SwingPointMedia - Reservations Episode 4 - After the "Newness Wears Off"

Well, welcome to another fun reservations. We're back at the Gardens on El Paseo. And I'm Jeff Harrison.

And I'm Andrew McColley.

And you're on our fourth episode. That's right. Even though it's Wednesday, it's our fourth episode because we started last Thursday or last Friday and we have somebody. Oh, yeah, we want to tag Andrew. Yep. Appreciate that. Hey, Andrew, you know, a lot of times whenever a restaurant opens up, it's always like the hottest thing on the list. And then when the next restaurant opens up, it's not the hottest thing on the list. How does a restaurant go about? Or what would you recommend a restaurant do so that the bloom isn't off the rose?

If you say, yeah, it happens a lot. And by the way, hello to all those joining us too. Thanks for. Thanks for dropping in. If you've got any questions, by the way, pop them in the chat. We may or may not see them.

I'll check it. I'll go in and out to check. Yeah, I may bounce in there and say. Yep. Hey, Monica. Surfing. Hey, thanks for watching Monica. Appreciate it. Thanks for joining us.

So back to the question. One of the things that many businesses do, it doesn't matter whether it's restaurants or any business for that matter, is that they fail to do one significant thing from the very start. And that's collect a database or create a database. Database can be of people that are frequenting your restaurant. It could be a database of people that are actually interested in, but maybe never have got to your restaurant doors. Maybe you've given away a coupon or a code for someone to come along and enjoy a free cocktail or a discount sort of thing. But they fail to collect and keep that information. Because what happens when you've got that information is you can go out and market to those people again. So imagine, you imagine this. I just went to a nameless coffee shop around here and I walked in.

There and Uwe, thanks for joining us.

Sorry, paid cash for my coffee, right?

Yep.

Now, not once did I. I mean, they asked me for my name, which I could have given any name. But the reality was that they'll never be able to market to me again when they want to.

Yeah, right.

They have to wait for me to go back into the coffee shop before they can show me their new ads or their new latest range of coffee line and stuff like that. And this is what a lot of restaurants do as well. They just forget to collect the data. Now if they were to say, hey, can you give us Your email address. Give us name and email address. That means that they can email us whenever they want down the track. And this is what a lot of restaurants are failing to do.

You know, when you say that you know this particular coffee shop he's discussing, I won't mention the name, but we go in there at least once a week. And we've been doing it for how many years? Two or three years, Once a week. And we probably know the staff definitely better than they know us. They've never once asked us our name, never once addressed us by name, apart from this. Oh, that's right. That's right. I take that back. They do ask us our name because they put it on their. But they never say, hey, good morning, Andrew, thanks for coming back, or hey, good to see you again. Whatever, nothing. And, you know, I don't know, it seems like coffee shops are very busy, and this coffee shop has been around a long time. And they should have by now. They should have already known that. And I noticed when you go in there, they start capturing information now about building a database for their WI FI use. But beyond that, they really don't know a whole lot about us. I mean, maybe I've never buy anything from them. I just go in there and take their wifi. I'm sitting on the parking lot.

Well, you can do that. You can go to the bathroom now.

Oh, that's right.

Without having to be a customer. But that's beside the point.

Yeah, I did notice I didn't have to have a key the other day, so that was kind of nice.

So my point is, if you're a restaurant, start from the beginning, okay? It might be great and fun. When you've started out and it's a new restaurant, everyone's lining up at the door. But if you can somehow collect their database, there's. Now, there's a couple of ways to do this, Jeff, by the way. You can ask for it, of course. You can do raffle prize or a monthly draw where they put their business card in and you collect data that way. Maybe it's signing up for a member's loyalty program, or it's a way to collect coupons that you may give out on a monthly basis. So there's a number of ways to do it, but the trick is not only to do it, but use that as well.

I'm not ignoring you, Andrew. I'm just double checking. I just want to make sure if there's any questions that pop up that, you know, we attend to them. I see a lot of activity on the screen. But you know, one of the things I noticed that you said build that database so you can communicate with them in the future. One of the faults that I see businesses doing when they do get my email address and it's only short lived because all they want to do is sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. They're never offering anything except buy me, buy me, buy me. Is there another way to handle that? I mean, a more effective way?

Definitely. I mean, think about it. All your customers have questions. Some have more questions than others and some questions are asked more than others. So maybe it's a matter of, you know what, I just want to keep in front of my customers. I don't necessarily need to sell anything, but maybe I'm going to address once a month a frequently asked question about our business. Do we have private parties or do we do certain types of menus? But what you're doing is you're addressing, addressing a question that's often asked or often unasked because people think it, but they don't bother asking it. But you're addressing that so that you're giving information, becoming an information booth rather than just a sales booth.

You know, one of the things, as an example, if I were a restaurant now, this week, it's restaurant week. So you know, I would be utilizing that platform, that trending topic, if you will, in your area. And I'd be talking about not just my restaurant, but other restaurants because, you know, talk to us a little bit about tagging. Like in this particular video, I did some tags on there. So I'd make sure immediately when this is being shown, it's also on those pages. How can we use tagging on Facebook lives to actually get traffic?

Yeah, tagging is a bit like tapping people on the shoulder and letting them know that it's something important that you want them to know about. Right. So you may want to go and tag some restaurants. Like we could go and tag, there's a restaurant just up here over to the right, my right, your left, wherever that is on your camera. That way we could go and tag their page to say, hey, we just spoke about your restaurant. Or we're talking about a particular theme in this video and we think you could be interested in it. So tagging basically taps people on the shoulder and lets them know that there's something that they should know or see here.

When that happens, Andrew, let's say for instance, you're a restaurant and maybe you're just starting. This may be good ideas. You're just starting and you're sharing content and you're saying, hey, I do breakfast and I do lunch. I don't do dinner. So you look at other breakfast and lunch locations in your area. They're maybe non competitive, but they're close enough that you could overlap some of the clients. Could you kind of get in front of their audience? If they have an audience by doing.

That tagging, you can certainly do that. And if you're running ads, too, you can certainly use their fan base, if you like, to get in front of them. This is the cool thing about Facebook ads, and we spoke about this the other day a little bit about Facebook ads. One of the things you can do is get in front of your exact perfect audience, whether it's an audience that you created or a demographic that you think fits your audience, or they may like your competitor, and you can put an ad in front of those people, which is pretty awesome.

Yeah, we see that a lot in, you know, somebody will come up and let's say somebody like Tony Robbins is an example. Let's say that's your audience. Well, if you're a local coach or speaker or something like that, that's a great audience to get in front of. And all of a sudden your reach goes from a few thousand to sometimes millions, and you get your message out there. Okay, so we've talked a little bit about today about how, or actually a lot today, about if you were a new restaurant and you got that influx of activity, because everybody said, oh, that's a new restaurant. I got to go check it out. How do you sustain that? And you've talked about, number one is get a database. Okay, so I want to circle back to that. And it sounds so easy. It's almost like saying, hey, you want to be rich? Get a million dollars, Win the lottery, great. But how do I do that? What are some things that. Just give me one thing that a restaurant could do to successfully get that information when. When they come in their restaurant.

I think I touched on it before, and this goes back. This is old school. It's nothing new. But you could run a prize giveaway.

Okay.

I mean, you're already giving. I mean, you've already got.

While I'm in the restaurant.

In the restaurant.

Okay, all right.

Coming in the restaurant, and you might be coming there and say, hey, Jeff, you know, we've got a prize, a month of free steak or whatever. It may be a good valuable prize, and you're only giving one away for that particular month. And you might get, you know, a thousand people who put their business cards in or give you their email address. That's a thousand people you've got. Now, let's say that you're giving away a prize at the value of $500. Okay. Okay. You may not. May or may not want $500. Let's work with me here for a sec.

Even though it's retail.

$500 retail.

Right.

To you, it's worth 500. Right. To the restaurant, too, it's probably about 120, 25, 130 bucks. Right. But it's cost you. Let's say it's 500 cost you as a restaurant and you get 500 names. That's a dollar per name. Getting that you can market to later.

That's really cheap.

Right? So it's super cheap. That is. That is a very low cost of acquisition for people. And the good thing is you don't have to wipe them. Once you've used them, you can keep using that name and address over and over and over again until they decide to unsubscribe.

Yeah. Hey, I want to say a special shout out to Gerard Norman. Great guy, Gerard. He is. I appreciate you dropping because he is on a track. He does interviews and he's on 60 interviews in 30 nights. And he interviewed a gentleman today who's done tremendous stuff. And he has another one later today. He's just an animal. And also Bart Lewis Jr. Hey, guys, thanks for dropping. I know you're very busy, so I appreciate that.

Here's something that tends to happen. Stop me if I'm wrong and comment. If you're a restaurant owner, you've not done this. Comment if I'm wrong is. We tend to want to do these activities that we're talking about after things slow down. We wake up one day, we're going, wow, you know, the reservation sheet's kind of. Kind of light. What do we do? And then we start doing this, but we have no traffic to build it on. So should this be like, hey, this should be like part of your opening strategy, day one? Yeah. Okay.

We're sitting here, we're in Palm Desert. It's getting hot here. It's 110 and it's only 10:30 in the morning.

Yep.

Or something. Ridiculous. Restaurants close here for summer. They close. It's crazy. That's unheard of. They close because they're not busy enough. And it's mainly because they haven't done the work before that they get to the summer and they go, well, there's no one around. There is still hundreds of thousands of people live in the desert year round. We all still want to eat.

Yep.

All right. We go to our favorite restaurants. Closed. What the heck. So get started. Day one. Collect that name and address. If you don't do anything with it, you don't do anything with it. Hasn't cost you anything, but you've collected it and you've got it to use whenever you want. If you don't collect it, you don't have it to start with later.

Yep, yep. Okay. So we challenge you to go out and do that. Now here is the biggest issue and there are tons of electronic ways to do this. I don't want to get into any of them, but I just want to encourage you that there are tons of electronic ways to do this so that you get accuracy. Because the number one problem with gathering names and email addresses is everybody writes down a paper and then you get there that night at 2 o' clock in the morning when you're closing up and you can't read it or you do it wrong, gather it electronically. Don't try to do it by hand. That's so old fashioned. There's so many ways you can do it where you can scan it, all kinds of stuff, check it out. Maybe we'll put some information in the resources. We'll find a few things and we'll put them in there. If you're interested in that, just comment below, let us know. Okay, great.

That's all I need to say.

Hey, we also want to encourage you if you're watching this, whether it's live or it's recorded later and you'd like to be on the show and you're a restaurant owner, we'd love to come to your restaurant. It gives you a little bit of traffic, a little bit of an awareness because we do get a lot of viewers on this and.

We'D love to just come to your restaurant and we'll challenge you with a question or you bring a question up and we'll help you work through it. Because I guarantee if you're dealing with it, so are other restaurants. And it's benefit to all of you. It's like, what's that saying? When that. When the tide rises, all ship. When the tide comes in, all tide rises or excuse me, excuse me, let me try again.

When the tide rises, all the ships rise too.

That's it. When the tide comes in, all ships rise. So that's what we are, we want to help you out. So. Hey, Hoove asked a question. I noticed your guys audio is really good. Do you mind taking a picture of your phone? Of your phone? Actually, I'm not even using this. Jove. We actually have a wireless mic. So we've got a mic hooked up here, and. And that's why the sound is so good. You don't have to do that. But now we have some space between our camera and us and Juve. Thanks for asking that.

I'm not hooked up, by the way. I'm not hooked up. I'm not hooked up.

Hey, stop it. No, I won't even go into that. So, anyway, so thanks for joining us. We'll be back again tomorrow from another city. I think we're actually traveling tomorrow, aren't we?

I'm not sure.

I think we're actually possibly moving out of the desert, because it is. It is getting hot. My Apple watch is getting hot, and we're going for cooler ground. But again, it's. If somebody sends us a message and said, hey, come to the fix across here on El Paseo or someplace down in Palm Springs, we're there, and we'll see you guys tomorrow. I'm Jeff.