By Matt Plapp
Recently, I made the case that the chains are winning the footprint war and that your only shot at fighting back is replicating their reach digitally. This week, we’re getting tactical—because a digital footprint without a plan behind it is just another version of Hope and Pray marketing.
I’m Matt Plapp, CEO of America’s Best Restaurants. We help independent restaurant owners win. We help them win new customers, win back lost customers, win more frequent visits, win higher checks, win their community’s attention and win against the chains. We do it through our three pillars, ABR: attract attention, build a database and retain your customers.
Today, I’m going to show you what happens when you skip even one of them—starting with the restaurant I just ghosted for the second time in four years.
The Barleycorn’s Story (Round Two)
I’ve been eating wings at Barleycorn’s since 1984. I was eight years old. I made a bet with the general manager, Art, in 1986 that the Bears would beat the Bengals. The bet was free wings for life. My parents told him to stop honoring it after a few months, but the damage was done. I was branded as the kid who ate their wings.
Over 42 years, I’ve made thousands of visits. I genuinely cannot remember the last bad meal I had there. Their food is always great, the service is solid and the atmosphere is what I look for from a dine-in restaurant.
And I’ve gone missing on them twice. The first time was in 2022. I had a midlife-crisis car: orange, fast, fun. Driving Route 42 through stoplights wasn’t exciting in a car that goes 207 miles an hour, so I started cutting up I-75 to get to the office. I stopped passing the Barleycorn’s sign. I stopped thinking about Barleycorn’s. Three months went by before my daughter came home from college and asked to go there for dinner.
This latest time, it’s my wife’s fault—sort of. Between my house and Barleycorn’s, there are now 23 new restaurants. One of them is Taco Mama. My wife loves it. She’s been three times in the last week and dragged me along twice. Both times, when I asked where we should eat, she suggested Taco Mama before I could suggest Barleycorn’s.
That’s 42 years of loyalty, erased by a Mexican place that opened closer to my house.
Here’s the Scary Part
A restaurant I’ve eaten at since 1984 has no idea I’m gone. There’s no tech throwing off red alerts. No ads that find me when I’m scrolling. No phone call asking if everything’s okay. Nothing.
That’s not a Barleycorn’s problem; that’s an industry problem. It’s playing out at your restaurant right now, and you don’t know it. Customers come, customers go, and most of you have no plan, no system and no database to address it.
That is what Hope and Pray marketing looks like. They hope I remember them. They pray I drive by and get hungry. Meanwhile, Taco Mama is winning my wallet, just because they built closer to my house and they’re showing up everywhere I look.
The Three Customers You Have to Plan Around
In your market, there are only three types of customers: New customers who’ve never tried you, frequent customers who love you and lost customers who used to love you and no longer come.
Most owners spend 100% of their marketing budget chasing the first one and 0% on the third one. Then they wonder why getting sales feel like a never-ending treadmill.
The ABR Restaurant Marketing Funnel exists to fix this. It covers the three pillars, the three customer types, and the three battlegrounds: in-store, in your community and digitally.
Pillar one is Attract. Get new eyeballs.
Pillar two is Build. Get their information so you own the relationship instead of renting it from Facebook, Yelp and DoorDash.
Pillar three is Retain. Use that database to bring people back, including the ones who quietly drifted away.
Skip Build, and the math never works. You have to reattract every customer forever, because you have no list to talk to. Skip Retain, and you’ll watch 42-year customers like me ghost you, and you never know it happened.
What Aim and Expect Looks Like
A two-location chicken concept in California just started working with us on March 5. Here’s what happened: They put one Facebook ad in the market with an offer that was hard to say no to.
The traditional metrics most agencies brag about: 76,000 impressions and 30,000 people reached. But we go deeper. We look at engagements, comments and clicks.
Why? Because this means the customer took our bait and raised their hand. Plus, with our customer acquisition system, this allows us to build a database based on their engagement. We received:
- 3,200 engagements
- 940 comments
The comments said things like, “I’ve always heard about this spot, but never been before, and now I have an excuse to come in.” That’s a real comment, from a real future customer. Most marketers stop there and call it a successful campaign.
Here’s the ABR difference. Those engagements turned into 1,800 raised hands. That’s 1,800 people who said, “Here’s my info, please send me the offer.” That’s the database. That’s the asset they now own forever. This includes about 58% brand-new customers, 11% frequent and 30% lost.
Then about 19% of that database walked into the restaurant within 60 days and spent more than $7,300 in tracked sales. The restaurant paid about $1.60 per customer acquired. The campaign self-funded two to three times over in the first 60 days alone.
But here is the part that owners miss: That database is reusable next month. And the month after. They’ll keep talking to those 1,800 people for years. The 60-day return is not the win. The lifetime value of that owned database is the win.
This is the opposite of Hope and Pray marketing. It is Aim and Expect. Now compare that to Barleycorn’s, which has no idea where Matt Plapp went.
The Lost-Customer Lever Almost Nobody Pulls
You can’t win back customers you don’t know are gone. Within our Dryver loyalty platform, one of our clients has recovered $482,000 from 647 lost customers over six years. The system flagged customers who stopped spending.
With this loyalty program, they have a “win back” program in place, which includes:
- Emails
- Texts
- And the last line of defense, a prompt for the restaurant to pick up the phone and call, saying, “Hey, did we do something wrong?”
If Barleycorn’s called me, I would have said no. I would have said “Your food’s perfect, but my wife just discovered a Mexican place down the street, and I’ll be there for lunch tomorrow.” That’s all it would have taken to at least try to re-engage me as a former customer: a plan, a system.
Build Your Attention Plan This Week
Pick one pillar, just one. Attract, build or retain—whichever one is the weakest in your restaurant right now. Then pick one of the three battlegrounds: in-store, community or digital. That’s your starting square on the matrix.
If you have no system that flags lost customers, that’s your move. Pick a window: 30, 60 or 90 days without a visit. Get a tool that flags those names automatically through your loyalty platform, POS or email system. Then go get them—through email, text, a Facebook ad or a phone call from the owner. Track who comes back so you know it works.
The chains aren’t beating you on food. Anyone who’s eaten at Barleycorn’s versus a Chipotle knows that. The chains are beating you because they have a plan to go get customers back, and most independents don’t. You need one, too.
Take our free WIN Audit and see exactly where the gaps are in your marketing. The industry average score is 28 out of 100, and most of you are leaking on the build and retain pillars. Find out yours now.
Then come hang out with us in the free ABR Skool community, where we go live every Monday at 3 p.m. Eastern with real owners, real numbers and real conversations about what’s working right now.
As for me, I really need to hit to Barleycorn’s this week—let’s hope I remember. If they had a system, they wouldn’t have to wait for me to show up. They’d already know I was gone.
I’m Matt Plapp, the CEO of America’s Best Restaurants, and we exist to help independent restaurant owners win. Not survive—win. We help them win through their marketing and by leveraging our three pillars: Attract Attention, Build a Database and Retain Your Customers. The goal is to win new customers, win back lost customers, win more frequent visits, win higher check averages, win your community’s attention and win against the chains. That last one is the one keeping you up at night. And it should be.
