Secret Sauce - The Restaurant Marketing Podcast

We look at what we learnt from Dinner by Heston.

Firstly, have a think about the photos that you've got. I will put some images up in the show notes to give you an idea about the kind of photos that you can take with an entry level camera or a decent mobile phone.

Dinner by Heston has a unifying story throughout the menu - cooking food for centuries ago and reinterpreting them in a way that is interesting and compelling for customers.

Every dish had a story and they tell the story really well. There was Savoury Porridge. This was green and gives everyone something to talk about. Green Porridge. For Dinner. Savoury Porridge. Lots of interesting components to the dish to get people talking about the Restaurant.

I was lucky enough that my wife had booked the Chef's table for us. A great high value experience that gives you a close up view of the workings of the kitchen.

Our tea came with an hour glass to tell us when the tea was properly steeped. A small thing that signals the value of the experience that you are having.

As a part of the Chef's Table, we were able to see the quality assurance commitment that the team have. It shows. The steak that we had was probably the best I have ever had.

Mentoring in the Restaurant - does your head chef do this? Helping out all of the team to be their best in the team. I think mentoring is a big thing, it makes the team better and good mentoring usually means that your team members will stay with you longer because you are investing in their career.

We look at the sourcing work that the sommelier. An eclectic range of drinks that were immaculately paired with the degustation menu.

Do you have an incremental revenue opportunity from Birthday cakes?

Have a think about creating unique and epic desserts.

How can you create something, a physical link with the experience that you have created?

Are you using OpenTable? Are you getting the email addresses of your customers booking through OpenTable? Do you want to be giving them access to your booking list to another company? We talk about IP leakage and what it can cost you.

For more information on this podcast, check out our show notes.

If you liked this episode, please leave a review in iTunes. It really helps us to get the word out and share it on our Facebook page.

For Free Tools to build your Restaurant business, check out our free tools page. We've helped restaurants around the world build the Restaurant that they always wanted with our tools. Our free booking tool has taken over $25,000,000 in seats booked.

We talk about Kalimera Souvlaki Art, which was recently written up in the New York Times by Sam Sifton. How does a Souvlaki Restaurant in Melbourne Australia get written up in the New York Times?

We talk to Veronica Fil, the Business Manager at Restaurant Lume. Lume was voted the Gault and Millau Restaurant of the Year in 2016.

Lume works very hard to create unique experiences for diners. They use actors, script writers and use psychological tests to work and are pushing the boundaries in the way that food is experienced in their restaurant. The are attracting a significantly younger audience market than a traditional fine dining venue.

Understanding their customers is a critical part of the Lume experience. With a high percentage of customers from China, they learned that many were not drinking wine, so they created a tailored mocktail drink pairing with their meal.

Lume has adopted Virtual Reality to push the boundary on the way that their guests experience their food. They have created VR experiences that significantly pushes the limits of multi sensory dining. By combining the story of the ingredients, the preparation and the restaurant into a Virtual Reality experience with scents, auditory cues and tactile sensations.

Restaurant Lume has reduced No Shows to zero in their restaurant. This is a phenomenal result because No Shows in fine dining are especially expensive in fine dining. They adopted Tock as a booking engine that takes pre bookings. They were losing up to $3,000 a week to zero. This is the difference between Lume surviving through to the point where they are very popular and having run out of cash and going out of business.

Lume has a reputation of providing some of the best Corporate Event experiences in the country. Large corporate customers looking for something to WOW their customers with and provide their customers with a unique experience have becoming For one event they created a perfume for the event, a bespoke menu based on local ingredients of the customer, they had a photographer at the event and used those photographs to create a cook book of the recipes from the event with photos of the participants in it. The diners get a memento of the event, a cook book that features photos of themselves delivered to them weeks after the event, reminding them of it. The customer gets branding that will stay with the customers.

Lume is continuing to create cutting edge multisensory dining experiences, starting to work with augmented reality.

All of the experiences have the foundation of Chef Quade and the team creating amazing food. We will talk to Chef Quade in a future podcast about his journey and his approach to restaurant creativity and innovation.

Described as the Iron Lady of Hong Kong Private Dining, we talk to Grace Choy.

We talk about the our Comparison Research between Dimmi, Quandoo, OpenTable, Tock, Obee and the Free Online Restaurant Booking System. We think that email sharing

Grace is very humble, but her passion for cooking shows through in the videos that she produces and that has enabled to build up the largest Facebook following of any Chinese Restaurant on Facebook.

Grace has an amazing social media following:

She has 41,871 followers on Linkedin and 431,703 followers on Facebook.

The important lessons from Grace are:

1. The power of Facebook Videos; and

2. The power of using Facebook Video to show your passion.

Grace is very passionate about her cooking and that shows through in the way that she comes across on the videos. It is so important to be yourself and do things that you are passionate about, and Grace does that very well.

Grace manages her own Facebook, and responds to everyone on the Facebook page.

Her 20 seat Restaurant is booked out 2 weeks in advance. She focueses on fresh food and treating people as family. She also has pre bookings to cut down on no shows.

Grace was the first Twitter Verified Chef's in Greater China, even though she has only tweeted 68 times! and now has 21,500 followers on Twitter.

Her Facebook following has been the basis for a large amount of free PR that Grace has received, including a short Youtube Video that tells her story.

Last episode covered what we are seeing working in quick and dirty Restaurant Marketing.

Today we discuss some key concepts as we move into lockdowns and shutdowns.

Runway. Cash going out vs cash coming in.

Re engineering your Restaurant to bring in cash from different areas. Some great things that Restaurants are doing.

Restaurant Leadership.

To help you through the crisis, we have our Free Restaurant Tools, and if you need more help, contact the team about our special marketing assistance program during the Coronavirus outbreak. FROLO signups have jumped up quite a lot as Restaurants look to go to delivery or pickup only.

Have a listen to the podcast and see what concepts Restaurants have been dealing with this week.

Let us know what you thought of the podcast on Linkedin or Facebook.

Facebook Marketing - We look at the Facebook Marketing Report Card for Australia, and very few Restaurants are doing any Facebook marketing. This is a huge opportunity for most restaurants.

Annual event marketing - We discuss a Restaurant that made a Meat Pie Burger for Australia Day. Sounds pretty ordinary, but it is an Aussie thing. A great idea that got them mentioned in news.com.au.

We look at how you to run a Facebook Live Video for your Restaurant.

Check out the Facebook Live Map, to get some ideas of the kind of streaming that people are doing.

Equipment -

Here are the makers of the phone holder that I use - Arkon.

Bright lights - we bought some cheapies of eBay.

Your phone - Android or iPhone. It doesn't really matter, both do an excellent job.

A couple of tips - Rehearse, plan, and start with something exciting because the video will appear silent. People need to engage with the video to be able to hear the video.

Pick somewhere quiet, make sure you have a good phone signal.

Be authentic - this is a great way to build your personal brand.

Types of content you can use in your Facebook Live Videos:

• Food going over the pass
• Food prep - tell the story of how you create your dishes
• Sourcing the food - video from your garden, the market
• Use it to do market research - what items do people want to see on your menu?
• Go through a recipe

Aangan at Footscray prepare their own spices, that is a perfect type of video for Facebook Live.

We then discuss some ideas on how to best run an ad to your Facebook Live Video.

Tag us in on your Facebook Live videos.

Connect with us on Linkedin to keep up to date with the latest Restaurant Marketing ideas.