Restaurant Marketing That Works An Interview with Matt Plapp  

Hey there restaurant pros, it’s David Scott Peters and welcome to episode 28 of the Restaurant Prosperity Formula. I’ve been coaching restaurant owners since 2003 and the Restaurant Prosperity Formula is based on what the most successful restaurant owners I’ve worked with do on a daily basis to achieve their success. The basic premise of the formula centers around achieving prosperity, freedom from your restaurant and the financial freedom you deserve. To achieve prosperity, you have to follow a very specific formula made-up of leadership, systems, training, accountability, and taking action.
Today’s topic centers around restaurant marketing. Now I want to tell you about our guest today, Matt Plapp, avid marketer, CrossFitter, author, speaker, consultant, and business coach. Matt is a serial entrepreneur. Among his businesses, he is the owner of Restaurant Marketing at Works, a restaurant marketing firm with clients nationwide. We had a lively conversation. Listen in as Matt and I take a deep dive into his new book, Restaurant Marketing That Works, and how you can implement his system for attracting customers while maximizing your marketing dollars following his ABR system. I want to welcome Matt Plapp to the show today.
Hey Matt, I’m so glad you’re with us today. Welcome my friend.
Thank you. I appreciate having me on.
Hey, do me a favor. People don’t understand why I’m so excited to have you on. We’ve spent some time together when you’ve come visit here in Phoenix. Heck, we went out on the lake and went rowing together and that was a blast. But what I really love about you is your background and how you got into marketing because it’s not a straight path for you. It was really kind of a, it’s an interesting story and I’d love for you to share with our listeners how the hell you got into marketing in the 1st place, that journey you took.
So kind of a dull, I guess, almost a couple roads running right next to each other eventually hit together. So right out of college, I worked in TV in college and had the great hope that I was going to be the next, you know, Chris Berman on ESPN. realized that wasn’t really a path I was gonna be able to take unless I wanted to wait 30 years and make $7 an hour. So I went into the advertising sales side and radio and really enjoyed it. I enjoyed hearing the journeys of the businesses. And that’s how I first got introduced to the restaurant world because in the radio world, everybody that was anybody that was taken. So if you had accounts you had to claim. So the car dealers who were spending way too much on radio already had reps. I looked and everybody that didn’t have reps were these one location independent restaurants. And the reason they have reps is because they really didn’t need to be spending 5 to $6,000 a month on radio. So I became friends with them and said, hey, there is an opportunity for you to be on radio. I need trade to take my clients to lunch. I’ve got some cool ideas how we can position you really inexpensively on Friday and Saturday nights. You do have cash has trade. You’re in the radio station for 500 bucks a month. And so next thing I know I’ve got about 30 restaurant clients and I was known as the restaurant trade guy across Cincinnati Radio.
At the same time, my dad and brother got together. We wanted to open up a boat and RV dealership doing consignment boat and RV sales, but online. Now here’s the funny part was none of us are technical. My brother was an engineering side guy. My dad was a sales and marketing guy. I was in marketing sales. So I bought a book on Adobe PageMill, learned how to create a website in 1999, and we launched Outdoor Consignments as an online listing service for the Cincinnati area to sell campers and boats.
Flash forward, it was doing 15 million a year, four years later. And I was still working in radio sales. A consultant came in and said, hey, you’ve got to run the business. You can’t be doing both. So I ended up leaving the radio business, running the boat and RV dealership. And in that time, accidentally figured out this thing called the internet. It’s a long story. I won’t get too deep into it. But at the end of the day, the guy who sold me the book on Adobe Pagemill. Came in to try and track down a virus we were getting and ended up finding where it was coming from. But in that process gave me a book of every website our employees were visiting.
Well, everybody we employed at the time about 40 people were boat at boat activists, hardcore RVers, ATVs, fishing. They were all visiting chat rooms. This is before Facebook. This is when MySpace was in its early days, but they were visiting chat rooms and so I looked at the marketing side and said, well, these are genius. There’s The one was Bass Boat Central, 22,000 active users a day that were bass fishermen. We sell bass boats. And so I convinced my salespeople to be active on those groups in a different manner. I bought sponsorships. Next thing I know, we’re highly ranked in Google. Yamaha’s calling me to find out what I did. I thought I was in trouble. They actually wanted me to help.
And 2008 comes along, the economy was kicking the crap out of us. I wanted to get out of the boat business. My dad wanted to retire. I hated having 40 employees that were mechanics and parts guys, just the opposite of me. I was a terrible boss. And a lot of my radio clients were calling also going, hey, I’ve seen you on the front page of the Cincinnati Business Courier about this thing called the Internet and what you’re doing. Show me how to do it for my business. And so while our marketing firm was created and that was 08, here we are with 40 plus employees. What year is it? 2021, 13 years later.
It’s been crazy. Just in the last year or so, your growth has been explosive. I mean, you not only dabble in the internet marketing side of things, but you veer off and you do videos. Talk just a little bit about the video side of your work.
Yeah, so our company has kind of split into two parts, but they work together. So 3 years ago, I’m in San Diego, holding an event with a bunch of restaurant owners there, and we were having a little brainstorming session. I said, here’s the good and bad news. The top two things that you hate about the internet you should love, but it’s because they’re built wrong. Yelp and Google. There’s a lot of animosity towards Yelp in the restaurant space. You know that everybody’s heard it. But I also said, here’s the good part of it. They have eyeballs. They have people looking for restaurants. And I said the negative is if you could strip it all down, the biggest problem comes that you as an operator do not control the narrative. And that could be dangerous.
And so back then I had this vision for a company called America’s Best Restaurants where I created it. I bought the.net. We eventually bought the.com and I said, hey, I’m going to create a media channel where people can find stuff on their local restaurants. So ones that have an owner inside the four walls, not the chain that somebody owns 80 of them and they have an assistant manager on them. I’m talking with the places that have an operator that really cares. inside there. So back then we didn’t have the money. I had this cool idea, but I was one of five employees. I was in the business every day. Didn’t have the money, the time or the ability to do it.
Flash forward in 2020. Our company had grown a lot by May or June of last year. I was pretty much out of our business running the day-to-day. My employees were all doing it and I could look at America’s best restaurants and say, man, imagine if I had done this. What it would have helped restaurants this year and so we end up doing it. Went out and bought a Mercedes Sprinter van wrapped it. It’s a little conference room in the back hired. I guess there’s eight of us now. Four camera crews, three hosts and the vision is we travel like right now. The van leaves this Sunday. Just got back from North Carolina. They leave Sunday to go to North and South Carolina on their part, but every week goes somewhere different. The second van comes online in Idaho in about 3 weeks.
But the overall vision for me is in five years, 50 vans, one in every state that every week they travel and they record the vision of that restaurant. What I call is a restaurant. I would eat that weekly. You know, hey, I’m Matt Platt, America’s best restaurants. I’m at XYZ restaurant. I can eat every week. You should. I’m with the owner. Tell me why I should be here every week. David, you talk about the restaurant. OK, great. We’re going to go inside and eat three items. What should I try when I come to your restaurant? We go inside, watch him get made. It’s a 5 minute thing. It’s not like Triple D with guy that’s going in depth. It’s literally down and dirty. But the overall vision is I want to create a media company exclusively telling the story of restaurants.
And what we’ve done is those vans, which is pretty cool. This is a big number and people kind of can’t get their head around it. Each van will produce 2250 pieces of unique content a year. Wow. And we’re on pace to have four vans by the end of this year, 10 by next year. We put if I can get to 50 in five years, I will have a very big megaphone online, on YouTube, on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, whatever new stuff comes out that we can let the restaurant dictate and tell their story.
And it’s brilliant. It really is brilliant because like I’ve built my whole business is based off video. Video is the hottest thing in the world, but restaurants are so far behind on it. It’s too expensive, don’t know how to do it and you’ve just created it. And the reason why I bring it up is, you know, You’ve got a marketing company, you’ve got this video company, but I can’t keep up with you, dude. It took me forever to write my book. You just released another book, right? Restaurant Marketing That Works. Talk about like, how the hell do you find time to publish yet another book?
Yeah, I appreciate that. It’s the third book. I actually have two more that I didn’t publish that actually aren’t that good. They were kind of forced. But I enjoy it. I think one of the things like you is that I eat, sleep, and drink what I do every day. The one advantage I do have is that the last year and a half to two years, from advice from business coaches, like people hire you to help them do the right things in a restaurant, I’ve hired business coaches every year. And so a guy named Billie Jean three years ago, Billie Jean’s not my lover, out in California, Billie Jean Shaw, and he helped me figure out how to write myself out of the business ’cause I was in it every day. And now that we’ve got employees that do everything, I’m more of an advisor to the employees and it lets me sit back and say what’s our next calculated move? What can we do?
And the other thing you talk about video, how I wrote this book. I wrote it on video is I had a vision because the problem I saw this is before the pandemic. I started writing this early 2020 late 2019 was that the restaurants weren’t doing the basics. And to me, there’s a basic element of marketing and there’s the tactics I think are pretty basic. And within there is using video is one of the items. But I started writing the book, but I literally just took a piece of paper, wrote down what I thought was the structure of the book. And as I would drive my car around town, I would literally just right off the cuff, tell a chapter. And I’m good at telling a story.
And I was kind of comical. The first, the copywriter that I had started looking at the content once it got transcribed, called me and said, man, this is weird. I said, boy, he’s like, well, I’m going through your stuff. I’m looking at it. It’s almost like you’re talking to me. Yeah. I wrote it talking on a video and he’s like, okay, that makes sense. And of course, I turned that into, if you go to my YouTube channel, you can see every chapter back in the spring of 2020 as I was recording those chapters, I would upload them a week later and it came to fruition.
But it’s. I look at the time of it, I’ve been fortunate to learn from some entrepreneurs to get myself out of the business. What I know a lot of restaurateurs can probably relate to because a lot of them, especially this year, are stuck in the business because there’s just not enough people.
Right. Well, your book is pretty incredible because While it’s not in some respects, like you said, it’s the basics. It’s not groundbreaking like it’s going to change somebody’s life because, man, I can’t believe that you invented this. The fact is these fundamentals, kind of like the systems I teach, there’s fundamental systems you’ve got to have in place. And you’ve got this philosophy. And I love the way you honed marketing it into something that everybody can grasp. And that’s ABR, right? That’s attract, build, retain. What does that mean in layman’s term? If I were to grab that book as somebody listening to us right now, what do I expect from ABR.
So the book, the original title was Restaurant Marketing Works Back to the Basics. And then during last fall, when the pandemic was, I guess we thought winding now, now it’s winding back down again. My publisher called me and said, Hey, question, what did you pivot in the book? What did you change with the pandemic? I said, What do you mean? He’s like, Well, obviously this changed restaurants. What did you change in the book? I said, Nothing. He said, so you’re telling me what worked before is working during? I said, yeah, and it will work after. It’s the basic principles of marketing, but unfortunately a lot of small businesses. do not have the expertise to really dig into it enough.
And so that ABR comes from, it originally had a different acronym, but I looked at our company, America’s Best Restaurants, ABR, and I had ABA. And it was funny, I’m sitting there thinking, retain, we had another word for it, but I’m like, well, retain is the goal of it. So ABR is attract, build, retain.
The number one goal of marketing is to attract attention. I wear an orange shirt, I have an orange sports car, I have orange shoes, it’s to attract attention. And so as your restaurant, your number one goal is the more attention you get as long as your food is good, your services, your food’s great, service is great atmosphere. If you get attention to those people, they will eat more often.
And what sticks to me is a guy named Peter Wiley. Him and his brother have a brand called Hothead Burritos in Ohio Market. I think they’re 80 locations now. And he was telling me about two years ago about, we were talking marketing and he was looking at stuff we do for a lot of their stores. I actually talked to him yesterday and we were talking about it and he said, Matt, Put aside all the fancy stuff you do on the backend. I look at this and you’re showing me we had 40,000 impressions last month with people who interacted multiple times within our brand, whether it’s in messenger, e-mail, text, Facebook, Instagram. Yeah, he’s like, I look at it this way. If I have 40,000 impressions, I know that’s gonna drive us, say, 500 visits. If I get 80,000, it might drive 1,000. If I get 120, he’s like, so I don’t really care about a lot of fancy stuff that you do, I understand. That if you get people’s name, phone number, e-mail and birthday and you’re in front of them more often and I’m a brand that they like, I’m going to benefit long term.
So that’s the attraction part and I think there’s so many ways this goes back to when I was in radio. David is back in 99. There weren’t a lot of options for free marketing for small businesses. If you were a restaurant back then you were buying direct mail. You had maybe a dude on the sidewalk for free. But there wasn’t YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and YouTube. And the one thing all of those have in common, which cracks me up is they’re free. Now, granted, they’re using your data and like a lot of consumers have never figured that part out, but they’re free supposedly. But from a restaurant standpoint, it costs you nothing to pull a phone out to grab a microphone to put a $30 light you get off of Amazon, get a little tripod and tell the story of your restaurant that’s attention.
So the second part of that is built. The problem with attention is you’re usually using somebody else’s audience. Facebook, you can get attention on Facebook’s platform, you’re leveraging their audience, not yours, they own it. And so if they wanna make you pay more to get it, you gotta pay more. If they wanna kick you off of their platform like Twitter has done with people, they can take you away from it. So I’m a proponent of any time you use your time, money, and effort to get attention, Try and figure out a way to build a database off of that attention. I hear from restaurants a lot of times, and obviously every restaurant’s built differently, but I’ll say, hey, anybody that walks in your restaurant, you should have a code they can scan to join something and say, hey, your next burger is free. Well, I can’t give away food. Well, you’re not, you’re trading, you’re bartering it for what information you need to communicate with that person on a consistent basis.
So I look at it as build as how do I build a database off of that attention?
And then the last part, the R, is actually kind of the same as the A, it’s retention. How do I retain the people’s attention? Because if I put a post on Facebook and I get attention, and I don’t get any data from it, and I wanna reach David Scott Peters again next Wednesday to tell him about our burger special, I’m hoping and praying that he sees my Facebook post. I might have to pay some money to get it out there a little better. But if I got David Scott Peters’ e-mail, phone number, and I have different ways of reaching him, when it comes down to retaining, I now have the ability, the balls in my court. I can use the data that I have and instead of renting your attention from somebody else, I can get it from my marketing on the back end.
What I love about what you go through is, I always taught no matter what business you are, you can only get customers three ways, right? You get a brand new customer to walk in your door in the most expensive form of marketing normally, get them to come back more often and spend more. And for all intents and purposes, the ABR strategy allows you to leverage that.
Finding the new customer isn’t the most expensive thing anymore. Getting, retaining them is much easier. It’s just really interesting. how easy you’ve also made building the database. Like I’m a lifetime restaurant person and I remember I tell people your list is the most important thing you’ve got. If your restaurant burns down, you still can communicate with them. Open up, you’ll be back to open to business.
And I’ve had literally members have their restaurants burn down and literally snap their fingers because they’ve been communicating with their list over and over again. They’re back in business. Well, the truth of the matter is, When we follow your formula, it’s not as expensive.
In fact, you leverage the different media types as you talked about. You get to build that list almost automatically, like without thinking, not stacks of those cards in the office of comment cards and so on that nobody ever types into a database. Like it’s just they’re putting it into place, putting into play the way you operate and then obviously retaining, finding a way cheapest form of marketing is to get the person who loves you to come back more often because sometimes that’s just a touch in the head. Am I missing something or is like literally you have kind of broken the code to make this so much easier for people?
No, it’s kind of comical. I think back to when I started my marketing firm. I always tell people, I practice what I preach. My company spends money on everything that we talk about restaurants doing. We give away stuff. Like my van I talked about that’s on the road, we’re shooting 10 restaurants videos for free every week. The goal is we’re getting, one, we’re going to help them on one side, but the second part, we get a relationship. We get to meet somebody that could possibly benefit from us down the road.
But I remember when I started Driven Media, this is the company name of our agency back in 08. I reached out to my database of every client I dealt with when I was on radio sales in 1999-03. And when I think about it is I was getting their attention. I was on the front page of the Inquirer, the front page of the Business Courier. I was really present in the market. I was on an article in the Sensei Business Courier talking about how a local boat RV dealership, a former radio sales guy, is doing tactics that Procter & Gamble’s doing. And so I had the attention.
And so when I got out of the business and I literally, I remember doing my first e-mail, I went to my ACT database. I had every radio company, everybody I had ever called in radio. I had their phone number, their e-mail, their fax, their address, their birthdays. I hit my list. And I have people all the time go, Matt, how did you start a digital marketing firm from scratch and go to six figures in six months? I’m like, it’s not ’cause I’m a genius. It’s because people know, like and trust me. I already had relationships. I already had the database and I leveraged it.
But I’ll tell you funny story. I’m gonna drink water and this tells a story. This is a growler. I’m not an alcoholic. I actually don’t drink. This is water. But I lost my water bottle in our office here today and I’m looking for something to drink out of and on my shelf behind me was a growler.
That growler is significant because back in 2015. One of our restaurant clients, Nick Ellison said, Matt, prove to me that these people from Facebook and e-mail and text were doing all this effort to get their information. We’ll walk in the business and spend money. I said, okay, we’re going to run an advertising campaign. We bought, I think he bought 2,500 Growlers between the locations. It was like $2.28 per logo Growler. And we went on Facebook and we did an ad. Go to this place, give us your name, phone, and e-mail address, and come in and get a free logoed growler. No beer included.
And like we had a little funny punchline there. And I’m like, nobody’s going to drive down here, park, walk into the restaurant, get a free growler for two bucks and leave. They want what’s going in it. And it was wild to watch because the growlers were gone. in like a week and a half or two weeks. And 90% of people walked in, got it full of beer, sat down, had a leader, had a pretzel and beer cheese, had some fried pickles. And so it drove a lot of revenue.
But the cool part was, wasn’t what happened on the front end. It’s now, guess what? We’ve got a list of people we know drink beer. Like I’m not getting a growler for the heck of it. If I’m getting a growler, it’s because I want to drink beer.
So when you go back to the first thing you talked about was the three ways to increase sales is is new customers is bring customers back more often and is increase average check size. I’ll work backwards. Increasing average check size is next to impossible with most server with most restaurant servers. If you look at the fast casual the way it works, my son works at a pizza restaurant. He’s not a good salesperson. He’s terrible like he’s 67 was 17 now 17. He’s just there to make sure he gets his job and lives life. He’s not saying, hey, Matt, by the way, that steak hoagie is even better when you throw bacon and jalapenos on. It’s an extra. He’s not incentivizing me to get a dessert pizza or their giant chocolate chip cookies.
And so when I work backwards on the power of a database is the easiest way to incentivize people to buy something extra is have somebody sell it. Well, the people don’t sell it good in the restaurants, but digital can’t. I can send somebody an e-mail or text and say, hey, next time you’re in, your cookie pizza is free of charge.
And people say, I can’t give away a cookie pizza. I’m like, well, if I can get that cookie pizza to get them to buy 100 more, that happened to me. I use the example a lot, Papa John’s, the pizza chain, like five years ago. I got, I’m in their e-mail club. I got an e-mail that said, try our new cookie pizza free of charge, your next order. And I’m thinking, I love pizza. I love cookies. I had never seen a cookie pizza. I was like trying to pitcher sauce on a pizza. And then I saw the picture, I’m like, oh, it’s actually a giant cookie pizza. And so we got the free cookie pizza. Guess what we get every time we order Papa John’s? We pay full boat for a damn cookie pizza.
And the next part of that is driving the extra visit. In my book, I’ve got a graphic about hope and pray. I got an X out, I have aim and expect. that hope and pray marketing is hoping that Matt Plapp had a great visit and remembers, I pray he remembers to come have pizza here next Friday. Aim and expect is when you have Matt Plapp’s information and you know that he typically comes in these days or times, that you can put a marketing plan together and get him to come back. ‘Cause I know a lot of our customers, I can go in, I can pull up any customer we work with, there’s hundreds of them, no matter what vertical. I can pull out a segment of that audience and send a message and tell you a percentage you’re going to walk in within a week.
Now, I want to hold that for one second because before I forget, how does somebody buy your book? Because I want to ask about your company and tell about our story when we sat outside in the middle of the pandemic and we were going over your stuff. But how does somebody find your book? Because it’s a must read. How would they find you?
Easiest place is Amazon. We’ve had landing pages on Amazon ships it quicker. My assistant leaves for a couple days sometimes and the order sits in his inbox. Amazon, just look up Matt Plapp. There’s A Kindle version. I depending on when this airs and when people hear it, we’ve Amazon’s been fluctuating the price. It’s supposed to be at 699. It went to 1296, then it went to six, then it went to 25. So there’s a Kindle version for a dollar. There’s the printed version will eventually be 25.
If you’re not happy with what you read out of it and you buy it for 25, whatever you contact me and I’ll give you a refund.
But I can promise you that what’s in here isn’t BS. It’s also thin. I wrote this for one, the the width of this, or I guess the thickness of it, I wrote for one reason, that you could read on a two-hour flight, that a lot of people are flying somewhere or they’re driving somewhere with a spouse. I have a lot of books. I like your book for the same reason. It’s a read that doesn’t take me five days. I have a lot of books that I read that one of the books I just finished reading was Daymond John’s Rise and Grind, and it’s a good book, but it took me nine different sittings to read it because I can’t read for four hours, but I read for 30 minutes.
So it’s a quick read and it’s literally got actionable steps because my big thing was, hey, I want people to read this book and at the end of the chapter go, what are those five things I can do at my restaurant? I can put this in place, I can do this, I can change my check presenter, I can put this on my website. And at the end of the book, look back and say, man, I actually did 15 or 20 tasks. And none of them are impossible.
And there’s also QR codes in here that go to some online tutorials and case studies that literally show what we did and how.
I go to a lot of restaurant shows. I go to a lot of shows. You hear the speakers on stage and they’re always speaking for one reason, to sell something afterwards. And I’ve always been told by my dad that the minute you get on stage speaking somewhere and you’re there to sell something, you just lost because you probably aren’t going to get out the goods and you might not even have them. I’ve heard you speak. You do an amazing job. You’re not worried about selling a book or consulting. You’re worried about helping people learn something to change their restaurant.
Yep.
And so that was my same vision with the book.
So, and this is the segue. Go on to do the book and then ask you about your company, but I wanna share a story first. Okay. So grab that book. Like everybody should grab the book, read. You’ve got to learn. Most successful restaurant owners I’ve ever worked with understand they don’t know what they don’t know. So just constantly consume information, find that one, two, three ideas that can truly change your trajectory of your business, leadership and what you want to do. So grab the book, read it.
But I also know because I’ve got people, because I’m a restaurant coach and I’m coaching people all the time is often people want to mentor or they want, they understand it, but they don’t have time, don’t want to do it themselves. And that’s kind of where I want to talk about your company.
So you and I are outside of, I believe it was a Starbucks here in Arizona. We’re talking about it. We had just met. I’m like, dude, all right, show me what the hell do you do? What makes you so special? And this is before we had a relationship in any way other than a cold, hey, let’s sit down and talk. And by the time we’re finished opening your laptop, showing me, I start getting really excited. And it’s difficult to get me excited about marketing stuff because Often it’s blue sky. A lot of people sell blue sky. If I sold marketing, I’d be worth millions of dollars because I could sell it. But you got to deliver.
And so all of a sudden you got a guy, David, with you, works with you and he does video stuff. But we start talking and you’re showing me some details and it happens to be a guy I know, Chip, who was a member of mine for almost 15 years before I sold my old company, still with him. And I know Chip really, really well. Been in his restaurant multiple times. I’ve trained his team. Love him to death and he’s a hardcore Philly guy. You know, every other word has a sentence enhancer. Let’s just put it that way. And I said, you got Chip to say yes to you? Then that says a ton because he’s as skeptical as they can be. Like he will run you through the ringer. Like don’t give me the ********. Get to the bottom line.
And so in that conversation, I then call up one of my current members and go, Steve, you got to try this. I’m truly telling you, got to try this. And he is still with you and happy and you’re driving business and all these things. So talk about what your company does. Yeah, I get the book. But what if I get so excited and I go, I want to start working right now. I’d be calling you, right? What is your company? What do you do?
So the company, ironically, is that’s the name of the division is Restaurant Marketing Works. That was one of the reasons I I made the the title of the book that ’cause I wanted to have it be kind of our benchmark book. My first two books I think were too specific. I heard from restaurant owners that said Matt the book was cool. I can’t do any of that. It’s like you giving me a recipe to make food like I can put a DiGiorno in and steak outside that I’m screwed.
So our company started off back in 08 helping businesses and a lot of restaurants. build their attention online. And then we eventually got to where I said, man, the ultimate caveat is if I can get that attention to build data and then talk to them. Well, you talked about earlier, this goes back to taking action and talk about the e-mail list activating people and the restaurant burns down and get action.
Before the pandemic, we focused exclusively on front end attention and building a database.
When the pandemic hit, I told my team, I said, guys, nobody worry about their jobs. We got money. You guys are all be paid. We’re fine. If revenue goes way down, you’ll still be paid, whatever. We got a year plus in the bank. We’re good. But I said, I want you to call every client and I want you to find out what we can help with because they’re going to need to use their database more than ever because people need to know about third party and delivery and curbside. And is the dining room open? Is there a mask or whatever?
Well, we found out the ugly truth. I kind of knew. was that we were building these databases for people and the front end of it proves it, but they weren’t using them. So we’re calling clients and it was before the pandemic. It was like, why aren’t you using it? Well, you know, I don’t have a whole lot of time and plus you guys got a lot of stuff happening for us and I was always didn’t want to be the everything to everybody.
Well, I realized during the pandemic that we needed to be, that we needed to be the people helping people get attention, helping them build database, then helping them use it. So we created a retention department and that was born from the pandemic, which we did for free for clients for six months because I said, hey, you suck at e-mail and text. You’ve proven you’re not doing it enough. We’ll take database. We’ll tell the story. Let’s go.
So now that’s our biggest part of our company, but what our company does. is exactly what the book is about. We help people market on the front end to get attention of either new, frequent or lost customers. And my vision is whenever they interact with our marketing that it goes into our system called Database Dynamite that identifies people right away. Hey David, we appreciate you wanting to join the VIP program. Let us answer five questions really quick. All we ask them is a question that identifies have you been to the restaurant before and if so, how often do you come? Because I want to know if they’re new, frequent or lost.
If they’re a new customer, I have to indoctrinate them. I need different Facebook ads to tell the story of my restaurant. I need a different e-mail and text campaign to make them get excited to come in. If they’re a frequent customer, they need a high five. We love you. Get your butt in here. Can’t wait to see. If they’re lost, you gotta figure out why they’re lost. Why’d they quit coming?
And so that’s the front end of what we do is we help restaurants from their website, from website listings like Google, Yelp, Google My Business, all these different places, TripAdvisor, their in-store marketing. Did you know 85% of people that walk in and out of the doors of a restaurant are not in that restaurant’s database? I believe that. That’s scary to me. I can’t fathom that. When we had a boat dealership, we did everything. You didn’t leave our business unless we got your information. Our salesman had a book of gift cards, and it was whatever you have to write a gift card out, you get their information. No matter, make it up. Hey, we have a birthday program. By the way, when you give us your name, phone, or an e-mail, you get a $50 gift card, seriously? Now granted, we’re selling $50,000 boats, you can do that, but that was the goal.
So you know in store marketing, website marketing, online listings, database reactivation. The pandemic has forced a lot of people to do online ordering and a lot of consumers are taking advantage of it. I talked to a restaurant today is like Matt. This is no lie. 17,800 people any database from his online ordering last years. He’s never used it. He said, I’m scared to use it. I don’t want to **** people off. I don’t know what to do with it. I’m like, hold on. He’s got multiple locations. You get 17,000 people’s information sitting in a locked up computer that you’ve never touched. He’s like, yeah. Like, man.
And so we’re helping him take that database and reactivate it. Find out, because a lot of his stuff is their name, photo, or e-mail. He doesn’t know if they’re male or female, which is different, how you market to them. He doesn’t know if they’re a new, frequent, or lost customer. So we then take all that information, we put it into our tool where we get their information.
Now the next part of that, which is the proof, which is what I like a lot about what we do, is you can go out and build a database. Let’s say Steve’s restaurant, like the first month he was in the program, I think we built like 700 people in his database. if none of those people walk in the restaurant, who cares? It’s useless.
We had a place called Biker Jim’s in Denver, Colorado. We worked with, I was at the Denver Restaurant Association, Restaurant Association Show back like four years ago. Met him, awesome restaurant. We did some marketing for him. We got 2,800 people to join this program in 60 days. He was loving it. It’s cool. The negative was the way we track it. 2% had walked in. I said, man, we’re on the wrong path, Jim. I said, why? I said, because I’ve got a database that’s useless. If these people aren’t walking in your restaurant, who cares if we have their name or phone or e-mail? I mean, that’s like a restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona, having my information. I’m there three times a year. It doesn’t do a ton of good. Like what if I live there?
And so our tracking system of getting people to come in the restaurant for a buy one, get one free burger for a free dessert, my tactics are I want four offers. If I can give somebody four offers, one that’s really sexy, like a free appetizer, that gets them to get a free item. They’re going to spend money and they also might try an appetizer. Never had an appetizer before. I’m going to give him a dessert item. They might be too full typically to get a dessert. Now they’re going to try one for free and hopefully it remembers. I love that I’m paying for it next time and then drive business to incremental places like a lunch day part or like an early weekday dinner part where nobody’s coming in.
And then after that is where the magic really happens because if you get a database, use your marketing to build a database. And then we take that database and we activate, let’s say 20% of them. I was looking at clients here today, 21.3% of the people that have joined the database have walked in the restaurant in the last 45 days. And the fact that I know that, that’s a damn good number.
But the cool part about afterwards is now talking to them. And what happens with most restaurants, the ones that do use e-mail and text do two key things wrong. They send everybody the same message. So you’re talking to me, my wife, my assistant, my brother, my mom and dad, exactly the same. And then they send them a message every week about them.
So our retention strategies are different. The first week of the month, we target people who have told us they’ve never been to the restaurant and we still know haven’t walked in. The third week of the month, we target people who told us they hadn’t been in a while, they’re lost and still haven’t come back in with one of those four offers. So we got those people handled.
The second week of the month we do a campaign to frequent customers that has nothing to do with the restaurant. So a good example place and that always sticks in my mind ’cause it’s a cool restaurant. I visited recently for our TV show called Sweet Taters and Conover, North Carolina.
In early April we did an e-mail to their frequent women. We took the database and carved out like 700 people that were women that told us they were frequent customers. We sent him an e-mail and a text, but I’ll tell you how we did it. The e-mail went out and said hey. Mother’s Day is coming up. We want to celebrate all the moms in our area. Click on the link below. Go to Facebook and give us a memory about you and your mom that’s near and dear. We’re going to pick one person to win a Mother’s Day prize. We didn’t say come to the restaurant. We didn’t say book a reservation. We didn’t say menu said go to Facebook and leave a memory.
This one little location mom and pop hit 200 plus people go to Facebook and leave a comment in there. They weren’t little comments. They were a picture of them and their mom and their sister in four sentences. So when I look at that, I’m like, OK, we had 700 women that we sent an e-mail to that wasn’t about the restaurant and it got a couple hundred of them to go to Facebook and leave this memory.
When we send a text message, we only sent the text to the women who did not click in the e-mail. So if 700 emails went out the way our system is built, 700 emails go out. We have 700 telecell phones still. If 300 of them click the e-mail, we’re not wasting the bandwidth and sending them a text. We already know they clicked it. So now 400 get that text message.
Now what happens is the reason we drive that to Facebook is Facebook has a very good machine learning that if all of a sudden Facebook algorithm sees most Facebook posts get three or four comments. If they see a Facebook post get three to 400 comments or even 50 to 100 comments, they now look and go birds with feather. Who are all these women leaving pictures of their mom on this Facebook post? Now they’re going to show it to people in the area, and so that is something that really helps one. It gives you a valid reason to e-mail your database. The next time that frequent woman gets an e-mail from you, she’s more likely to open it because she wants to see what’s inside. If you send your customers every week, here’s our fish special, here’s our Wing Wednesdays, here’s our Taco Tuesday, they eventually quit looking ’cause they know what it is.
And then that last week of the month, we do an e-mail and text to everybody and it’s always a contest. Go to Facebook, guess how many Skittles are in the jar. Steve, from your client, your introduction, he did one recently that was Brussels sprouts. I think it was Brussels sprouts. It was a big sprouts. Go to your guests. Whether you get 50 people or 5,000, we had a restaurant recently in Michigan, 6,500 comments, one location restaurant, 6,500 people guessed on how many mints were in a jar on top of a bar.
And the other cool part about that, which kind of goes back to the build, Whenever we do those campaigns like that, where we drive them to Facebook to guess or to comment, it fires our automation in Messenger and says, hey, David Scott Peters, we see you’re a member of our VIP program. You have two offers left, click here to see them. Or if you’re not in the database, it recognizes it and says, hey, you’re not currently a VIP, click the link below to join.
And up the one restaurant, for example, I actually did a little case study in the back of the book. It was like 1400 people, I want to say, that joined the program. They had 400 and something visits in the next two months from people who just happened to see a candy contest because of the virality, comment on the post, go in there, join and walk in the restaurant within 60 days.
That’s amazing. So let me ask you a question. I mean, I’m ready to sign up. How would I contact you? If they’re listening to us right now, they’re watching us, how would I contact you?
Easiest way is my e-mail or phone. I answer the phone all the time and I work only at a capacity of marketing and sales to some extent, not much sales, but in these situations, I love having these conversations. Matt@mattplapp.com and that’s Plapp, three P’s like the city of Pittsburgh. You can look at matplap.com my website that’ll take you to our other company websites and then my cell phone is 85974324088597432408.
If you want to have a conversation, text me, call me and I’m honest with people too. That’s one thing I pride myself. My dad taught me don’t take money to take money.
And give you an example. We had a restaurant we shot America’s best restaurants at in Chapel Hill, NC last week. I was there. I’m a huge North Carolina Tar Heel fan. My mom’s from Greensboro, North Carolina. My dad’s Chicago, so I’m like we’re going to shoot Chapel Hill. I’m going, but one of our producers found three awesome restaurants in Chapel Hill. They’re on campus. That one’s been there 43 years. He does not need marketing help from Matt Platt. He’s got 30,000 students walking in and getting pizza.
But we have the ability to supply him with the footage. So when we hop on a review of the footage we shot, and I said, hey, you might want the footage from the event. It’s a couple 100 bucks and you get 24 pieces of media for social media if you want it. But I don’t think you need our marketing help, brother. He goes, no, Matt, I don’t. It’s Angelo’s, IP3 is name of Italian Pizzeria 3, awesome place, staple in the Chapel community.
But I told him, I said, you do not need my marketing help. I’m not going to do anything that’s not going to, you’re paying higher rent because you’re on campus. So one thing I pride myself in telling restaurants is like, if I can’t help you or if I’m not the best fit or my team, we’ll tell you. But at the same time, I’m also honest, I’ll tell you, hey, what we’re doing, even if we suck, at your particular restaurant, it’s probably 10 times better than what you can do, just like almost all these restaurants can cook a lot better food than Matt Platt.
Well, I’m going to tell you right now, you think about just everything we talked about today, you got a book that says Restaurant Marketing Works. You got a company called Restaurant Marketing Works. And basically, You’ve got restaurant marketing that works. I mean, it’s the trifecta in restaurant marketing that works, man. I really appreciate you sharing all this with us today. I’m excited that people go out and grab your book and literally get those basics, but take the basics to another level to see how they can truly change their businesses at a much different fee structure than we were 20 years ago. To do the same thing is just amazing what you can leverage. Matt, is there anything you want to leave people with before we finish?
The one thing I want to leave them with is think about, I call the tactic spend to build, and there’s a graphic in the book about it. Whenever you spend time, money, or energy on marketing your business, why would you not ask for their information?
My wife, we’ve been married as of two weeks ago, 22 years together, 26. It started with me asking for her phone number in study hall in college. I don’t ask for her phone number. I might not get that first date. I might not end up dating her and being married and having two amazing kids and having an amazing mom for my kids, my wife.
Do the same with your customers. Everybody wants to. I always say a lot of restaurants, a lot of small businesses want to marry and have babies with their customers on the first visit. No, you’ve got a date.
And the best way to date them is to spend, to build, spend your time, energy and money to build a database. If you build a database, you can use it over and over and over and over. And even if you’re using it wrong, you still have the database to use. I think that’s the core of what every business needs is a list of the people that are willing to give them money.
Amen, you’re preaching to the choir, somebody who sold the company, have my database and was still back in business. It is truly just something that no matter what industry you’re in, that is it, your customer list is so powerful. Matt, I want to thank you so much for talking with us today. I hope people go buy the book and I hope they call you. I can’t believe you gave away your personal cell phone number. You, my friend, are somebody who’s kind of crazy and a champion of my book.
I appreciate the opportunity. I appreciate your kind words. I love what you do. I just shared a text message with you the other day. We send your book to our clients because it’s a powerful book. It’s stuff people need. And so I appreciate what you do. So giving me a chance to come back on here is great. I appreciate it. And I love everything.
Thanks, my friend. Go out there, kick some ***.
Cool. Thanks, sir.
Hey, that was an awesome episode. I want to thank you for taking the time to take action on building a better, more prosperous restaurant.
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