Editor’s note: This is the second 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

When it comes to attracting attention for your restaurant, what works, and what should you not waste your time on? After all, you don’t want to do marketing just to get reach and impressions for your pizza restaurant; you want marketing to drive sales.

In last week’s article, we laid the foundation for my ABR (Attract, Build, Retain) theory for marketing your restaurant. If you missed it, click here to read that first.

The first step of the ABR equation is A, for Attract. But, in reality, all you really need to grow your restaurant is attention.

Attention is the cure for all of your woes—technically. Imagine a world where you had the same budget as McDonald’s and could be seen everywhere. If your best customers saw you 10 times more, your sales would increase. If your average customers saw you 10 times more, they’d probably become best customers. And if the Johnny-come-lately customers saw you every day, at every turn, they’d be much more frequent.

All of this assumes your restaurant rocks, which I’m sure it does. So, if you have food, service and an atmosphere that people love, then attention is 100% the cure for your sales woes.

But that’s where the problem lies: You don’t have a McDonald’s-sized ad budget, so you can’t get the attention, right?

Wrong! You can get the same level of attention in 2024, but you have to do three things:

1. You have to stop using social media wrong.
2. You must start using the right features on social media every day.
3. You have to direct all your attention down the path of build to leverage your list.

No. 3 is why my ABR method is so important. Yes, attention is great, but without a massive budget, you must depend on a following and a database that you own. The attention that McDonald’s and other major brands get through their big ad budgets is simply renting their audience, and you and I can’t afford to rent our audience. We must own it. But that topic is on next week’s agenda. For now, let’s go back to the A in ABR: Attract.

As a restaurant owner in 2024, you are lucky! I recall my days as a radio salesman in 1999, and nothing was free. If you wanted attention, it was all rented through mass media. Radio, TV, cable, direct mail, newspaper and outdoor dominated the spectrum. The only thing you controlled was the kid standing on the corner with a sign.

But 2024 is much different. The “advertising streets” are lined with gold!

June 29, 2007, should be a day that we all celebrate. In fact, I’m starting a new holiday, and this article is the first announcement of it. June 29 will now be known as “Small Business Marketers Day” to celebrate the day we were all given the greatest opportunity ever to market our businesses.

That was the day Apple launched the iPhone, the first smartphone, and the day that marketing changed forever. No longer are we glued to our TVs for entertainment, waiting for the newspaper to come out to hear the latest news, or finding out what’s up with friends in person while drinking coffee. All of this happens in our hands, every few minutes, all day long.

The smartphone has given way to apps like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok. It reinvigorated email marketing. It launched Messenger marketing, and it made text marketing widely accessible.

The launch of the iPhone gave you access to many free channels to market your restaurant. But the issue in 2024 is that most of you suck at using them. You treat social media like Valpak mailers, posting daily promotions and food pictures daily. You rarely collect customer data, but when you do, you email your entire list the same stuff every week. Nothing is segmented, and the mailers are more Valpak-style.

So, in 2024, you have the ability to reach your customers where they spend their most time, but in order to do this correctly, you have to do it on their terms and be massively consistent.

First, ask yourself: Why are your customers on social media?

Second, ask yourself: Do they go away for days at a time, or are they addicted to looking at their phones 30-plus times per hour?

Your customers are not on Facebook to see ads; they’re on Facebook to be social. Research shows they are on it 15 to 30 times per hour daily! So what does that mean for your restaurant?

It means you must show up daily with a marketing plan to capture their attention, not annoy them. You must meet them on the platforms they use daily, because they are on them.

Today, we covered the problems with how you’re failing to use these platforms to gain attention. Next week, we’ll cover what platforms to use and why, and how to use them to win—and win in a big way. Then we’ll dive into leveraging all of this new attention you’ve gained to build a database and following.

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.

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