By Matt Plapp
Last week, we talked about how the chains are winning the footprint war and why your only real counter-punch is building a digital presence that reaches your customers wherever they are. We covered Hope and Pray marketing, the concept of Aim and Expect, and why independent restaurants have a massive opportunity hiding right in front of them.
Now let’s talk about exactly what you’re leaving on the table.
Your Marketing Plan Goal
The goal of your marketing plan, every single week, should be to win. Win more new customers. Win back lost customers. Win higher check averages. Win your community’s attention.
That’s what Aim and Expect look like in practice: You use your marketing plan to target a customer segment and expect an outcome from those efforts. You’re not throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping somebody shows up Friday night. You’re running a plan.
But the unfortunate truth is that too many restaurant owners are still running on Hope and Pray: “I hope my customers remember me. I pray they see my Facebook plea for sales.” That’s not a plan. That’s a wish.
At the end of last week’s article, I mentioned taking our Restaurant Marketing Audit. This is a tool I built to help restaurant owners see the attention they are leaving on the table. Thousands of you have taken it. The average score? Twenty-eight. That’s 28 out of 100.
So when I say you’re leaving $200,000 on the table, I mean it. Your marketing is so far behind that your customers are driving past you every single day and eating at the chains, which can afford to score a 28 on their marketing because they have a six-figure budget and 11 locations to make up for it. You don’t have that luxury.
You need a plan. Let me show you what one looks like.
What’s Missing in Your Marketing?
The audit looks at 12 specific levers in your marketing. These are 12 things you either have working or you don’t. And when I say “working,” I mean a hard yes. Not “sort of,” not “we try,” but a resounding yes. Because in this audit, anything less than a resounding yes is a no.
Here are the 12: paid ads, social media engagement, video marketing, in-store customer acquisition, website customer acquisition, social media customer acquisition, database segmentation, marketing automation, an active loyalty program, an active birthday program, email marketing and text marketing.
Read that list again. Go ahead. How many can you answer with a hard yes right now?
Most owners I work with answer “no” to eight of the 12. And that’s fine. It just means you’ve got eight levers you haven’t pulled yet. Let me walk you through a few so you understand what I’m really asking.
Paid ads. Facebook and Instagram ads are a gold mine that most independent restaurants are not touching. Here’s why that matters. Amazon, Nike, Red Bull, Chevy—they’re all spending their social media budgets chasing people under 25. They want to brand them young. But the people in your restaurant right now, the ones with the credit cards out ordering another round, are 30 to 60 years old. They are easily reachable online, and the big brands are barely competing for them. For as little as two dollars a day, you can put your restaurant in front of exactly those people, inside a two-mile radius of your location. Tell me where else that deal exists.
Social media engagement. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, did it fall? If you make a post on Facebook and the only person who comments is your mom, did anyone actually see it? Facebook long ago stopped showing your posts to all your fans for free. They now show it to two audiences: people you pay to reach and people who consistently engage with you. If you’re not getting 100 combined likes, comments and shares per week, you are invisible. It is called social media because you have to be social. The restaurants winning on these platforms are not posting graphics of their specials and calling it a day. They are creating content that makes people react, respond and share.
In-store customer acquisition. I eat out seven days a week. Not once in the past month has a restaurant inside those four walls made a real attempt to get my information. Not once. And I’m sitting there, wallet open, already sold. The person inside your restaurant is the single best prospect you will ever have. They chose you. They drove to your location. They walked in. They handed you a credit card. And you let them leave without capturing their name, email or phone number? Come on! If you had a solid pitch, a real ethical bribe, something front and center, you would get that data. But most restaurants have nothing. Nine out of 10 are not adding 100 new customers to their database per month through in-store efforts. And here’s why that matters so much: You’re losing 40 to 50 customers a month, naturally. People move, people change habits, people have one bad night and try somewhere new. If you’re not outpacing that loss, your database is shrinking, not growing.
An active loyalty program. Active is the keyword. A loyalty program collecting dust in your POS doesn’t help much. I’m talking about one you are growing on purpose. Papa Kelsey’s out in Mesa, Arizona, is a perfect example of what happens when you get serious about this. For years, they were adding 30 to 50 loyalty members a month, yet their loyalty revenue remained flat. They started pushing harder, doubled their additions, and eventually reached 200 to 300 new members a month. Their loyalty revenue went from $15,000 per month to nearly $40,000. Same restaurant. Same kitchen. Same staff. Just a commitment to growing their database instead of letting it sit.
Now here is the audit question that makes most owners uncomfortable: What is your sales gap?
What are you doing in sales right now? What should you be doing, based on your history? And what could you actually do, based on your table turns, your average check and your physical capacity?
I ran one actual restaurant through this recently. They were at $800,000 a year. They had done $1 million before. Based on their footprint, they could realistically do $1.2 million. That’s a $200,000 gap. And if it costs them $30,000 in marketing to close it, the net is $170,000. More importantly, every new customer they earn through that marketing isn’t worth one visit. They’re worth a hundred visits over the next few years.
That is why the math on marketing spend is so different from what most owners think. A friend of mine who runs a successful business puts it this way: If there’s $200,000 out there, I’ll spend $200,000 to get it, because it’s not what I get today, it’s what I get for the life of that customer.
Auditing Your Business
Here’s the one thing I want you to do right now: Take the audit—and be brutally honest when you do it. When it asks about social media engagement, don’t tell yourself yes because you posted three times this week. Go look at your page. Count the comments. Count the shares. Answer it the way a stranger grading your restaurant would answer it.
Most of you are going to score a no on eight of the 12 questions. That is not a failure. That is a road map. And the entire point of my articles, and what I teach in our ABR Skool community, is to help you chip away at these marketing gaps. Do that for two years, and you will not recognize your business.
I’ve been working out for 30 minutes a day for 15 weeks straight. Some days, it’s a walk. Some days, it’s weights. I didn’t get ripped in month one. But I built the habit, and habits compound. Your marketing works exactly the same way.
A 28 out of 100 means you have 72 points of opportunity in front of you. Go get them.
Take our free WIN Audit to see exactly where the gaps are in your restaurant’s marketing. 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.
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.
