Secret Sauce - The Restaurant Marketing Podcast

We discuss the Just Eat half year results.  Our advice is always to try and negotiate on the rates that they charge.  There can be a big variation between the commissions that they charge different restaurants - so negotiate and see how much you can save.  (Or you can get Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering with FROLO ) :)   This episode covers People and Processes so that you can take a holiday. Peop...

As a restaurant owner, when did you last take a holiday?  We is your next holiday planned for?  Do you have a holiday planned? Too many Restuarant owners aren't able to take even a short holiday from their Restaurant and I think that is really sad.  It leads to burn out and people falling out of love with their Restaurant and if you don't love working in your Restaurant, how can you expect your em...

Knowing what is going on with your website is an important ingredient in your Restaurant's Secret Sauce. We look at bounce rates and then we move onto the dark arts of Restaurant Marketing - campaign tagging with the Google Analytics campaign builder.   This is really important because it helps you keep your marketing accountable. Website speed and page load time is a really important part of the...

Did you check out the episode on how to fly like a celebrity chef?  The good news is that I have been practising what I preach and I've been lucky enough to make Platinum with Qantas.  There has been a bit of travelling around the world, visiting Restaurants and being Platinum certainly makes things a lot nicer.  How can you craete a loyalty program that makes your regularly customers feel really...

Many small Restaurants use Credit Cards to pay for a lot of bills.  With some really simple changes, you can make a really big difference in the kind of travel that you can take. We talk to Steve Hui from I Fly Flat .  This is something that we do a pretty good job of, and I was able to get an upgrade to Business Class last year for our family as we flew from Melbourne to Singapore in December las...

We talk about a Restaurant in Perth who had been struggling for years and years now.  He had a Restaurant that had very poor SEO, was quite hard to find in Google.  He had a purple website with no images and no online bookings.  It seems that the Restaurant wasn't too bad, but the marketing was just awful.  The marketing mistakes that he made over the last 4 years could have easily cost him an ext...

We look at what we learnt from Dinner by Heston. Firstly, have a think about the photos that you've got.  I will put some images up in the show notes to give you an idea about the kind of photos that you can take with an entry level camera or a decent mobile phone. Dinner by Heston has a unifying story throughout the menu - cooking food for centuries ago and reinterpreting them in a way that is in...

What if you ran your Restaurant like Princess Cruises? I spoke to a Restaurant owner and he said why think about cruises?   We look at operational efficiencies and how looking outside the Restaurant industry can give you ideas about innovation for your Restaurant.  We discuss Southwest Airlines and how they redefined industry best practice in turning around the aircraft.  It is a great story about...

We discuss products and services.  What is it that you do?  Many restaurants that we speak to who have been running restaurants for 10 years still do not know what it is that they do and what it is that their customers buy from them. For the numbers for your Restaurant, make sure you have pessimistic numbers in there.  Too much optimism in your P+L spreadsheet makes it very hard to be long term vi...

We talk about creating a Restaurant Business Plan as a living document to help you better run your business. We have a copy of blank Business Plan Template and we go through the process of filling it in, and give you some ideas and guidance around the kind of information that you need to put in there. Why is it important to create a Restaurant Business Plan? We look at some of the resources that y...

Carrie is owner of Restaurant HR and company that specifically deals with Restaurant HR issues.  She also runs  CarrieLuxem.com  which helps Restaurants with the broader HR issues, like leadership and culture. We discuss the definition of Leadership and how it is so important in Restaurants.   What are some of the steps that people can take to be a better Restaurant Leader? We also look at the rel...

We finish off place.  Have you thought of running your Restaurant like a franchise?  Get the economies of scale in purchases and economies of scales in activities in your restaurants.  Create an operations manual so that everyone knows what needs to be done in the restaurant. We look at dine-in, take out and delivery.   We finish off with promotion.  Promotion is not about the promotions that you...

Price Setting - How do you set the price?  Price Leader, a Premium Price?  How does that impact your customers and how does it impact your profitability? We look at M Y China and one of their amazing dessert item - the Sugar Egg Puffs.  These are awesome. How does Menu Engineering fit in with your pricing?  We look at the Dogs, Stars, Puzzles and Plow Horses. Revenue Per Available Seat Hour.  What...

What are the 4Ps and the Restaurant Marking Mix? We look at Product.  It may be something that you eat or it could be something else, or a mix of both.   When you fundamentally understand the product that your customers want, you will be able to price it appropriately.   What are the demographics of people that you want to target and what is it they they want to buy?  Should you change the product...

Firstly, make sure you check you Google My Business account for your Restaurant.  Incorrect information could be costing you thousands or tens of thousands of dollars! We talk about Jamie's Italian.  A restaurant chain over $100 million in debt with stories of poor food, poor team culture and poor experiences for diner's.  A Sydney Jamie's Italian was filmed using packet Gnocci when they advertise...

What is the Boost Juice way of marketing?  How can they get PR coverage for an app update?  Another example of how being a little bit out there can get you some great results.   We managed to fly to Singapore in Business Class with @qantas, which was super awesome.  Make sure you are looking into your credit cards and the points you collect!  We got the upgrade with points which was super cool. We...

This podcast started with an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that described Menulog as "the business partner he never wanted". We look at Restaurant Brandjacking and websites set up by online aggregators which look like the web Adwords Arbitrage.  We discuss how restaurants can advertise on Google Adwords and get clicks to their platforms, not your website.  We talked about this with Kyle Wel...

Oohbah Butler is a journalist who writes for Vice.  He used to be employed to write fake reviews on Tripadvisor, getting paid £10 for each review.  He had concerns about the impact that the fake reviews were having, so he created a crappy website for the Shed at Dulwich, a restaurant that only existed on the High Street of his mind and started getting his friends to write reviews for it. In April...

Woo Hoo! You've just done a weeks' worth of Restaurant Marketing.

Find out what works and what doesn't with your Restaurant Marketing plan.

Email Marketing - The simplest and cheapest way to fill a Restaurant on a Midwinter's Tuesday night

Facebook is pay to play now. This is a great thing. The budgets are low, the returns are high.

Some sites change every week, some haven't changed since 2002

When did you last post to your Restaurant's Facebook page?

The Menu is the critical in most restaurants, it is part sales, part marketing, part art, part science, and part soul and part passion - yet so few people work to improve it.