take your best performing posts and turn them into an ad and you try to show it to as many people as possible. And you try to get likes, clicks, shares, right? Or likes on your page follows, right? That's one way to get people to engage with you. You're creating warm audiences who maybe didn't know you and now know you. And then the other piece is that you're trying to run a traffic ad, you're doing some sort of promotion, right? They click on the ad, they go to a landing page, they put in their information, they hit submit, then they're sent an automated email. That email has the deal. It says open this up for your deal. It says click here, place your order, use promo code xyz or show this to your server next time you're in the restaurant that you're doing something to get opt ins, right? In exchange for $10 off, give us your email, right? That becomes incredibly valuable on the part of the small business owner. And then you're driving redemptions because you gave them a gift, they get cash burning a hole in their pocket. And then we can measure how many redemptions we've had, right? How many downloads, how many people have signed up for the to get the promo email, how many people then have redeemed it. And then finally, most importantly, the attributable net sales, the number of sales that would be attributed back to that, to that redemption that becomes Incredibly powerful. And then we get to measure everything we do, which is ultimately what we care about. So when we talk about the organic side of social media, I can't determine who sees my ad, right? I can't tell how many people see it, and I can't determine that the people who do see it are the people who are going to be able to purchase my product. On the paid side, it's quite the opposite. I can put a certain dollar amount behind the ad every single day, meaning I want at least X number of people to see it. And I can tell them I want people within the zip code or within 10 miles of my restaurant. So I know I'm targeting the quantity of people and in another, in a certain way, the quality of lead that I get right now. Also, the beauty of this is that we can optimize the hell out of this ad. So if we're showing it to a lot of people and no one's clicking on it, it's because the deal isn't good enough, or the creative, meaning the video or the photo isn't good enough. We can tweak that out. It's called optimizing, right? We can optimize that ad. Then after we optimize that, if we're showing it to people, we're getting a lot of clicks but nobody's signing up. Then there's something about the landing page that isn't getting people to do the next thing what we need them to do, right? So we showed them the ad, got them to click, they go to a landing page, and we want them to fill in their information. So we have to optimize that page, right? Then if they're seeing the ad and clicking and they're signing up but then not redeeming the thing, then it's something about our email sequence that isn't, isn't reaching them or isn't sparking them to do what we need them to do. So again, we can optimize that. We can optimize to get people to click. We can optimize to make sure that they sign up, and then we can make sure to do our best to optimize the process afterwards to get them to remind them to redeem the ad, to actually come into the restaurant. And ultimately that's what drives sales. The beauty part of it is that we can get better and better and better about it. And the more you do it, the more you'll learn what works and what doesn't work. When it comes to social media, if you are not using paid you are missing out on the entire point of the platforms. And now let me say you don't have to spend a lot of money, right? So if you're going to do that engagement ad, right, to raise awareness, $5 a day, it's 150 bucks a month. If you do this traffic ad, start by running $10 a day. That's $300. Now those combined, it's 450. So for less than 500amonth, you now have a paid meta ad strategy that has focus, that has intention behind it. You have a strategy that now we can measure rather than just running an ad and trying to drive traffic to your website, which is ineff, drive them to opt in for something and then you can measure the redemptions. That's how we start leveraging the platforms to their fullest. Guys, that's what I want to talk about on today's episode. I want to talk about the difference between organic and paid. And yes, there's a place for both of them. Yes, you should be doing both. And when you do both together at the same time, it's like throwing kerosene on the bonfire. But you need to be using them both the right way. Listen, if you have any more questions about this, email me chip close.com c h I p klo s e.com I will also say that we have an agency now there's the agency arm to our business to restaurant strategy. My business partner, Monica Hammond oversees that whole thing because she is a wizard when it comes to meta ads. We run meta ads and actually Google search ads for restaurants and now got 25 different restaurants that we're working with all over the country. The ROI is palpable. It's very clear what we do works. So if you hear all this and you want to do it yourself, by all means, go do it. But if you need help doing it, that's also why you send me an email. We'll start a conversation and I'll connect you to Monica who will talk to you about exactly what we do, how we do it and and why and why it works. That's it, guys. The difference between organic and paid and the way to leverage both of them together to really throw kerosene on a bonfire. Appreciate all you guys being here every single week. Thank you very much and I will see you next. Next time. Sa.