Editor’s note: This is the first in a new weekly series of PMQ-exclusive articles about pizzeria marketing from Matt Plapp, CEO of America’s Best Restaurants and Dryver Powered by Repeat Returns.
By Matt Plapp
You don’t want to do marketing just to get reach and impressions for your pizza restaurant; you want marketing to drive sales.
The days of buying ads just to have someone see them or get a random coupon in their mailbox are over. It’s time to build a marketing plan for your restaurant that not only reaches the customers in your backyard but also sees tangible proof that they are walking in every week and spending money in your restaurant.
To build this plan, though, we must start with a goal. The goal is to drive sales, and we must agree that there are only three ways to do this:
1. Get visits from new customers.
2. Get current customers to visit more often.
3. Increase the customer’s spend.
Now that we understand how we can increase sales, it’s time to build a plan that makes all three of those possible every week. All three of these sales opportunities revolve around one simple piece: your customers’ data. This means that just knowing who your customers are isn’t enough. You must have their contact information and have permission to use it to market to them. Not having a customer database makes all three sales strategies much more complex and makes your marketing plan “hope and pray.”
Today, we will discuss how to move you from “hope and pray” to “aim and expect.” You will implement a plan enabling your restaurant to aim at each segment of your database weekly and expect an outcome.
As an example, the lowest-hanging fruit is birthday marketing. If you know which customers have a birthday every week and have their email and phone number, you can easily build a marketing campaign around those birthdays and expect a specific outcome.
Today, I want to build the foundation of your marketing plan. We already know the goal is to drive sales; to do that, we need to build a robust marketing database. But how? Through three simple letters: ABR.
A = Attract
B = Build
R = Retain
All marketing is designed to attract attention. But what you do with that attention is another thing. You can either leave it to chance or build attention-getting campaigns that build a database. Once you have a customer database, it’s time to retain their attention.
The old saying “every action has a reaction” comes to mind when I say ABR. Every marketing campaign should create an action—and that action, in this case, is either gaining a customer’s data or engaging a current customer. Once you have their data, the reaction is a visit to your restaurant.
Let’s look at the three ways to drive sales.
First, visits from new customers. What if you ran Facebook ad campaigns daily targeting consumers within a three-to-five-mile radius of your restaurant and offered a reward so good they’d feel stupid saying no? And to get that reward, they had to give you their contact information. So now that you’ve got their information and they’ve gladly raised their hand, it’s time to invite them in and start their journey with your restaurant.
Next, more visits from your current customers. To do this, you must know who they are—and 90% of you do not. This would require an in-store and website marketing program that did the same to your current customers as you did to attract new customers, making it a no-brainer to give you their name, phone number, birthday, visit frequency and email address.
Fun fact: Many of you will say, “But, Matt, I have a customer loyalty program.” Many of you do nowadays, and I love that. But loyalty programs only account for about 15% of your customers, meaning you risk losing 85% of your customers who are not in your loyalty program.
Last but not least, increase average spending. How can you take that check average up by $5 to $10? The best way I’ve seen it is by getting customers to buy something they wouldn’t usually buy, like an appetizer or dessert. And in my 1,000-plus visits to restaurants like yours over the past few years, less than 1% of the servers or “order takers” ever attempt to sell me anything. The only question I’m almost guaranteed to hear every visit is, “How are you doing?”
Your employees are terrible salespeople, but your marketing can be a fantastic salesperson. Once you have a customer’s contact information, it’s time to turn that data into a visit with a new menu item purchased and, hopefully, an introduction to a new favorite.
For me, that moment came seven years ago at Larossa’s Pizza in Florence, Kentucky. My family and I would visit every few weeks, and I’d been emailed a free cookie promo. Not being able to pass up a free cookie, we redeemed this promotion. Flash forward to 2024, and every Larossa’s order I’ve placed since then has included those cookies at full price, adding $10 to every order—equaling over $1,000 since then.
That’s the start of our marketing plan. Next week, we’ll explore how to gain attention for your restaurant.
My name is Matt Plapp. I’m the CEO of Restaurant Marketing That Works. I’ve worked with thousands of restaurants since 2008 when I started this company, and over the next 12 months, we will help 2,500-plus restaurants with their marketing. This is the first of a new weekly column for PMQ to help restaurant owners understand the gold mine we have to market in 2024—and beyond.
