In our world filled with location check-ins, self-proclaimed “foodies”, and an endless amount of #nom hashtags floating on social media, it’s easy to make the assumption that people love sharing pictures of their food. As a restaurant owner, this is really great news for you. These snap-happy foodies are basically completely free advertisements for your restaurant. All you have to do is offer totally pic worthy food for your customers, and be ultra present on social media sites so they won’t have to think twice about tagging your restaurant in their photos.

Are You Utilizing Instagram?

You may already be active on Facebook or Twitter, but if you don’t have a live Instagram account, the time is now. Setting up an Instagram account for your restaurant not only allows you another free platform to share images from your perspective at the restaurant, but it also creates an interactive space for your customers to advertise for your restaurant at zero cost to you.

With 800 million (and counting) users on Instagram, this platform offers an audience for you whether you’re a local pizza shop attracting college students, or a breakfast and lunch joint for families. Customers are sharing mini sized billboards of their favorite meals at their favorites restaurants all over the internet, so it’s time to make sure you become a part of it!

Our friends at Fundera, created a helpful infographic that offers some foolproof ways to put your best face forward for your Instagram following. Check it out here!

The post A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words appeared first on Restaurant Logic.

The answer is simple. You’ve been out-marketed. I know what you’re thinking — of
course, they have a much bigger marketing budget than I could ever have. While
this may be true, it is easier than it ever has been to compete and win against the big brand marketing
wave. The internet and social media have equalized the playing field. The real
question is, are you taking advantage of it? 

The key to winning the marketing battle is to have a balanced marketing plan &
calendar. If you’re like most independent restaurants your current marketing
plan looks mostly like this:

Don’t fret – we’re here to
help. Today, I am going to show you how to make some simple adjustments to
create a winning marketing calendar within 6 weeks. The goal – have your
marketing planned out 60 days in advance.

Week 1: Carve out an hour in
your schedule to get your marketing calendar set three weeks out.

Week 2-5: Take ½ hour to add 2
more weeks to your marketing calendar

Week 6 (and beyond): Add 1 week
to your marketing calendar

Sounds simple enough…but what
exactly do you include on that marketing calendar? Here’s some tips:

·
Start with email. Best practice is 1 email per week. Best things to
email? Glad you asked. Let your customers know about LTOs, coupons, menu
launches, and upcoming events.

·
Next, add some Facebook and Twitter posts. Best practice for Facebook
is 3-4 posts weekly. We recommend the rule of thirds: 1/3 promotions, 1/3
stories, and 1/3 creative posts; pictures of food, pictures of things happening
in your restaurant, staff highlights, upcoming events, community happenings.  For Twitter? We recommend daily posting. These
posts should include your daily specials, pictures of food, weather-related
posts, holiday-related posts (national burger day, etc..)

If you’re looking for a
template to use for your marketing, you could look into building your calendar
on a google doc, an excel spreadsheet, or even by using Google Calendar. If you’re
looking for an even simpler option (that doesn’t force you to waste time
copying and pasting), we highly recommend the use of our marketing calendar on
Restaurant Logic’s dashboard. By using our Restaurant Logic marketing calendar,
you can visualize your marketing strategy in way in advance. And guess what? It
even offers recommended content and ideas so all you have to do is schedule
them out. If you’ve been searching for a simpler option…we found it.

By following the outline above,
you can make a significant impact on your marketing success. If you feel you’re
not able to make time for it quite yet, we believe adding even 10 minutes a day
to work on your marketing schedule can make a huge difference to your bottom
line.  Focus on some small goals to start
off. Transparently speaking, we don’t believe writing a lengthy marketing
strategy isn’t nearly as important as simply sitting down and planning some
real content.

Here’s hoping these bite size
action items will realistically help you gain a better grasp on your marketing
concept.  Your marketing might not start
out perfect, it will probably need some tweaking and adjusting along the way,
but if you start planning now we know that it will become a valued resource
that will not only make advertising your restaurant easier, but more successful
too.

The post How To Create An Effective Marketing Calendar for Your Restaurant Today appeared first on Restaurant Logic.

But I have noticed one
thing… I’ve noticed a unique trend in our eating habits.

About every three months, while my wife is innocently browsing Pinterest, she stumbles upon a juicy new
article about healthy eating. Usually it has the world “cleanse” or
“challenge” in the title, and before I can ask what gluten is, all our bagels are
in the trash, our milk is down the drain, and I’m sitting in front of a bowl of
spaghetti noodles made out of squash.

There was a lot of resistance initially. I mean, if you remove meat-lovers pizza and baby
back ribs out of any man’s life, there’s bound to be a period of withdrawal.

But I’ve been roped into enough of these now that I actually don’t mind them as much. It’s hard to
admit, but by the time it’s through, I almost always feel better and weirdly
enough, all my pants miraculously get a little bigger.

Whether it’s abstaining from sugar, dodging carbs, or focusing on “clean-eating,” there are always a set of
guidelines we have to operate against in order to stay within the boundaries of
the chosen program.

These programs, while being good for my health and whatnot, can end up being terribly inconvenient and
radically interrupt my day-to-day eating habits. But I know if I want to see
the health benefits of this program, I need to set myself up for daily success,
knowing I’m going to get hungry at least three times a day. Also knowing that
my go-to lunch buddies of old aren’t going to cut it… bye bye cheesy gordita
crunch.

It’s wildly unrealistic for me to think, with my sporadic schedule, that before every meal, breakfast,
lunch, and dinner, I’ll have the time, resources, or energy to cook up a fresh
meal tailored to my dietary restrictions.

It’s just as wilding unrealistic for any restaurant owner to think they are going to be able to give
their marketing the attention and preparation it deserves trying to figure it
out day to day.

It all comes down to one word.

Preparation.

Meal prepping, I believe is the term my wife uses. For those of you like me who didn’t know, that means
planning out, shopping for, and cooking up all your meals on Sunday for the
entire week ahead of time. If you look up the #mealprep on twitter, you’ll see
exactly what I mean.

We meal prep to make sure there’s enough good food to get us through and I don’t end up scarfing down a
bag of cool ranch Doritos because we didn’t cook enough broccoli, or, for a
restaurant, making sure there’s no poorly thought through social media posts or
under-utilized email marketing efforts.

You won’t know whether or not your efforts are successful if you don’t
intentionally invest in your marketing plan. If you randomly post content or
send emails to appear active, how will you ever know if your efforts are
contributing to your business’s success? Some speaks to meal planning. If I eat
steamed broccoli with my Big Mac at dinner, chances are any affect those
vegetables have on my health will be hard to notice.

When meal prepping, there are three steps we have to think through in preparing for each week.

1.] Outline what we want to eat this week day-by-day

-How many meals do we need to prep?

-What do we want those meals to be? (Monday: Turkey
burgers and sweet potatoes, Tuesday: Lemon Pepper Chicken…) 

What do I want my restaurants marketing to look like this week? 

-How many Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts do I want?

-What do I want the contents of these posts to be?

We recommend posting on Facebook and Twitter no less than once every three days, as a low-end rule of
thumb. You really don’t want your frequency to drop any lower than that though.
People dropping by your page want to see you’re alive, you’re active, and you
have something to say. Allow the personality of your restaurant to shine
through online, don’t be afraid to have fun with it!

2.] Map out what we need to get from the grocery store

-What ingredients do we need for each meal?

-Do we have the right balance of meat, vegetables, and fruit?

What do I want the content of my restaurant’s posts to be made up of?

-How many pictures of menu items do I want to showcase? Dessert items? Alcoholic Beverages? Are there menu
items we would like to sell more of?

-How many staff highlights should I do?

-Try to keep it high level

Sometimes when you start to prepare and outline your marketing, you realize you may actually have an
opportunity to delegate some of this responsibility to other staff members. For
instance, if you have a socially savvy server that you know is already active
on Instagram, maybe ask her pre-shift to keep her eye out for a moment to snap
a photo of that she could pair with a clever statement and post online. Maybe
you want to post it right then and there, or maybe you want to save that post
for a later date. Possibly even give her $10 bucks for every usable photo and
phrase; some employees might even get excited enough to share that photo on
their personal page to get the ball rolling.

3.] Go get the food and prepare those meals.

Take the outline you created, and sit down and make
your restaurant’s social media posts in advance.

-The key is to have a plan that is actionable, and do it. It won’t take forever, but make sure to set some
time aside before the week begins to prepare your posts.

For many people, myself included, preparing ahead of time for anything is extraordinarily difficult
because there are probably 83 other things screaming for your attention that
feel much more pressing. But without a clear strategy, your marketing plan
becomes lost in your to-do list.

Creating a simple outline for yourself is always a great idea. The best part about an
outline or framework for social media posts, is that once you find a few
structures that work, you can reuse them month-to-month. As long as you’re not
carbon copying posts and reusing the same images and catch-lines, a solid
framework for posting can go a long way.

This is something we believe quite strongly in at Restaurant Logic; so much so that we actually created a
Marketing Calendar for our customers to us when mapping out their social media
content. It’s filled with dozens of different posts every month that you can
use as inspiration for your posting, or even use them word for word if you’d
like. Our calendar makes it very easy to plan your posts and schedule them out
for automatic posting, so you can focus your attention on your business.

The post Marketing Meal Prep – Tips On Getting Your Marketing Calendar Started appeared first on Restaurant Logic.