By Matt Plapp
Last week here on PMQ.com, I talked about how the chains are stealing your footprint and why you have to replicate theirs digitally. If you missed it, the short version is this: You can’t outspend Chipotle on billboards, but you can absolutely outperform them inside your customers’ phones. Today, I want to go one layer deeper and give you the actual system to do it.
The Conversation That Made Me Write This
On Monday morning, I was on the phone with a restaurant owner. He’s a great guy with a great product and great location. He was doing $3 million a few years ago. He’s on pace for $2.8 million this year, and he told me he knows his real potential is $3.5 million.
So I asked him the only question that matters: “What’s the plan to bridge the $200,000 gap?”
His answer? “Matt, I’ve got to be honest with you. There’s not a massive plan.”
That right there is what I call hope-and-pray marketing. Open the doors, make great food and pray people show up. And guess what? Twenty years ago, that worked. Today, it doesn’t. Because this owner has no email list. No text list. No loyalty program. He has zero levers to pull. When business dips, he has nothing to reach for.
Why I Built the ABR Restaurant Marketing Funnel
The marketing playbook of 20 years ago was simple because the options were few: Buy a radio ad. Buy some TV ads. Run direct mail. Stick up a billboard.
Most of you couldn’t afford to play at that level, and the chains dominated, because they could. If you were a one-location pizzeria trying to compete with a 30-unit chain, you would be crushed on exposure every single day.
Here’s what changed: Your customers, your neighbors, your kids, your parents—all of them are on their phones 144 times a day. They’re checking email, text, Facebook, Instagram, websites. We live, eat, sleep and drink inside our phones. And none of these platforms charges you to show up. Even when you do pay, a few hundred dollars on Facebook ads can get you in front of thousands of people. That is the most level playing field small restaurants have ever had.
The problem is that most owners don’t have a system for it. They post when they feel like it. They send an email every three months. They ran a text blast last spring and haven’t touched the list since. That’s not a plan. That’s noise.
The ABR restaurant marketing funnel is the plan. Three pillars, every week, every month, every quarter. As a reminder, ABR stands for: Attract. Build. Retain.
Pillar One: Attract Attention
The top of the funnel is attention. Everything that puts eyeballs on your brand lives here: your wrapped vehicle, your sign, the graphics on your windows, your website, Facebook, Instagram, your emails and texts, the content your team films on a Tuesday morning. All of it.
And here’s the trap: You can rent attention forever and never own anything. That’s what radio and TV were. You paid, you got exposure, and the minute you stopped paying, the exposure stopped. If you only live at the top of the funnel, you’re on a treadmill, and you can’t get off.
Pillar Two: Build a Database
This is where most restaurants leak the most money. You got the attention. Your Facebook ad works. Someone sees it and walks in on Friday and drops $23. And then what? You let them walk out the door and never captured a thing.
Above are some numbers from a client. Last month, one of our restaurant partners spent $408 on Facebook ads. Yes, those ads reached a lot of people—there were thousands of impressions and 500-plus folks engaged with the posts, which is the concept behind traditional marketing. However, in the ABR Restaurant Marketing Funnel, the “Attention” part is just the start.
From those ads, 379 people opted into their marketing program—meaning, these local customers raised their digital hand after seeing the ad and said, “Here’s my info! Send me an awesome promo to come try your restaurant.”
And then the magic happened—83 people walked in and collectively spent $5,337.80. And 67% of those customers told us when they opted in that they had never been to the restaurant, or had not been in a while. In other words, this is found money.
But here’s the part I love. They now have 379 customers whom they can reach out to—for free—from their own database. They don’t have to pay Facebook to reach those customers again. Instead, next month, they can take that $408 and find another 379 people, brand-new to their database.
So the ad got their attention and built the database. Up next is how you use that database.
Pillar Three: Retain Attention
If you get the attention, capture the contact and then never speak to that person again, you wasted your efforts. I see email lists with 8,000 names sitting there collecting dust, or text lists nobody has used in six months. That is money on the table.
A few years back, we were working with a craft brewery here in Northern Kentucky called Hofbräuhaus Newport. Nick, the owner, was frustrated. Sales were declining year over year, and he couldn’t figure out why. So I grabbed three of my buddies, told them the drinks were on me, and we visited every craft brewery in town.
Here’s what we found: Individually, none of those little breweries could touch Hofbräuhaus. Some of them had one or two tables and a couple of mustachioed guys pouring beer. But collectively? All 50 of them combined were stealing Hofbräuhaus’ attention. Hofbräuhaus used to be the only craft brewery in town. Now there were 50 choices.
This was unavoidable, but it was compounded by the fact that Hofbräuhaus wasn’t retaining its customers’ attention through its marketing, either. They weren’t using email, text or paid social media to retain their customers’ attention.
And while you might not be facing this same fight, you’re facing a very similar one. Every community in America has been flooded with chains. You have more competition now than you ever did. The quarter-mile stretch of land near my house that’s now “restaurant row” had zero restaurants 30 years ago. When I moved in 10 years ago, there were two. Today, it has 23.
You’re not losing to one competitor. You’re losing to the cumulative noise of all of them. And the only way to win is to intentionally retain your customers’ attention every single week.
Three Places to Run This System
Here’s how I want you to think about ABR this week. You only have three places to run this funnel:
- Inside your restaurant
- Inside your community
- Inside your customer’s phone
Within your four walls, you attract attention with your signage, staff, energy and experience. You build a database by training your team to collect customer information at every single touchpoint. You retain attention by making sure every guest leaves with a reason to come back.
Inside your community, you attract attention by showing up. One of our clients, Little Italy Ristorante in Groveport, Ohio, just did a massive PR push for a fundraiser honoring three soldiers from their community who were lost overseas. That fundraiser drew attention to a cause that mattered and built trust with every single person in that town. Too many restaurants sit back and wait for the community to come to them. The winners go to the community first.
Related: How Little Italy Ristorante Turned $500,000 into $5 Million in Annual Sales
On your customer’s phone, you attract attention through social media, build a database through email and text opt-ins, and retain attention by using those channels intentionally—not blasting, not selling, but showing up with content your customers want to open.
One Thing to Do This Week
Pick one pillar. Just one: Attract, build or retain.
Then look at your restaurant and ask yourself honestly, where is the biggest leak? Most owners I talk to know the answer the second I ask. You’re either not attracting enough new attention, you’re not capturing the attention you do get, or you’re not using the database you already have.
Fix the leak. Don’t try to fix all three this week. Just pick the one that’s bleeding the most and plug it.
If you want to see exactly where the gaps are in your restaurant’s marketing across all three pillars, take our free WIN Audit. It has 12 simple questions, and it’ll give you a real score on where you stand today.
And if you want to go deeper, join our free ABR Skool community, where we help owners and their teams dominate all nine strategies under the ABR pillars. We go live every Monday at 3 p.m. Eastern, and I’d love to see you there.
Your restaurant is not going to beat the chains by accident. Pick the pillar. Plug the leak. Let’s go win this week.
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.
