Mobile Marketing Offers Great Potential for Restaurants. Are you Game?

While you are trying to take your restaurant business to the next level, (Top-Line Growth), mobile marketing presents a great opportunity to keep current clients and to acquire a whole new set of clients. Here are a few good techniques and strategies that you can use:

Mobile Marketing Strategies and Techniques

• Create a Mobile community within your business, location by location. Technology today will enable you to reach out to any smartphone  that enters your business location(s).  Use this “Push” marketing to connect with your current clients, capture their mobile numbers and start building a database of your mobile clients.
• Utilize multiple feedback surveys via cell phone and consider incenting response by offering rewards such as Amazon Gift cards, or credit toward purchasing iPhone Apps.  
• Send reminders via text messages: Simple, yet effective, send your restaurant information, special menus, and specials of the day via a text message. This, along with your contact information, can be sufficient to attract diners to your restaurant.  Make sure that you keep the message simple, precise, and relevant and that it adds value for your customers.
• Quizzing via text: Ask people to participate in quiz competitions that can be focused on questions about your products, for example: a specific recipe or the origin of a particular dish. Offer them free meal deals or great discount offers to attract them to your restaurant.  This is not only a great way to create brand awareness but to also increase loyalty among the existing customers.
• Text Polls or Surveys: People like to give their opinions.  Conduct a text poll and offer some perks in return for opinions on items of interest to you.  Using this strategy, you can collect valuable customer feedback as well as phone numbers, the most valuable asset for your restaurant business.
• Coupon sending (text or picture): Restaurant owners can decide to send either text or picture coupons.  Normally, the coupons sent by the restaurants are text based that I’ve experienced so far.  These can be presented at your restaurant counter and redeemed for free meals or great discounts.  They work well to attract new customers who want to try out your restaurant.
• Mobile friendly website: Make sure that the website you create has special features that enable it to be easily viewed via a mobile phone in addition to a PC.  For example, if you have a restaurant menu designed for a standard web site, update it for mobile devices, so that mobile users will find it easy to navigate.  Be sure to create a website that is compatible with most mobile phones and test it before rolling it out.
• Create mobile apps: Mobile-based applications to play games or access popular sites are in huge demand these days.  Have one created with your restaurant name endorsed on it.  This enables you to establish your brand with a younger audience as they are more likely to be influenced by such applications.  You can also utilize existing mobile apps to help your potential customers link to your Facebook or Twitter account.  Whenever you post anything on your respective accounts, your customer will be updated on his or her mobile device. This gives you a better chance of reaching out to your customers in a short timeframe. 

The tactics mentioned above represent just some well-tested techniques for mobile marketing. Plan innovative campaigns and tweak them to create better mobile marketing techniques of your own.

 

Does a small business need a social media strategy?

Here is a question many small retail business owners ask: “Do we need a social media strategy if we have a website?”

The answer is the same as for why you have an email address, even though you have a phone. It’s not an either/or decision; it’s both/and.

Clearly, your beautiful website is also very handy: cyber address, digital brochure, e-catalog, virtual store, etc. But as versatile as it is, there is one increasingly important capability you need that a website isn’t good at: community building. That’s what social media does.

By my definition, social media is much older and more comprehensive than the popular Johnny-come-latelies, Facebook and Twitter. Your social media strategy includes everything you do to build, connect with and serve customer communities, including: the new stuff, email marketing, customer loyalty programs and, the original social media, face-to-face.

You may ask, “What are these communities?

In the old days–like 1999–your customer list was just names on an accounts receivable report or sales forecast. Today, those customers are part of your business’s community; the rest are prospects who are becoming interested in you. But unlike the passive customer list of old, this community is functioning and has expectations you have to meet, or they will join another community.

At the risk of hurting your feelings, once customers find you, returning to that beautiful website of which you’re so proud will be of decreasing interest to them. But the good news is that anything you have that’s new–product and how-to information, order status, special offerings, etc.–is of increasing interest to customers. They just don’t want to have to come back to get it. More and more, customers are saying to businesses, “I’ve seen what you offer and like it, but I won’t be returning to your website much, because I’m very busy. Why don’t you follow me home?”

This is what customers and prospects mean when they join your community by giving you permission to connect with them and send them stuff by email, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, etc. They just want the new stuff, including updates to your website.

Connect with and serve your customer communities by following them home with all social media resources. That’s how a small business transcends merely being competitive by being relevant.