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Al Peralta started out in the pizza business in 1986 working for Bella Pizza, an award winning franchised pizzeria in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. By 1992, he had opened his own Bella Pizza franchise in North Vancouver, which is a satellite city of Vancouver with a population around 50,000 people. Bella Pizza has eight locations throughout British Columbia, and Al said there are at least 55 pizzerias in his delivery area, but through business networking he has been able to maintain plenty of good word-of-mouth and loyal customers, earning the franchise the award of Best Pizza of North Vancouver by Vancouver Magazine.
Out-servicing the Rest
In 2006 Al expanded his take-out/delivery operation to a full dining restaurant called Bella Candela. The pizza at Bella Candela is a Montreal-style thin crust that is baked flat on the stone with the toppings beneath the cheese. “I wanted to do a regional representation of Canada, so for each region, I have a different pizza: the Yukon Gold, which is a cream sauce-based pizza, the West Coast Tree Hugger is an all vegetarian with spinach, red onions, feta cheese, roasted garlic, and sun-dried tomatoes,” Al said. Being of Latin heritage, Al said Bella Candela has a strong Latin influence with Latin music playing and even some Latin items on the menu, such as the La Bella Mexicana, which is a pizza with seasoned ground beef, green peppers, tomatoes, salsa, taco spice and Jalapeño peppers covered in cheddar/mozzarella mix cheese. Al said in order to stay on top you have to be involved in your community. “I work with the different school lunch programs to help raise funds for the schools, the soccer associations and I am a member of the chamber of commerce. But, my major drive for marketing is through networking groups,” he explained.
Marketing through networking groups
The networking groups are composed of business owners and managers within the community who get together on a regular basis to refer business to each other or to keep current on community, business, and political activities.
“This morning we did a screening of a movie in the restaurant,” he continues. “We have a projection screen and we had 57 people in today. We fixed a breakfast buffet and some breakfast pizzas.” He said these meetings introduce a large portion of the community leaders to his restaurant. “Most of these people are North Shore-based, so if I do a good job, I’m guaranteed these people will turn around and talk the restaurant up. Out of this one group, I had five Christmas parties booked for my restaurant.” Al said once you’re established as a place for networking events, it’s free marketing and it generates business. Holding one event nearly every week, Al said most of the people who frequent the networking groups are bank managers, realtors, newspaper reporters, and lawyers. “The referrals are worth their weight in gold because they don’t come lightly—if I refer you to my lawyer friend for legal services and he does a bad job of representing you, I’m going to know about it, so there’s a lot of weight and trust in these referrals.” Finding your local networking groups, or organizing your own group, can be as easy as picking up the phone. Check with your chamber of commerce to see if they know of any. If there isn’t a group in your area, you can even organize a group to meet in your restaurant on a weekly or monthly basis by contacting your local business owners and chamber of commerce members. Al’s advice on attracting a network group to your restaurant is to deliver a focused and concise message stating that you would love to entertain small groups in your establishment. “Keep in mind that the networking event you host is a marketing tool to introduce your establishment to a group of people who are in the frame of mind of sharing their contacts with you…it is that leveraging that will reap the rewards and not the actual sales from the event,” Al reported. “You can look at it as getting paid to advertise your business.”
Marketing and Advertising
Al said his major rule of thumb is to never do marketing or advertising without being able to track the return on investment. “In print ads, I will make sure I have a call to action: a special offer. My name is not the most important thing. I don’t use advertising for awareness campaigns, I use it to catch a person’s attention that’s looking for what I’ve got to offer,” he informed. Al tracks his advertisement returns on his point of sale system. “Right now I’m doing an advertising campaign where I’m giving away a free pizza. In order to get the pizza, [the customer] has to call and make a reservation for the night, they order a pizza for either pick up or delivery, they pay for it, and can use the receipt as “Bella Cash” as long as it is on that same day and used for a dine-in meal,” he said. “I’ve targeted this towards families because it works well for them…what they’ll do most times is call the babysitter, get the pizza for the kids and babysitter, and then the husband and wife will come in to the restaurant for a great dinner at a discount of up to $20.”
Al said with most advertising campaigns, they are just barely breaking even, over a six-week period. He measures the campaigns over a six-week period because, “If 10% of those customers become long-term customers, each one of those customers is worth $750 a year,” Al said. So 150 calls means on average you’ll retain 15 for long-term, he estimates three years of business from those 15 customers, equaling approximately $34,000 worth of business over the three year period. “If you don’t break even on a campaign in a six week period, you’re in the negative as far as the marketing campaign is concerned.”
Al said one of his most unusual advertising feats was for an awareness campaign. “I advertised on the back of a bus one time. It was $400 a month, but I don’t think I got $800 per month to make it worth while,” he said. Another unusual but catchy idea Bella Pizza does during Christmas time is tree decorating. “We had a big sign outside that said, ‘put a Christmas ornament on our tree and we’ll give you a free egg nog.’” He said the reason this works well is because it includes the customer in the restaurant. “They can say, ‘that’s my ornament—I put that there,’ and it gives them a sense of ownership,” he said. It’s not customary to ask a patron to participate in the operations of your restaurant, but giving them that sense of participation goes a long way, Al said. He also mentioned one thing he tries to do when there are special groups in the restaurant, “I try to get pictures and I really try hard to e-mail the customers with their pictures of their event before they even get home. It gives them that little ‘wow’ factor. I tell my staff, ‘under-promise and over-deliver.’ We try to do that as much as we can.”
“Right now I’m on the verge of launching an e-mail campaign,” Al said. “It will be targeting existing customers.” The company he is using for the e-mail campaign is called Extra Contact. “I have a business card collection and [customers] can also sign up through our web site. We’re also asking every customer that calls in if they’d like to receive specials through e-mail.” Al said they don’t just sell stuff but they also let them know how they’re involved in the community and what’s coming up. “Right now we have about 300 addresses, but compared to our phone database, which is about 10,000 names, it’s not as big as we’d like it to be yet.”
Final Words
As we can see from the story of Bella Pizza, a personal touch can add so much to the value of your restaurant. Offering your customers a sense of ownership and participation in your restaurant, as Al did with the Christmas tree in his pizzeria, having a digital camera handy to photograph your customers’ special events and e-mailing them their pictures, these things all help build loyal customers and friends. Through networking and smart advertising and marketing practices, such as only carrying out those campaigns that can be tracked, your business can grow and develop along with your community. “I think in business it’s important to keep in mind you get what you give,” Al advised. “So, the more you give, the more you’re going to get.”