You and your marketing team are invited to attend our first 2012 webinar, Identifying and Engaging Influencers.  Sign Up Here: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/391493654

We will share our experience in the restaurant, wine, casino, travel and entertainment categories with brands such as CPK, Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & WInebar, The Palms Casino and more.

Join us and learn more about influencer marketing.

We will announce our additional webinars soon. If you would like to co-present with the agency, please contact Carin Oliver. She can be reached at Firstname@InkFoundry.com.

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?

Thanks for attending my education session at CalSAE Seasonal Spectacular.

Hope you enjoy my presentation, “Turning Common Materials Into Killer Content” that I gave on December 7th in Sacramento. Let me know if you have any questions!

We will announce the prize winners next week, January 23, 2012. And will release the survey results in February.
————————————————————————————————————
If you complete the survey, you can be rewarded with some cool tokens of our appreciation. We will randomly select 15 survey takers to receive one of 15 different wine and food-related items.

They include: (1) bottle 2008 Romililly Pinot Noir; (1) $150 Amazon Gift Card; (1) bottle 2008 Rodney Strong Sonoma County Chardonnay; (5) $10 Starbucks Gift Cards; (1) Vinturi Wine Aerator; (1) bottle 2003 El Sol Amador County Pinotage; (2) 2008 Rubicon Estate Captain’s Reserve Chardonnay; (1) box Napa Valley Quail Point chocolates; (2) $25 Visa Gift Cards = 15 people who will win prizes!

In January, we will begin a new webinar series to address some of the biggest marketing issues that face wineries today. And we wanted to invite you to join us.

We are considering the following topics, but would welcome input on which items are most important to you:

• Motivating Your Wine Club Members To Spread Positive Word of Mouth
• Identifying and Engaging Influencers To Fuel Conversation About Your Wine
• Facebook Marketing and Applications For Wineries
• Using Social Media For Consumer Insight
• Best Practices For Winery Website Design
• Creative Ideas For Promotions That Are Actually Legal in California
• Training Staff on Social Media Best Practices
• Content Marketing Through Storytelling
• Time Saving Tips For Social Media Marketing
• Retooling Marketing Messages For Social Media Channels

Let us know by adding a comment below or emailing Hannah Dunton directly.  She can be reached at Hannah[at]InkFoundry[dot]com.

In the webinars we will share what we’ve learned while working with brands such as Hilton Hotels Corporation, Rodney Strong Wine Estates, Romililly Wines, Fleming’s, Anheuser-Busch, Tanqueray, Fogo de Chao, Lexus, Lawry’s, Roy’s Hawaiian, and many other wine, spirits, food and restaurant experience.

We look forward to your participation.   Sign up for the wine marketing webinars here:

Keeping up with all of the changes on Facebook can be a daunting task, but making sure that your winery is compliant with all of the promotional restrictions, design features and terms of use requirements will keep your page in good standing with the social network.

While the original restriction of involving alcohol as a prize is now lifted, current Facebook guidelines maintain that all promotions must comply with local laws and regulations of the jurisdictions where the promotion is open. The burden of verifying that a promotion is legal is in the hands of the winery and by running a promotion on Facebook, you confirm compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.

As painful as it may sound, loop your winery’s legal team into your Facebook marketing plans before you get too far into your planning. And make sure they are very familiar with Facebook’s promotion guidelines and terms of use.

Below, I’ve highlighted 13 little known Facebook participation requirements that many wineries (and other categories, you are not alone!) are violating on a daily basis. Don’t jeopardize your brand and all of the hard work you’ve put into building a relationship with your fans, by making these easily fixable mistakes.

At the end of the article, I’ve also included the link to the Facebook promotion guidelines, should you want to read and share them with your team.

1. 3rd Party Applications Required
   • Facebook requires that all promotions are run on 3rd party applications.
     • Facebook’s definition of a promotion is: “a contest, competition, sweepstakes or other offer” that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner determined on the basis of skill or on the basis of chance.
     • Either randomly choosing a winner or having them perform a task to win requires a 3rd party application hosted off the social network.
2. Facebook’s Native Features & Functionality Are Off Limits
   • Brands may not use any native Facebook features or functionality for promotions.
     • For example, you cannot have users “Like” your page to enter into a contest— the entry process must be performed within the 3rd party application and include a registration separate from the act of simply “Liking” your page.
3. Connecting with Winners
   • Brands can’t send a winner via a message, chat, or wall post alerting them to their win.
4. Use of The Wall
   • Many wineries are using the wall as the way to run a promotion. For example, “Comment below to win…” is not an acceptable way to run your winey’s Facebook promotion.
5. Voting
   • You cannot use the “Like” feature as a method of voting. Again, this type of functionality must be contained within a 3rd party application.
6. Secure Socket Layer
   • Although this won’t result in Facebook suspending your page, it will result in your custom tab(s) not working. Basically, they will be invisible.
   • All custom tabs must be hosted on a secure server. This means you will need to purchase a Secure Socket Layer certificate for your web server if your site doesn’t already have one. Make sure that any Facebook application developer is compliant with this requirement.
7. Age Gate Restrictions
   • If you have a wine, beer or spirits Facebook page, it must restrict users to 21 years or older. Any Page administrator can fix this in less than 5 minutes. Follow these steps:
     1. Go to your winery Facebook Page
     2. Click on “edit page” on the right hand side of the page>
     3. On the left, select “manage permissions”
     4. The “age restrictions” menu is a pull down menu. Scroll down to “alcohol-related”
     5. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and select “save changes”
     6. That’s it!
8. Third Party Advertising
   • We’ve only witnessed this once, but a restaurant displayed an advertisement on a custom Facebook tab for a spirits brand. While we think this is clever, it’s against Facebook’s terms of use.
9. Privacy Policy
   • If you collect information from your fans, you must gain their consent and tell them how their information will be used with a posted privacy policy. For example, if you run a promotion on the required 3rd party application and collect information, you must tell them what you are going to do with that data.
10. Personal Profile Page Used As Brand Pages
    • We are still seeing wineries use their personal accounts as their label page. An example, instead of using their name “Willy Winemaker” they use Willy’s Pinot Noir” as the name. Just create a brand page for your winery. It has a ton of advantages.
11. Violating Copyrights
    • Do not under any circumstance post content that has a copyrights that your winery does not own. Be careful of YouTube videos in particular because many times even though the video is under a creative common license, the maker may have not received permission to use the music. If you post the video, you are violating the music copyrights. Not something you want to have to explain to your winery’s legal council.
12. Promoting Underage Drinking
    • This rule applies offline as well, so it should be relatively easy for your winery marketing team to enforce. The best way for your winery to avoid any hint of impropriety is by placing the age gate on your page.
    • However, when it comes to photos of consumers drinking that you place on the page, be very aware of how old they look. We know you all do a great job of making sure no one is under 21 in your tasting room, but we’ve recommended to some of our wine clients that they remove photos from their Facebook page just to be safe.
13. Photo Tagging
    • Although a well-known brand used Facebook’s photo tagging feature in a genius way to reward consumers who tagged the item in the photo with their name to win the item, the page was shut down for violating the promotions terms and conditions.

Whether you manage your winery’s Facebook page or have hired a social media agency, it is important to be fully aware of the limitations and features of Facebook Pages.

Click on the highlighted text to read the Facebook promotions guidelines. ]]> http://www.inkfoundry.com/2011/11/warning-13-ways-to-get-your-winery%e2%80%99s-facebook-page-suspended/feed/ 0 http://www.inkfoundry.com/2011/10/wine-retail-survey-results-at-a-glance/ http://www.inkfoundry.com/2011/10/wine-retail-survey-results-at-a-glance/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:21:02 +0000 CarinaOst http://www.inkfoundry.com/?p=2380 Napa Technology, developer of the WineStation Intelligent Preservation and Dispensing System, commissioned a survey of 40 top wine retailers nationwide on wine purchasing trends and best practices for increasing bottle sales.

Respondents agreed that today’s consumers are willing to pay more, when given the opportunity to sample wine before they buy.  And those retailers willing to look outside the wine bottle for creative and technologically innovative solutions are seeing the profits pour in.

1. Are customers demanding a wider variety of wines now than in the past?

• Yes                                    84.6%
• No                                     15.4%

2. When wine sampling is available, what is the increase in purchase price:

• 5-10% higher                      30%
• 10-20% higher                    30%
• 25%+                                    15%
• Don’t know                          25%

3. Are customers willing to spend more on a bottle of wine if given the opportunity to sample it first?

• Yes                                     97.4%
• No                                        2.6%

4. Is your wine buying customer more savvy today than they were 4 years ago?

• Yes                                      76.3%
• No                                       23.7%

5. Do wine tastings help you sell more wine at your store?

• Yes                                      91.9%
• No                                        8.1%

6. How much can you expect your wine sales to increase after a wine tasting?

• Less than 5%                     10.8%
• 5-15%                                 56.7%
• 15-20%                               16.2%
• 20% or More                     16.2%

7. Do you believe that a daily “try before you buy” opportunity for your customers would increase your wine sales?

• Yes                                     80.6%
• No                                        8.3%
• Don’t know                          11.1%

8. Do you currently have a wine preservation and dispensing system in your establishment?

• Yes                                    69.4%
• No                                     30.6%

9. What prompted the need for a preservation and dispensing system in your venue? (Multiple Choice)

• Product Control                                                             44.4%
• Increase/Improve Profitability                                      59.3%
• Reduction in waste due to spoilage                                29.6%
• The ability to offer finer/high priced wines                   66.7%
• Expand wine offerings                                                    48.1%
• Ability to offer promotions (wine tastes/events)           40.7%
• Loyalty Programs                                                             3.7%
• Point of Differentiation                                                  40.7%

10. What is the customer reaction to your wine preservation system? (Multiple Choice)

• None                                                                                  17.2%
• Positive                                                                               69%
• More likely to purchase small/boutique wines               37.9%
• It encourages additional/new purchases                           69%
• Generates repeat visits                                                    55.2%

11. Can consumers sample wine anytime at your venue?

• Yes                                    70.6%
• No                                     29.4%

Methodology

Commissioned by Napa Technology, the retail wine survey took place in September 2011.  The sample size included 40 top wine retailers who were contacted by Ink Foundry via a private database and select open and closed social networks. Individuals who participated in the survey are existing users of wine preservation systems, non-users of preservation systems, grocery stores and wine shops.

About Napa Technology

Napa Technology, LLC is a designer and manufacturer of Intelligent Dispensing Solutions for wine that ensures optimum freshness with each pour. The company’s breakthrough product, WineStation®, is designed to drive revenues and maximize the profitability of each bottle. WineStation® has been adopted by hospitality, entertainment and foodservice industries as a new way to serve, preserve and capitalize on the value of available customer preference data.

Voters will narrow the field down to three for the SF Weekly panel of judges who will then choose the winning blogs on September 2. The announcement party will take place on Friday, Sept. 9th.

To check out Carina’s blog, please visit Mission Fruition and to vote for her, which we hope you will, please visit SF Weekly.

Carina is instrumental in food, wine and restaurant influencer engagement programs on behalf of Ink Foundry clients including Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar, Outback Steakhouse, Napa Technology and others.

Congratulations to Carina and best of luck!

And the winners are…drum roll please…

Grand Prize – Wine Enthusiast Complete Aroma Kit

1. Bianca Romano

Runner Up Prizes – “I Love You More Than My Dog”  books

1. Mark Kuehn
2. Kevin Woodward
3. Scott from The Park Press

Thanks everyone!