Thread by @Fandy_Wang

1/ Hey all! Sometimes people ask me how I would approach marketing if I opened my own restaurant. Here’s what I tell them. A thread:

Oh and my hypothetical restaurant would of course be a hits list of my parents’ home cooking!

2/ To start, a few assumptions. I assume we’ve created a good “product”. We must have good food, fast service, and friendly hospitality. This is obviously not a given but something that needs to be nailed before even considering marketing

3/ Once “product” is set, I’d start defining all local “customers” near me. Let’s say our restaurant is near Union Square. Our core customers would be office workers, university students, and residential tenants. Great! Now let’s solve for “distribution”.

4/ For office workers, I’d use Google maps & publicly available CRE data to find all companies near me. Then I’d use LinkedIn + common email formats to guess & verify the work emails of every employee at those companies.

5/ For university students, I’d find a directory of every club, fraternity, dorm, and school organization for every campus near me, and again verify the email of every leader/member within those groups.

6/ For residential tenants, I’d make a list of all apt bldgs near me. For large rentals, I’d find the leasing agent. For smaller condos, I’d intro myself to the doorman. For others, I’d use existing deliveries in the bldg to leave some “marketing collateral”

7/ Now that we’ve solved for “distribution,” we need to execute the actual marketing funnel. Here’s what it would look like. Every one of those potential customers will get a personal note (either direct email or hand-written) from me saying some version of the following:

8/ “Hi [Jane], my name is Andy. I just opened a new restaurant on [19th & Park], and we serve incredible [Northern Chinese Food], w/ fast & friendly service...

9/ ...We’re excited to meet all our new neighbors & would love for you to try our food. If you have time to stop in this week, just show this [email/card] and get a [free order of dumplings] on me! PS - If you do, I recommend ordering them pan-fried😀”

10/ When customers come in to redeem the offers, all staff will be trained to (a) give above & beyond customer service, and when ringing them up (b) hand them another card that reads:

11/ “We really hope you enjoy our [dumplings]. They’re an old family recipe! We have so many other great menu items including [Noodles, Bing (Asian flat-bread), and Baozi (steamed buns)]. Bring back this card, try something else on our menu, & get [30%] off your next order.”

12/ Those that come back, again get (a) above & beyond customer service and (b) another card that reads, “So great to see you again! We hope you enjoy your meal. Btw, did you know we also have [homemade desserts]? Stop in next time with this card and get [dessert] on us."

13/ Finally, those that come back, now for the THIRD time, will once again get great service and a standard loyalty punch card + a message that says “Want to occasionally (max 1-2/mo) receive exclusive text offers from us? Just text “Hey Neighbor” to [Phone Number].”

14/ I've simplified this example in the interest of time (e.g. ignored online biz) but if executed correctly, this could generate THOUSANDS of new LOCAL customers monthly (and hundreds of opt-in, repeat customers) at very low costs (some free dumplings, cards, etc).

15/ The real cost however would be time. With a very savvy & dedicated team, this could all actually be done manually (finding emails, printing cards, tracking phone numbers) but it would take a MASSIVE amount of work.

16/ So it begs the question. What would it look like if someone took this entire process, brought it online, automated it, and scaled it up so that very little time commitment was needed?

17/ AND, what if all of your hard-earned customers were yours to keep and not owned by some 3rd party site that wanted to take 30% each time they returned?

18/ That’s the marketing I would want to execute for my hypothetical restaurant. And that is the exact product we are building at @TrySpread. If you made it all the way here, thanks for reading and like/retweet if you found it helpful! #restaurant #marketing #marketingtips