By Carin Oliver

Approximate reading time:  5 minutes

What’s in store for restaurant marketing in 2012? We see six key restaurant marketing trends that will lead this next year’s efforts to gain market share, better understand the customer and turn a profit in 2012. We also believe there is one trend that will consume marketing dollars in 2012 but will turn out not to be influential in driving consumers into restaurants.

A recent Harris Poll reported that the majority of consumers surveyed planned on reducing their spending on dining out occasions. We believe this will make dining choices in 2012 even more selective as consumers opt for safe, trusted brands and rely more heavily on recommendations from friends and online research.

The most important restaurant marketing tactics restaurants will employ for 2012 include:

Data

The biggest restaurant marketing trend in 2012 will be integrating data capture and in-depth analysis from social media, public relations, email marketing and advertising teams. Savvy restaurateurs will also increase the data points collected on customers to better allocate tight marketing dollars into the marketing channels that are delivering the most return on investment.

Although data reporting services are in abundance, they alone will not be able to deliver the multi-platform analysis required. While social media participation and listening was a great first step for many organizations, in 2012, it will be time to go beyond gathering data and to bring in senior customer intelligence analysts to extract usable information from the data. Analysts will need holistic marketing training to effectively mine and merge insights from webpage analytics, onsite restaurant data capture and social media analytics from Facebook, Yelp, OpenTable, Twitter, YouTube and others.

Many restaurants are still keeping data in separate silos, maintaining marketing, public relations, influencer relations and business data in different departments. Although we believe this will be a protracted process, in 2012, we will begin to see silos break down and the emergence of more fully integrated communications programs that inform each other to reach a highly defined target market with customized messaging and provide a robust understanding of marketing effectiveness. The organizations that can effectively streamline internal data from multiple touch points will have a significant lead over their competitors that will extend well beyond 2012.

Identifying And Activating Influencers

If you ask any restaurant marketing professional, they report that the number one way consumers find and decide to dine is based on a positive word of mouth recommendation from a close contact in their social sphere. But when it comes to finding and activating those customers who have the most authority to drive recommendations, there has been a significant lack of data to understand who those individuals are and which tools to give them to encourage pass alongs.

In 2012, we will see more programs identifying and activating the hidden individuals who influence a greater number of diners. The big play will be in digging deep beyond the top traditional media influencers and food bloggers to uncover the passionate foodie who is prime to spread the word about their great restaurant experience.

Specialized tools, techniques, and word of mouth marketing agencies will be engaged to identify those individuals who are passionate about a particular kind of restaurant, have both the digital and offline reach to be influential and are considered knowledgeable by their social sphere. Activating the individuals who have access, motive and credibility to make restaurant, food and dining recommendations will see wider adoption at a diverse array of restaurants.

While we don’t think the perfect tool that seamlessly blends on and offline dining influence will arrive in 2012 it will be the year that restaurants get serious about working with influencers.

Signature Items

While signature items have been around since restaurants began, a new marketing importance will be placed on them. In 2011 we witnessed an increase in chatter on websites, blogs and in traditional media discussing specific dishes versus specific restaurants. This will place more emphasis on restaurant marketers to make sure signature items are getting sampled by key influencers in order to steal share from competitors. This will also play heavily into local search as consumers research individual items instead of types of restaurants.

Gamification Of Loyalty Programs

2012 will be a transformational year for how restaurants will attempt to differentiate their loyalty programs from their competitors with social gaming-type rewards for performing certain actions, such as referring friends, visiting multiple times and more.

Location based services with their badges, titles and rewards will merge with restaurant loyalty programs to play a major role in incentivizing repeat visits, facilitating sharing and making rewards easier to redeem for diners. Check-ins in 2012 will begin resulting in real offline rewards from savvy restaurants. Integrating gaming dynamics to impact diner action will accelerate restaurant loyalty programs.

One to One Accessibility

Social media has made getting to know the brand much easier and connecting with diners outside of the restaurant has been a simple communications evolution for many restaurants. Restaurants, unlike many industries, excel at customer relations and social media has given operators another channel through which to make a meaningful connection with diners. However, diners are now demanding more: They want to get up close and personal with who’s cooking in the kitchen.

Specifically in 2012, consumers want to hear from but also interact with the chef directly, both on and offline, not with the intermediary in the marketing department. Expect to see personalized messages directly from the chef to best customers telling them when the menu changes, nightly specials, and suggestions based on past orders.

While this might sound like another daunting task on top of an already busy schedule, chefs will manage this enhanced engagement by relying on the marketing team to first identify the restaurant’s best customers both on and offline. In the restaurant, the chef will also need to play a prominent role on the dining room floor.

People are looking for more personalized, direct connection with both what’s on the plate and who’s plating the food.

Coupon Personalization

In 2011 many restaurants experimented with social coupon sites such as Living Social, Groupon and others. Unfortunately, many reported neutral and often negative results. We believe restaurants will continue to experiment with coupons and certificates in 2012, but with more realistic expectations of results, more control, customization, flexibility as well as insist on reporting data.

We also believe that most restaurants will realize their own customer lists are gold mines for helping to promote them, focusing again on the top influencers and providing them with additional opportunities for value added experiences and tools and rewards to facilitate the pass along recommendation.

Couponing will be more select and personalized for the brand with restaurants running their own deals to loyal customers. This trend will accelerate as restaurants see the benefits in tracking and engineering word of mouth recommendations that a well designed application and program can deliver.

Search is the New Social…NOT

And now for the trend we will see that will waste precious resources.

In 2012 we will most likely see restaurants allocating resources to local search. We do not believe this will provide an adequate return on investment for dining establishments. Preliminary results from our current dining survey point to search as one of the least influential channels for diners. While we don’t see local search as having a huge impact on dining decisions in 2012, we do believe it is part of the marketing equation that restaurants should not totally ignore this next year, but should earmark resources judiciously.

What restaurant marketing trends do you see that you care to share?

The marketing paradigm has dramatically changed and the one-way, limited lifespan advertising campaigns have lost effectiveness. And savvy consumers don’t want to be sold, they want value-added two-way relationships with the brands they patronize. If content is king, then consumers are gods and freely sharing your proprietary information is the sacrifice brands need to make for effective engagement.

Instead of traditional interruption-style “push” advertising, smart companies are using content as a way to deliver consistent high value communication that answers questions for current and potential customers.

Content marketing is an inclusive term that embraces sharing what was once considered proprietary company information through articles, webinars, videos and more. It is intended to publicly engage the target audience on a multitude of open channels.

Ann Handley, chief content officer for MarketingProfs.com and author of the soon-to-be released book, Content Rules (Wiley)How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business, sums up the value of brand-generated content:

“It’s both efficient and increasingly imperative that companies create online content as a cornerstone of their marketing — especially for small companies and brick-and-mortars, because they can increase their digital footprint (and expand their potential market) exponentially with good, interesting, compelling blogs posts, or webinars, videos, or audioposts, and the like.”

Content is one of the few marketing tools that work for your brand on a multitude of levels. Every day consumers are discussing products and brand preferences and content generation can help your company become an integral part of that conversation.

“Done right, the content you create will position your company not as just a seller of stuff, but as a reliable source of information. And its benefits compound, because online content is a kind of ‘information annuity’ that delivers returns time and time again. The more valuable the information you can give to others, the more you will become viewed as an expert in whatever field you do business in, and the more you gain the trust of your would-be customers,” adds Handley.

The brands using content marketing most successfully are those which have replaced the hard sell tone of yesteryear’s traditional advertising and embraced marketing with a kinder gentler more value-driven approach.

Below we share success stories from brands who use content marketing in distinct ways to reach and convert their core consumer.

Content As Part of A Bigger Campaign
Skin MD is a great example of small business using content as part of an integrated marketing campaign. By syndicating their articles through Press-Feed, it helped the company achieve page one Google ranking for specific key word phrases, secure great traditional media coverage and blogger reviews as well as help pave the way for the sales team to secure distribution in more than 5000 pharmacies across the United States.

David Capece, CEO and Founder of Sparxoo, a strategy consulting and marketing agency, has experienced similar success after making helpful content a key part of his agency’s marketing effort.

Capece shares his success, “Earlier this year we secured a client who reached out to us after following our blog content for 6 months.  He said that he liked how we thought, and hand selected us without having to go through an RFP process.”

Great content allows perspective clients and buyers an opportunity to get to know your company in a low pressure environment. Online content is the equivalent to product sample stations in the big grocery stores. It provides a barrier free try before the buy.

Content Marketing Drives The Business Model
LocalGetaways.com (full disclosure, they are an Ink Foundry client), a travel deals website, smartly incorporated content marketing into the fabric of the company’s financial model.

President and Publisher Matthew Poole reflects, “Content marketing is the key to differentiate ourselves from other travel deal sites. Our travel insider content convinces pre-interested prospects who are ready to buy with out us having to really ‘sell’ anything. Content marketing is the number one way we generate our revenue.“

Exclusive Promotional Tool
Web design and development company, New Media Campaigns, focuses on politics. Their online campaigning blog is dedicated to the topic and has been extremely successful in driving potential clients to the company’s site. As a result of the content strategy, the agency is on the first page of Google for a multitude of keyword phrases.

In highly competitive keyword categories, content can sky rocket organic search rank.

“We don’t buy any AdWords, all of our inbound traffic comes organically.  Additionally, we have almost no other marketing expenses — this year, we’ve placed no ads, sent no direct mail, and not sponsored any events.  Yet our revenue still grew close to 100%, with politics being about 40% of our business.  That growth was all driven through content marketing and referrals,” states Clay Schossow, Founder & Partner, NewMediaCampaigns

Is Content Marketing Worth The Time Commitment?
Many brands are concerned about the time commitment of developing content on a regular schedule. But Todd Dunning from Dunning Marketing, is a great example of how he changed his website from a typical services site to a content tutorial that has since doubled his business in just a couple of months. He is proof positive that the quality of the content vs just sheer volume is important to success.

“Content marketing seemed very counter intuitive to me. But now, the site’s value is much broader by helping people out instead of trying to sell them something.  It has broken down barriers to engage us for services,” said Dunning.

In a challenging economic and competitive environment, the ROI on content marketing is impressive. If done correctly, content marketing will increase search engine rank, build trust, develop top of mind awareness, prove category expertise and give your company a platform to respond quickly to industry news or product issues.

Those marketers who begin developing their content plan now, will easily be able to leapfrog their competitors who stall or never engage. Brand marketers will benefit by understanding that content is a long term asset that never stops working as a bridge between your customer and your brand.

PHOTO CREDIT:  Nikki L

In the restaurant industry, those gatekeepers can be hotel concierge and the bell desk, the human resources or office manager who books company events or the administrative assistant who is tasked with ordering executive lunches.

All of these very influential individuals are frequently overlooked when creating a external communications program. But by not including them in your restaurant’s marketing mix you are potentially forfeiting thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

But gatekeepers, unlike your straight to reservation consumer, have a downside. They have the most to lose by making an unfavorable recommendation. Suggesting a restaurant for your boss is fraught with anxiety. And this can make them extremely challenging to influence.

As a restaurant your strategic challenge is to create a program and outreach plan that is specifically targeted to that group, taking their expectations and objections into account as well as develop an ongoing relationship with them to generate reservations through out the year.

The tactical challenge is not only to initially capture their attention in a meaningful way but to also continue to keep your restaurant top of mind during peak booking times.

An example of an extremely effective gatekeeper program was one that Ink Foundry created for Organic To Go targeted to office and human resource managers of mid-sized companies. Using data that we had collected, we identified with the client the companies most likely to take an interest in Organic To Go. Our strategy was to create an initial awe-inspiring package of tasty goodies and information, and then we continued with other top of mind touch points in six weeks intervals. If they hadn’t placed an order, we then hit them with a free lunch offer. Before rolling this program out to Organic To Go’s other locations, we initially tested this program at under performing restaurants. The results were impressive and helped increase lunchtime sales by nearly 30 percent in 90 days.

Part of the success of any gatekeeper program for your restaurant will be dependent upon the tone of the materials (let them know you appreciate them), the offer and the ease of the sample you provide. They will need to dovetail nicely with your restaurant’s identity but also help to answer questions and concerns that your target audience may have about your service proposition. If done correctly, reaching out to gatekeepers can dramatically improve your immediate sales, but also provide an ongoing revenue stream for your restaurant.

We’re guessing you’re a bit like us – overworked, too many chores and not enough hours in the day to spend time with the ones you love.

To give you some help, Ink Foundry developed a Facebook application with 9 excuses to hack your way to a day off from work, taking out the trash, dishes, laundry, even a hack to ditch social media.

We didn’t just do it for us, we worked with Festival of Children Foundation to help them promote the third annual National Child Awareness Month. Their goal, and we hope you’ll join us, is to help adults understand how important it is to spend quality time with a child.

You can check out the 9 hacks for taking a vacation day on the Ditch For Kids application here. The Facebook application asks you to pick your hack and generates an “excuse” letter for parents and other adults to send to their boss, lawnmower, Farmville, dirty laundry and more.

The letter will be available through out the month of September on the Foundation’s Facebook page.

The Ditch Day Application is available free of charge to any of the 400 Festival of Children Foundation member charities.

THE FINE PRINT
The Ditch For Kids Facebook application is part of a larger on and offline marketing communications program created by Ink Foundry and the Foundation team to celebrate National Child Awareness Month.

Overall, National Child Awareness Month is an effort to raise the visibility of children’s needs in a way that will be entertaining for parents, grandparents and other adults in a cost effective manner. The ultimate goal of the Ditch For Kids program is to inspire adults to take time away from an everyday chore to spend an afternoon with a child. Easy. Now go check out the Ditch For Kids Facebook application so you can do something fun.

Ink Foundry was able to triple traffic to the travel website by instituting a robust conversation listening and participation program on vertical sites; engaging fans via a customized Facebook fan page; robust Twitter activity and promotion; as well as actively targeting offline influencers.

Additionally, we helped the travel website fully optimize their content by changing the posts that were originally being deconstructed after a week into a blog engine with permanent links; hired an SEO specialist; created an ongoing link building campaign and developed a content distribution strategy.

The post also lists other helpful case studies and can be found at Zajon.com.

PHOTO: Ink Foundry Client, Palms Casino, Las Vegas
PHOTO CREDIT: Terran In Virginia

If your restaurant or hotel has ever provided any material compensation to an online influencer, such as a free meal or FAM trip and the relationship was not disclosed, that transaction may be in violation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines on ‘adequate disclosure’ expected to be released this Fall. And operators could be held liable for non-disclosure.

Restaurants and hotels need to be upfront about any compensation between the brand and the blogger to avoid negative repercussions from the FTC and more importantly consumers. Additionally, if the blogger fails to disclose a freebie, it could violate reader trust.

For any restaurant or hotel this means developing a core set of principles which guide relationships with bloggers and influencers. Digitial hospitality influencers will also need to create and clearly communicate when any type of compensation which has been or will be accepted.

Key Considerations:

Disclosure on both the brand and the digital influencer sides are necessary and non-negotiable.

There will be an expectation of brands to monitor activity.

Advertisers/brands could be held liable for bloggers who fail to disclose.

The “influencer” who has or will receive some form of incentive/payment/gift has an obligation to their readers to disclosure the relationship.

If money or a product is either loaned or given with out the expectation of being returned (kind of hard to return that great fine dining experience!), then it needs to be disclosed in an obvious location on both the brand website and the influencer blog.

Nine Best Practices:

• For The Brand
  • Publish a clear, detailed ‘terms of engagement’ on the website, brand microsite or campaign site.
  • Make a commitment to work with third party influencers who adhere to clear disclosure best practices by creating a one page influencer agreement.
  • Request that all third party influencers link back to the brands ‘terms of engagement’ policy.
  • A brand’s integrity and reputation are its most valuable assets, only work with agencies who commit to high ethical standards.
  • Create site badges for recurring programs.

• For the Hospitality Food, Wine, Restaurant Blogger
  • If brands don’t have a ‘terms of engagement’ for working with bloggers, then ask that they create one.
  • Commit to working with brands who adhere to standard disclosure best practices.
  • Disclose in each post. (yes, even on Twitter)
  • Create a policy that is visible and easy to read on your website, blog or Twitter account.
  • Include brand affiliation and /or your likelihood that you will receive compensation in the future in your bio.

The pending FTC guidelines should not represent a dramatic departure from current best practices for disclosure for experienced social media marketing agencies and hospitality brands.

RESULTS (as of July 2009):

• Twitter is currently one of the largest sources of traffic to LocalGetaways.com
• Secured thousands of qualified followers in less than 30 days
• Tracked Twitter clicks through to sales
• Realized more than 20K website clicks in 2 months
• Generated national traditional media story
• Tweets trickled out to other social media sites, generating additional website traffic

TACTICS:

• Identified, followed and engaged other San Francisco and Bay Area influencers
• Create a consistent flow of information about Bay Area events, deals and attractions whether or not they are on the LocalGetaways.com website
• Track conversations regarding San Francisco and Bay Area travel and participated when appropriate
• Reduce character length to accommodate retweets
• Created three LocalGetaways.com accounts, @getawayguru; @LocalGetaways and @bayareagetaways
• Utilize Ink Foundry’s Twitter accounts where appropriate, remaining authentic to those accounts content focus

WHY TWITTER IS SUCCESSFUL FOR LocalGetaways.com:
This case study is a great example of how by just participating in a very basic way, the micro blogging service can drive traffic back to the site and generate sales. Granted, Local Getaways is a content-driven website with a generous amount of content to create a wide range of tweets that appeal to a diverse demographic.  And travel is also a high value social media conversation tool. However, we are seeing similar results with our other clients.

Ink Foundry is preparing to launch a full scale multi-channel promotion for LocalGetaways.com that will include Twitter and we will compare against the baseline that has been established.

As we engage additional layers of social media participation for this client, we anticipate Twitter may lose some of its rank against other social media outlets. However, we believe that Twitter will sustain its importance as a vital communication launch pad for outbound messaging.

We will continue to share our social media marketing for small business results as they become available.

Additional Twitter Articles:
11 Top Tips To Build Your Twitter Following

Top Twitter Trends To Consider

Impact
Roy’s Private Preview kicked off with an appearance on FOX’s Good Day LA and became THE gathering place for members of Pasadena high society by sundown. Featured on all of the community’s society pages, the event raised more than $20,000 and won the hearts of the local community. The event was followed by feature media coverage, including glowing reviews by top restaurant critics and residents alike. Roy’s is currently featured in Pasadena Magazine’s November Food & Wine issue as the city’s premier destination for fresh fish and seafood.

Ink Foundry reached out to local charities and social organizations in each participating market, and the groups, in turn, invited their supporters to attend and participate in these educational wine-tasting experiences.

Impact

Based on the initial success of “Wine Down Wednesdays,” Ink Foundry produced a turn key event series easily replicated by any in house staff at Fleming’s locations nationwide. The individual Wine Down Wednesdays garnered coverage in both traditional media and social networking and niche blog sites. The events also resulted in repeated return visits by event attendees who had not previously dined at the restaurant.

To launch Lawry’s off-site catering program, Ink Foundry created an informative luncheon at the historic restaurant that was attended by a select group of Los Angeles’ most prominent event, meeting and wedding planners. The luncheon demonstrated Lawry’s ability to provide the highest level of service and fine cuisine while presenting the new services extended to Lawry’s patrons beyond its traditional menu.

Impact
Filling the grand dining room, the luncheon started the community talking and resulted in a successful word-of-mouth campaign that generated bookings and inquiries for the new catering services.

Ink Foundry also secured online word of mouth from members of the Association for Wedding Planners International and the National Association of Wedding Professionals by providing a preview of Lawry’s The Prime Rib catering offer.