Last week, we went deep into your marketing with my Attention Audit, but this week, we’re going to audit your mindset as it pertains to marketing. Too many of you think, “What did my marketing do this week?” while ignoring the value your efforts will bring to your pizzeria in a few years.
What You Can Learn From My Sneakers
After running tens of thousands of restaurant marketing campaigns, there are a couple of things I know to be true:
1. Money follows attention.
2. Brand builds customer acquisition.
You’ve heard about the first one; we’ll dig into the latter today. The facts are simple: The stronger your brand is, the easier it becomes to acquire customers.
Related: Matt Plapp’s 3-2-1 strategy: How to gain massive attention for your pizzeria
I’ve seen this firsthand with marketing campaigns for restaurants (more on that later). But the bigger proof is in front of us daily: Just look at what major brands have done through the years. Let’s take two brands that are front and center in my life: Nike and Apple. I wear Nike Air Jordans most days, and I’ve had an iPhone since day one. I’m scared to guess how many pairs of Nikes I’ve bought due to Michael Jordan, but I currently have about 26 orange pairs! When the iPhone came out in 2007, I was in Las Vegas and rushed to get to the store to buy the first one. Since then, I’ve bought many more iPhones.
We all know Nike and Apple today, but do you realize that both brands were smaller than your pizzeria not too long ago? Every year, I pick a topic for my daily reading, and in 2024, it was books on the CEOs who have changed the world. I read books on Elon Musk, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Amazon, Waze, Apple and Nike.
The last one on that list hit me hardest: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. It’s the story of how he started Nike 61 years ago. I know what Nike is today—a worldwide giant. It’s easy to think Nike is this big, major brand, so it’s easy to sell shoes. But when you understand the path Nike took to get where it is today, you start to understand the power of the brand as it relates to acquiring sales for your business.
Those 100-plus pairs of Nike shoes I bought as an adult required zero convincing. I wasn’t comparing my many orange Jordans to another brand, weighing the features and benefits. I was 100%, without a doubt, buying the Jordans, and 90% were unplanned purchases. Why? Because Nike has spent 40-plus years building brand trust with Matt Plapp. I know exactly what I’m getting, and I trust it.
The strength of their brand makes it easy for them to sell shoes. Last week, Nike announced some shoe launches for this summer. One is a new orange Jordan, and I promise a pair will be in my closet by summer’s end. At least five people texted me pictures of the shoe announcement, so that’s another testament to the power of branding in its own right.
Do me a favor and pick up a copy of Shoe Dog. It’s easily the best book I’ve ever read, and it serves as a case study for almost every lesson you’ll need to build your business.
Branding and ROI
But enough about shoes. Let’s talk about pizza and wings, two of my favorite things.
Strong’s Brick Oven Pizza in Union, Kentucky, is my favorite pizza place. Their Almost Famous Hot & Spicy Pizza is my go-to. The restaurant is near my house and on the way to my office, so I see it often every week—they accidentally have my attention. But their service is always solid, the restaurant is welcoming, and, as I mentioned, the pizza is fire.
Barleycorn’s in Florence, Kentucky, is my all-time favorite wing joint. I’ve been eating buffalo wings there since at least 1985 (that’s the earliest I can recall). I’d be willing to bet I’ve eaten wings there a few thousand times. I can count on one hand the number of issues I’ve had there since I was a kid, so you can say they check every box when running a restaurant.
Both of these spots are brands I trust 100%. When given the choice of eating pizza or wings at a local place near my house or office, they will win nine out of 10 times. So imagine what would happen if they reached me with an advertisement. You guessed it: Their acquisition of my hard-earned money would be much easier than with a customer who’s never eaten at either.
I’ve been working with restaurant owners on advertising and marketing since 1999, and there are a few constants I hear from owners:
- What’s my ROI?
- How many customers will I get?
- I tried advertising, but it didn’t work.
- How will I measure the impact on my sales?
- What percent sales increase will I see?
It’s as if many of you don’t care about the brand you’ve spent years building through blood, sweat and tears. Every time you market your business, you think you should get a stampede of customers. You demand results now, and you cancel when you don’t see the numbers you think you should have. This leads you to run only short-term marketing campaigns.
Most buying decisions you and I make daily are due to the brand, not some spur-of-the-moment ad from a business we’ve never worked with. A restaurant can run ads to acquire new customers and get results, but those results will depend entirely on the brand’s strength or weakness.
In 2021, a six-location restaurant brand in Idaho hired us to run its customer acquisition VIP program. The owner had been running a branding-heavy marketing campaign with a local ad agency for 12 months. He told me he wasn’t sure if it worked, because there was never a call to action or any trackable results. He wanted my opinion on whether it was a good investment. I told him, “It couldn’t have hurt, and we’ll soon find out when we turn on our ads with an irresistible offer.”
The program we ran for him would typically see a 15% to 25% conversation rate. We’ve all heard about direct mail having a 2% to 5% conversion rate, and a properly built digital acquisition program should be 15% to 25%. But within 60 days, this restaurant had a 45% rate! Yes, 45%! Almost every other person who responded to the Facebook ad walked into his restaurants and spent money. He was blown away and called me to rave about our program. I was happy, too, but I told him we could take credit for only part of the results.
I then explained to him that those results are as much a product of the local firm’s marketing efforts as ours. Without the ads they’d been running, we would never have achieved that level of success. Our ad acquisition was a product of the brand strength; without those likes and clicks the year before, we would have likely seen about 25%.
Consider if he had told that branding agency a month in, “This isn’t working. Where’s my ROI?” Imagine if he’d canceled, like many people do. He would have had half the results he got from our program, losing out on 10,000-plus customers who joined the VIP program and over $200,000 in up-front sales. His brand would have been much weaker, and so would have our results.
A More Recent Case Study
As I’ve already stated, brand strength makes customer acquisition easier. The example above illustrated how a strong brand helped acquire customers’ information for the first time. In the following example, we will examine the results of two pizzerias trying to convert their current customers into a new loyalty program through email marketing.
Two pizzerias we work with recently launched new loyalty programs. Both brands have been around for a long time in their respective markets and have massive brand recognition, and this example will show a brand’s power in converting customers. Also remember that every customer list isn’t created equal, and how you use that list over many years can make a big difference.
Moving customers to a loyalty program can be tricky. There are many moving parts, from the strength and size of your current list to the offer you give them up-front. Of course, technology is also a big part of the puzzle. But in this case, the technology was the same for both restaurants; they used my company’s loyalty program, Dryver.
Pizzeria #1 has a single location, while Pizzeria #2 is a chain with more than 30 stores. The chain has a considerably larger advertising budget and reach than the independent, but both are legacy brands in their market. One significant difference between the two is the customer list they started with.
Pizzeria #1 has been running a social media VIP program for three years and has built a robust list of 15,000 customers, 5,000 of which are very loyal. They’ve also used Facebook and Facebook Messenger to nurture that list; we call it “really warm” in the marketing biz.
The chart below shows the results from the first 90 days.
Database Size | Visits per Contact | |
One-Location Pizzeria | 17,500 | 1.4 |
Chain Pizzeria | 168,000 | .3 |
As you can see, the one-location pizzeria saw 1.4 visits per contact loaded into their new loyalty program versus .3 for the chain. Both restaurants have similar average checks, so when you do the math, you see a massive difference in the strength of these two programs. I dug deep into their numbers to find out why their launch results were so dramatically different. The answer was mainly due to the “warmth” of the customer list.
This was eye-opening for me. Before we acquired the loyalty company in 2023, for 10 years, all I saw was how good or bad our clients did on the front end with our customer acquisition VIP programs. I saw first what it was to build a strong list up-front, but I never had proof of what happened with that list once it was used in a loyalty program. Now that I see it and create case studies like this, I’m blown away. It’s made me an even bigger believer in brand strength throughout the entire process—both before customers know you and while they are in your universe.
So I strongly recommend that you examine your marketing deeply and ask yourself, “What am I doing to support customers’ belief in doing business with my restaurant?”