Jeff Harrison of Swingpoint Media (YouTube, May 16, 2019) outlines a local-digital-marketing tactic for restaurants: use birthday-based promotional offers to attract new customers during slow months. He claims ~30,000 residents in the Coachella Valley have birthdays each month, with August and September concentrated as the slowest months for restaurants, and suggests targeted birthday offers (e.g., free entree with three paying guests, dessert for the table) plus in-person signups to grow the customer database and increase check size. He frames this as an easy, repeatable strategy applicable beyond the local area.
Questions this video answers
May 16, 2019
~30,000 people per month
August and September
About 420,000 people living there full time
Chapters
What if you had access to 30,000 new clients every month? Well, you do if you take this one strategy. Hi, my name is Jeff Harrison, Swingpoint Media. And I got to thinking about this for customers that we work with that are restaurants, and I live here in the Coachella Valley, and I looked up something and I thought was really interesting. Do you know how many people have birthdays? The Coachella Valley? People who live here year round have birthdays here in the Coachella valley. On average, 30,000 people a month. And here's another interesting thing. Guess when the highest percentage of these people have birthdays. August and September. Those are two of the. What I would call. And what many people that live here in the Coachella Valley that are business owners would say, hey, those are our slowest months. And yet that's where the highest concentration of customers are available. So what does this all mean? Well, it means this. If you did something to say, hey, I'm gonna jump into this whole digital marketing space and start attracting new customers using things like Facebook advertising or Instagram advertising, things of that nature, what could I do? Well, what if you just simply did a birthday offer? I'll give you an example. I just sent this over to one of our clients. They're not here in the area, but it works for them. It works everywhere on the planet because there are people always having birthdays and rarely think about this. Rarely, if somebody went out to eat for their birthday, do they go and celebrate their birthday by themselves. Well, I'm going to say no. Hell no, they don't. And so easily you could do something like this, hey, how would you like to eat for free? Just simply bring three of your friends and I put some kind of max on there as far as. As far as how much their. Their food is. And every restaurant is different, right? Just bring three of your friends that they pay regular price and your entree is free. And then maybe you want to throw in a dessert. If you're. If you're that type of a restaurant, maybe you'll offer dessert for the table. Well, now you have an opportunity to increase the average size of your check. And you're bringing people in who may not have been to your restaurant, or even if they have, maybe they're bringing in again. And now you can kick that whole thing up a notch by now seeing about getting the other people there at the table. Maybe you want to train your servers to say, hey, you came here for Jeff's birthday. How would you like to have your birthday also celebrated here for free? All you have to do is join our birthday club. And right then and there, you can sign people up. So you can do a couple things. You can increase the average size of your check, and you can increase the average number of people coming into your database. So that's a real easy thing to do. And all of a sudden, you're going to see some really cool things happen. So stepping into the digital space, and even in our area, a small area, Palm Springs area, there's about 400,000 people living here, 420,000 people living here full time, but yet 30,000 of them, more than 30,000 of them, are experiencing a birthday every month. And the slowest time of the year is when the greatest concentration is. So don't let that slow you down. Let's celebrate everybody's birthday.
