We’re a day late in getting our weekly restaurant marketing news and ideas post out, but not a dollar short.
In fact, you get a little video bonus for your willingness to wait that one extra day, in the form of this little humorous video courtesy of Coca Cola.
Clever content marketing from Coca Cola. But let’s get to the news round-up.
- Your digital signage, Scala software, weather satellites, predictive analysis, and your point-of-sale now bring you this headline: Data Tells Me You Eat Pickles On Your Hamburger. The concept is a string of technologies that help restaurant marketers deliver targeted messages to consumers on their mobile devices. From the article: “If rain were forecast for the coming weekend, the same shopper might be served an ad for soup stock based on the weather and social media activity about winter soups.” Listen, we’re not endorsing EVERYTHING we share with you, some of it is for your amusement…
- Found this video case study of Fatburger’s new tablet-based management app on YouTube. It’s a little over-the-top as an advertisement for Red Book Connect, but if you can get past that, you’ll glean some great principles in how to establish rock-solid management practices and how to use technology in smart ways to survey guests and standardize the experience.
- From the “Yeesh!” Department comes this unfortnate news: a Massachusetts Five Guys manager COPIED AN UNHAPPY CUSTOMER on his email back to corporate detailing the scenario, including some salty descriptors of that customer. Not good. Sometimes the most basic of digital tools, i.e., email, can be the vehicles of our destruction.
- If you weren’t already worried/scared/angry about/apathetic towards Yelp reviews, get this: Yelp reviews will now be pushed to Yahoo, giving them even greater exposure (via Restaurant Hospitality). Don’t stop with that part of the article, however, as there’s some extremely compelling information about how consumers search for restaurants via mobile included towards the end, including this finding from a massive survey: “If your restaurant already has a website and you’re thinking about adding a mobile component, you are probably behind the curve.”
- Each of the last two weeks we’ve mentioned large restaurant chains who have announced the launch or impending launch of mobile payments offering to consumers. This week’s it’s BJ’s Restaurants, based in California.
- It’s official: over 50% of all emails are opened on mobile devices. I cannot stress enough how important it is that you make your emails mobile-friendly (I’ve got an article going live addressing this very topic on Friday). This means your plan of simply plopping a big, close-up photo of food that doesn’t even resize nicely is officially an insufficient strategy for your email marketing, k?
- For those of you piloting the use of mobile payments provider Square (or considering it), check this out: the company is testing a new app called “Square Pickup,” which lets consumers order food from a Square merchant ahead of time for….bingo! Pickup. The app is preloaded with the restaurant’s menu. This service would be aimed right at all the other online ordering companies we feature in our Directory, but takes aim at Foursquare’s alliance with GrubHub/Seamless just as much.
For those of you reading who are restaurant owners, operators, or marketers, what are YOU doing that’s creative, innovative, digitally-driven, and getting interesting results? Let us know, we’ll feature you here!
Meanwhile, everybody have a great rest of the week and stay tuned — more articles slated for publish this week on email marketing, a March Madness promotion for the sports-minded locations out there, and restaurant CRM.
