Over the past 20 weeks, we have discussed marketing and its relationship to your pizzeria. Today, I want to attack this from a different angle. Often in business, we focus on the solution or the end goal while failing to address the actual problem or to understand it deeply enough.
Last year, I read the book Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution by Uri Levine. He created the traffic app Waze, which he later sold to Google for $1.3 billion…that’s billion with a B!
The book chronicles how his obsession with the “problem” led him to create Waze. Recently, at America’s Best Restaurants HQ in Northern Kentucky, I’ve been dealing with a drainage and sump pump issue at our office. This problem has been around for four years, and it hit me this past month: “I’ve been focusing on the solution, not the problem.” In other words, I was trying to get the water to drain better from our property rather than figuring out why the drainage problem was happening in the first place.
Related: How to Use Email Marketing to Keep Customers’ Attention and Drive Sales
Over the past four weeks, I have studied the root causes of our drainage problem. Instead of trying to direct the water where I needed it to go, I figured out why the water was an issue in the first place, and guess what…PROBLEM SOLVED! (Knock on wood, Matt!)
In restaurant marketing, we spend our time trying to find a solution for lower or lagging sales. But what if we followed Uri’s advice and instead focused on the problem?
Let’s map it out, starting with the final solution we hope to achieve. As an example, I’ll use a pizzeria that aims to increase its annual sales by $100,000:
- You need to increase sales by $100,000.
- Which means you need 4,000 more annual visits ($25 average check)
- To hit 4,000 total visits, you need a strategic mix of customer segments—an average of 1,200 visits each from new, frequent and lost customers.
- Which means you need to:
- Find 400 new customers and get them to visit 2 times.
- Get 400 of your best customers to visit 6 more times.
- Find 400 of your former customers and get them to come back twice.
- You could also get people to spend more when they visit by:
- Upselling appetizers
- Upselling desserts
- Selling more alcoholic beverages
- Selling more sides or upcharging on entrees.
- How do we get 1,200 customers to take this action?
- Emails
- Texts
- Phone calls
- Hand them a promo in person
- Social media posts
So in order to get these 4,000 visits, you simply need to email, text, call, shake hands and make posts. Pretty simple, right?
Wrong!
Let’s take one of these “opportunities”: email marketing. First off, there’s a 75% chance you don’t have the emails of most of these 1,200 customers. For sure, you don’t have the new customers’ emails—you don’t even know them yet!
You also don’t have a system built to automatically talk to them about their journey with your restaurant. Take your lost customers as an example. Let’s assume you have their email, but do you have it hooked up to a marketing software that tells you they’ve missed a visit and automatically reaches out to them to bring them home? Based on the hundreds of conversations my team has weekly with restaurant owners just like you, you don’t!
Now… back to the problem.
Your solution may be an increase in sales of $100,000, but what’s the actual problem? What’s the PROBLEM you must “fall in love with?” One could argue that ATTENTION is your problem. After all, if these customers were aware of your restaurant, your offerings, your promos and your brand in general on a daily basis, you’d have them thinking about you all the time, which would drive sales.
But I think the problem is deeper than attention. I think you need MASSIVE ATTENTION. But more importantly, you need a marketing plan built around gaining MASSIVE ATTENTION.
And to help you understand every opportunity you should take advantage of in this plan, I created a marketing tool called the “Attention Audit.” I created it 10 years ago to help restaurant owners understand the gaps in their marketing plan. Without a clear understanding of the gaps and a plan to address them, you’ll never solve your attention problem.
To find out where your problem is, start with a quick 25-question “Attention Audit.” Click this link to get started: www.americasbestrestaurants.live/aa.
My name is Matt Plapp. I’m the CEO of America’s Best Restaurants. 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 latest article in a new weekly column for PMQ to help restaurant owners understand the gold mine we have to market in 2025—and beyond.
