Sometimes people ask me what kind of marketing I would run if I opened my own restaurant. Here’s what I tell them — oh and my hypothetical restaurant would feature hits from my parents’ home cooking (northern Chinese food)!
Product
To start, a few assumptions. I assume we’ve created a good “product.” We must have good food, fast service, and friendly hospitality. This is obviously not a given but something that needs to be nailed before even considering marketing.
Customers
Once “product” is set, I’d start defining all local “customers” near us. Let’s say our restaurant is somewhere in NYC. Our core customers would be office workers, university students, and residential tenants. Great, now let’s solve for “distribution” — how do we actually find and reach these customers?
For office workers, I’d use Google maps and publicly available CRE data to find all companies with offices near me. Then I’d use LinkedIn and common email formats to guess and verify the work emails of every employee at those companies.
For university students, I’d find a directory of every club, fraternity, dorm, and school organization for campuses near me, and again verify the email of every leader or member within those groups.
For residential tenants, I’d use publicly available property data to make a list of all apartment buildings near me. For large rentals, I’d email the leasing agents. For smaller condos, I’d introduce myself to the doorman. For all others, I’d simply compile a list of physical mailing addresses.
Marketing Funnel
Now that we’ve solved for “distribution,” we need to execute the actual marketing funnel. Here’s what it would look like. First, every single potential customer will get a personal note (either direct email, pre-printed, or hand-written) from me saying a version of the following:
“Hi [Cindi], my name is Andy. I just opened a new restaurant on [19th & Park], and we serve delicious [Northern Chinese Food], with fast & friendly service. We’re excited to meet all our new neighbors & would love for you to try our food. If you have time to stop in this week, just show this [email/card] and get a [free order of dumplings] on me! PS — If you do, I recommend ordering them pan-fried :)”
When someone comes in to redeem the offer, all staff will be trained to (a) give above and beyond customer service, and (b) when ringing them up, hand them another card that reads:
“We really hope you enjoy our [dumplings]. They’re an old family recipe! We have so many other great menu items including noodles, bing (Asian flat-bread), and baozi (steamed buns). Bring back this card, try something else on our menu, & get 30% off your entire next order.”
Those that come back again get (a) above & beyond customer service and (b) another card that reads, “So great to see you again! We hope you enjoy your meal. BTW, did you know we also have homemade desserts? Stop in next time with this card and get dessert on us :)
Finally, those that come back, now for the THIRD time, will once again get great service and a standard loyalty punch card with a message that says “Want to occasionally (max 1–2/month) receive exclusive text offers from us? Just text “Hey Neighbor” to [484–702–6177] to sign up.”
Results
I simplified a lot of steps for brevity, but if executed correctly, this could generate THOUSANDS of new customers monthly and hundreds of repeat guests at very low costs — free dumplings, cards, etc. Moreover, it only targets verified local customers and automatically markets to 3 visits, not just 1.
The real cost would be time. With a very dedicated team, this could all actually be done manually (e.g. finding emails, printing cards, tracking phone numbers) but it would take a MASSIVE amount of work.
So it begs the question: what would it look like if someone took this entire process, brought it online, automated it, replicated it, and scaled it up so that no time commitment was needed?
AND what if all of your hard-earned customers were yours to keep and not owned by some 3rd party delivery app that wanted to take 30% each time they ordered?
That’s the type of marketing I would want to execute for my hypothetical restaurant and that is the exact product we are building at Spread.
