Mastering Restaurant Marketing with Rev Ciancio

In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, Jeremy Julian talks with Rev Ciancio, a hospitality marketing consultant and CMO at Salad House and Handcraft Burgers Brew. They discuss effective restaurant marketing strategies, focusing on the importance of local search optimization, email marketing, and guest feedback. Rev shares insights on why social media isn't a primary driver for customer acquisition and emphasizes the value of CRM growth through regular, targeted email newsletters. They also delve into the significance of guest sentiment and how to incentivize repeat visits for improved customer lifetime value. The episode offers practical tips and real-life examples for restaurant operators looking to enhance their marketing efforts.

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast
00:48 Meet Rev Ciancio: The Marketing Wizard
02:45 Rev's Journey from Music to Hospitality
08:24 The Importance of Local Search for Restaurants
08:57 Common Mistakes in Restaurant Marketing
17:52 The Golden Metric: CRM Growth
18:15 The Power of Weekly Newsletters
19:45 Email vs. Social Media: The Debate
22:09 Overcoming Content Creation Challenges
25:45 Essential Tech for Restaurant Marketing
29:08 Guest Feedback: The Key to Success
34:15 Engaging with Rev Ciancio

Transcript

0:02

This is the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. Helping you run your restaurant better.

Jeremy: 0:11

In today's episode, we talk with rev Ciancio about all things, restaurant marketing, as well as tech marketing, just a little bit, but those that don't know rev, he's a wizard as it relates to restaurant marketing. And he has quite a few unlocks that really are going to help restaurant tours to deliver. On the promise of getting guests in the door, as well as getting them come back. If you don't know me, my name is Jeremy Julian. I am the chief revenue officer for CBS north star. We developed north star point of sale for multiunit restaurants. Check us out at cbsnorthstar.com. And now onto our episode. Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining you, joining us. As I say each and every time I know you guys got lots of choices. So thank you guys for spending time with us today. For those that are on video, we're probably going to recognize Rev quite, quite quickly, the Hawaiian shirt and all of that. But, I'm gonna let Rev introduce himself for those that haven't seen him out on the internet sphere, because there's lots of people that do know him. And, then we can get to talk about what he gets to do for a living.

Rev Ciancio: 1:13

I think a lot of people know me for pointing at food and I don't have any. So I'm in tHe intermittent fasting portion of my day. I do have a seltzer. So there we go. We'll point at a seltzer. Jeremy, thank you for having me on the show. I'm super excited. My name is Red Ciancio. I am a hospitality marketing consultant. I help both technology companies and restaurant multi unit restaurants, with marketing. It's really the end of the story. I'm also the chief marketing officer for Salad House. They're a multi unit, fast casual salad brand here in New Jersey. And I'm the co founder and CMO of a smashed hamburger joint in New York City called Handcraft Burgers Brew. A couple hundred thousand followers on social media from posting content that I call a go eat here content, which is where I tell people to go eat here. And if you ask my mom what I do, she would probably tell you that I put pictures of pizza on the internet and she's not entirely right.

Jeremy: 2:00

Yeah. I love that. And, and if you ever get curious, go look Rev up cause he's got lots of different Instagram handles. I didn't know that you have the largest, what was it? The largest Nashville hot chicken, Instagram following or something along those lines. It was interesting to me when you shared that with me the other

Rev Ciancio: 2:14

Yes, I run the largest hot chicken themed Instagram account that there is. I didn't share this with you, but I will now. I also run the world's largest french fry themed Instagram.

Jeremy: 2:24

That's hilarious. I can tell you, I had a smash burger last night for dinner. that's two, two Wednesday nights in a row because, or two Thursday nights in a row that I had it. We're recording this on a Friday morning and, my son has guitar and we've only got about 45 minutes to eat after work before he's got to go, I got to go run him off to guitar and it's a quick. Quick meal, talk to our audience. Cause a lot of people give me feedback that they love to hear people's backstory. How did you get into marketing for tech and marketing for restaurants? And now you own a restaurant and all of these kinds of things. Cause I think it'll go really nicely into why we're going to talk about why marketing sucks typically and what you really believe marketing is and how you can drive change.

Rev Ciancio: 2:59

cool. my parents plan, it was about to expire cause it was running energy. And my mom was pregnant and they put, Oh wait, that's Superman. Sorry. I was, I actually didn't intend to do this at all. this is totally, I always say things happen to me. when I left college, Michigan State University, I really wanted to be in the music business. I was the program director of my college radio station. I'd been a radio DJ for years. Like I love radio and I love the music and I wanted to be in it so badly. and I got a job out here in the East Coast and I moved out in 1996. I'm a little bit older. and I was in the music business for 11 years and I ended up running my own agency and I worked with a bunch of bands and I've been in MTV videos and covers of magazines and I got crazy stories, man. and everything that they say about Tokyo is true and podcasts. Anyway, one day I woke up and I was like, I'm done with this. I hate it. I don't, I just don't want to do it anymore. It's killed my passion for music. I was so frustrated. I felt like I'd expired my ability to serve my clients. And I literally like Jeremy, no kidding. I walked into my eye on the company. I walked in the office one day, I looked at my one employee. I was like, I love you. You're amazing. You're my favorite person I've ever worked with. I'm turning the company off. I'm sorry. And I helped her get into a new job. And I like, no joke, Sandy, I literally turned off the lights, locked the door and walked out. and I was like, I want to be in the restaurant business. Like I love hospitality. I owned a bar. So like I was an owner, I got it. And I just really passionate about it. And that was it. I had a client, I don't know if you've heard of Thrillist, but Thrillist really loved my bar and they were starting this project that was like a Groupon. like a deal site, but it was for VIP experiences, not discounts. And they came to me and they said, can we test one out with your bar? And I was like, on one condition. And they're like, I was like, you hire me to run BizDev. And they were like, what? And I was like, I know every bar owner in New York city. Nobody will do this better than me. And they hired me. and I ended up running BizDev for Thrillist, for what was called Thrillist Rewards. And I did that for about 18 months. And I was like, okay, yeah, I want to be in hospitality. And, story goes on for a while, but basically I rode the line between operator, manufacturer, technology, blah, blah, blah for years. And I just I love it. I guess the real story here. So I own this bar. we were ridiculously popular bar. We did really well. We had really high ratings and we had a bad partnership and we didn't know if our partners got about 200, 000 in debt. Didn't tell us is crazy. crazy. Anyway, again, another show. We lost the bar on the day that I told everybody that we lost the bar. I'm like, here it is 2024. I actually still owe money on the debt.

Jeremy: 5:25

Oh, wow.

Rev Ciancio: 5:25

people were calling me like, what happened? Like you guys were the top of every list. Like you were always busy, blah, blah, blah. And then they started, Hey, can you help me with my marketing? And what I realized is, the three of us that own that bar, we weren't marketers, like we weren't operators, we weren't, entrepreneurs, like we were marketers. We, that was just our thing. And we developed that bar. Like I would have developed like a band or an artist and I learned all kinds of crazy skills. it's funny, like I'm the tech guy now, like I got tech coming out of every hole. Do you know how much tech we had at the restaurant or at the bar?

Jeremy: 6:01

Probably very little.

Rev Ciancio: 6:03

We had a credit card swiper. That's it. Like nothing. We didn't have POS system. We didn't have a marketing suite. We did. I'm telling you, Jeremy, if it was marketing, I literally did it manually. I updated Facebook. our CRM was a spreadsheet. we used Eventbrite to be able to book it. Like we had zero tech, which is funny because my shop now has, I got as much tech as McDonald's, but like I learned so much. Anyway, I'm rambling, but, restaurants and bars started to call me and saying, Hey, can you help me? And I realized I had a skillset that other people didn't have. It was that I knew how to market a location based business that was in the hospitality industry. And that was it. I was like, that's it. My calling is to help bars and restaurants with marketing. That's it. what I'm doing.

Jeremy: 6:48

so it actually reminds me, are you familiar with Scott Harrison, from a charity water? It reminds me of his story. He was an event promoter turn, bar owner, went down that life. And then now he's, now he's running a huge charity, but, but funny. I've met Scott a couple of times in life and, a remarkable story. If you had never checked his stuff out, it's pretty cool.

Rev Ciancio: 7:04

I don't know him, but they recognize my son as a, young influencer last year,

Jeremy: 7:09

Oh,

Rev Ciancio: 7:10

my kid watches this, watches this YouTube show called half asleep, Chris and half asleep. Chris did a thing on charity water. And my kid was like, almost in tears at age six, over what happened. And he's dad, I want to raise money for charity water. I said, okay, I'll help you. and we ended up getting my ham, my restaurant involved, blah, blah, blah. And long story short, he raised a couple thousand dollars.

Jeremy: 7:29

Yep. Yeah. My wife donated her birthday a couple of years ago to Charity Water and Scott's. it's a remarkable story. I got a chance to meet him, like I said, a number of years ago at an event and I was blown away. and, but it's funny because once you understand how to tell a story and once you understand how to, How to tap into human psyche to get them to drive behavior, to drive emotions, regardless of what you're selling, it's a different conversation. And so talk to me, over, over the last number of years, you've done this really successfully, but you see a lot of people that do it poorly. Can we talk about what you're seeing in the space, especially directly related to restaurants that you think. People think is working, but it really isn't working. And then we can talk about the flip side of that and why you think it's so important to tell stories and have, Instagrammable type stuff. And we can talk through all of those strategies, but what's not working that people really think is working. because you and I've talked about this offline and I've seen a lot of your writing on online about why it's not working. I'd love to have our listeners hear that. Growing your business can mean big time logistical questions like, how am I going to keep up with all these local deliveries? Let UberDirect offer you a helping hand. With UberDirect, you can take orders on your website, via app, or by phone. Then drivers who are part of the Uber courier network will pick them up from your store and deliver them to your customer's doorsteps. Sounds simple, right? Delivery just got better with UberDirect. Check out uberdirect. com to learn more.

Rev Ciancio: 8:49

I just want to clear face something. We have eight hours to talk, right?

Jeremy: 8:52

Yeah.

Rev Ciancio: 8:53

okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to be quick and I'm trying to be tactful about this. So what's not working, at the independent level is social media. I don't know how this happened, but like restaurants, a lot of independent restaurants and look, I get this a lot. It happens to me once in a while too, think that like posting to Instagram is going to save their business. And they think that they're going to go viral. And there's so much focus on like putting something on Instagram and I got bad news for you. that's not how it works.

Jeremy: 9:20

Yeah.

Rev Ciancio: 9:21

I love Instagram. I have a couple hundred thousand, but like I clearly prioritize it, but like it gets used wrong all the time. They call them followers. Those are actually your guests because nobody follows a restaurant unless they've either eaten there or they intend to, right? Or they did something crazy. So the key is to remember that Instagram in that case is a retention channel and it's a bad one, but it's a retention channel. It's not an acquisition channel. So when you're creating content that you think is going to attract people to your business, that's not what you're supposed to do there because those are people who have had an experience. I'm Your job with Instagram content or even Facebook is to drive people back to the restaurants. Okay. It's a retention channel. So your content needs to speak to your guests, not acquisition. Right now, somebody would be like, what if somebody searches my restaurant and find it? okay. Yes. But there, at that point, that's not how they found out about your restaurant. Somebody else said something or they saw something in line. And so now they're in a discovery phase, but they found out about it somewhere else. So when they come to your page, what they're looking for is to confirm what they were told. So if your content speaks to the guest's experience, then it confirms why somebody told them to check it out or what they saw online. So realign your thinking. Number one, Instagram is a retention channel. Make your content about getting guests back in and talking about what makes you unique to guests. Also, like I said, it's a crappy retention channel because it takes a ton of effort and being creative every day is really hard. And then they show it to 1 percent of your guests. man, I'm not saying don't do Instagram. I'm not saying it's a priority. It's not a priority. It is, but it is a much lower on the scale of priorities than other marketing efforts. So that's probably the biggest mistake I see independence make is like prioritizing Instagram. the second one I would say, and this actually applies to all restaurants, definitely independents, definitely franchise locations and everybody in between, but they're like the biggest culprits is not being optimized for local search. if you're looking at your website, I guarantee every restaurant on the planet. 60 to 70 percent of their content or their traffic is coming from Google. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. And I guarantee also that Yelp is in the top five, like I guarantee it. So if you're not optimized on either of those. As well as like Facebook and TripAdvisor and Yahoo and Bing, like you're making a huge mistake because it's easy to do. It can, and it runs in the background and it gains momentum over time. And so I'll give you an example. When I signed on to be the co founder and CMO of Ancraft Burgers and Brew, like I literally signed the contract. Five minutes later, I went and make sure we had got the Instagram screen we wanted. Next thing I did was started managing our listings. Like we weren't even open yet. Local search is so important for restaurants. So important. And it, that should actually be the number one marketing channel that restaurants look after.

Jeremy: 12:15

and give our audience just for those that are ignorant about what local search even means. I know what it means. I've told the story. We've had other guests on the show before that are really based on either. They've got applications that do it, or that's what they do is as they, they optimize local search. We've also had Yelp on the show before. and so understanding what that means. We moved to Dallas three years ago. Our longtime listeners know that. And at the end of the day, I needed to find the place that I wanted to have burgers. I felt like pho one night. What are the best places to have fun? I look and you know what, if it's too far away, I'm not going to your point. The majority of the traffic, unless you're a destination type, what type restaurant is coming within 10 miles of you. So you've got to be optimized for those listeners that are super ignorant about what that even means. Can you help educate them for just a second?

Rev Ciancio: 12:57

Sure. um, somebody once told me that if 90 percent of people do something, it's not a stat, it's a reality. And, 90 percent of people search for a restaurant before they eat there, even if they've heard of it. And even me, if I'm going to a restaurant, I've been to, I'm driving my kid. I still put it in ways to take me there. Like the internet and searchability rules, everything. When people go best wings near me, or best sandwich near me, or best pho near me, you have to be optimized for that. Okay, here's how the internet works. two out of three searches for a restaurant on Google, on Yelp, are unbranded. Meaning that 66 percent of the time, people go and they search for what they're craving. Not name of the restaurant, they're searching for cheesesteak, they're searching for bulgur.

Jeremy: 13:44

They're searching for Chinese food.

Rev Ciancio: 13:46

bulgogi, whatever the thing is that they're hungry for Thanksgiving dinner. So they're searching for menu items. Okay. So if you're not optimized for what Google calls menu search, like you're missing out on 66 percent of the traffic. Okay. Now here's a crazier stat. Two out of three searches for local business on Google are for restaurants. So if you take the entirety of everything that's happening on Google, And just about local businesses, two out of three searches are for restaurants, which means that's the biggest sea of opportunity there is search. Okay. And most people will talk about SEO. And there's actually three types of SEO for restaurants. Okay, there's SEM, which is Paid ads. You absolutely want to be on the top of Google by that. And you should, it's a great, it's a great way to Google search ads are amazing. Okay. Number one, number two, there's organic search. And so if you search for restaurant, if you go best wings near me, like the Google map and three options. If you scroll below that there's a line and then what we call the 10 blue links. That is actually organic searches. The 10 blue links and go look at them. I guaranteed there's no restaurants. If I do best wings near me, you know what I'm going to see down there? Listicles. I'm going to see trip advisor, yell, thrill list. I'm blah, blah, blah, because Google knows that when humans, people, us go to Google and search for their, don't go to the organic, they only go to the map. So that means that local SEO. It's map results. Okay. It's that top piece where you see three options. So that's the piece you need to optimize and people who are like hiring SEO consultants and like optimizing their website over and over, man, you are literally flushing dollars down the toilet. If your website has your name, your address, your phone number, your menu items, your hours of operation, and the other things that people need, and assuming it's written in HTML, it's not an image or PDF. Don't get me started. You're optimized for organic search. The internet knows that you're a hamburger shop and you're open on Tuesday. that's fine. The key is to make sure you are optimizing for the Google maps. That's a local search because. Even even the McDonald's near me is a local restaurant. By definition, the people that go to it live here. The people that work there live here. It's a local restaurant.

Jeremy: 16:05

Yeah. Thank you for that. cause again, as I talk with listeners out in the space, they're like, sometimes you guys, you get these experts on and I don't have any idea what the hell they're talking about. So can you clarify? Now, what are you seeing, as far as how things are going? Because, you've talked about some of the core tenants, SEO, SEM, if you want it, and making sure that your website has the data that you need, that you're in that space, you talked about social, what other things do you see that restaurants are doing? for the restaurant that you own, where do you focus your time and energy? Because as owners, as restaurant operators, we're constantly eating. Overwhelmed with the tech tools that people keep getting thrown at us with having to understand all of these different things and they don't know how to do it. So walk us through where you're finding the best success and where the clients that you're working with are finding the best success as it relates to this new world. Cause it feels like it changes every day, every week, and you've got to stay up with the trends. You've got to be relevant because if you're not relevant. You get out of the cycles. You've got a kid. I know my kids oftentimes decide where I'm going out to eat because they're the ones that are making the decisions oftentimes. And if you're not in their rotation, you're probably not going to get that meal. So talk to me about where you see some of those best successes, both for yourself and for others that you consult with.

Rev Ciancio: 17:15

Again, we have eight hours. Okay. So this goes without saying, but it really goes without saying more than it ever did before is if the experience is not stellar, it doesn't matter what you do with Mark. If I walk into your restaurant and the bathroom's dirty, or your server's a jerk, or there's a long line, or it's difficult to place. like. All of those things trump marketing. You can spend as much money and time and effort on marketing as you want. And if your experience sucks, it's not worth it. So let's move that aside. Let's assume everybody has an amazing experience. The thing here's the, again, I can go to a hundred directions, but here's the thing. Okay. My number one golden metric as a marketer, the golden, like the highest metric I can come up with is CRM growth. Okay. And that's adding emails from customers to my database. That's it. If I am constantly increasing the amount of people I get into my database, I'm winning because if I have your email address, there's a lot I can do. Okay. And the number one thing that restaurants should do again, after optimizing for local search is send a weekly newsletter, send a weekly newsletter and people are like, Oh, I never know what to send. Put a picture of a menu item and a two sentence description and an order now button. that's it. And if you're like rev, you can't be that easy. Seriously, go subscribe to red Robbins emails and go subscribe to the capital grow emails. They are the best emails in the business. I use them as examples all of the time. And you know what each of them do. Logo, three important buttons, hero image, one sentence, manual description, send. Those are huge companies. They've probably figured this out. So collect email addresses, send weekly newsletters. Like it will do so much for your business because you touched on this. Why would we do that? Every single human in America, you, me, and everybody we know, and everybody listening to this show, has four or five restaurants they frequent, and that's it. It's the place I get coffee, it's the place I eat lunch near work, it's the place we frequent as a family, it's the place my kid likes to go, and then the rotating fifth that like I'm interested in that week. That's it. That's it. That's every human in America. Every one of us. If your restaurant is not in my top five, your job is to stay top of mind with me. So you're at least in the consideration set. Okay. That's it. That's what marketing is. And so the easiest, fastest, most scalable way to stay top of mind or in my consideration set is send me an email.

Jeremy: 19:44

yeah. Be in my inbox. But why is it more important to do email versus social? I have a, again, I know why, but talk to our audience about why capturing metadata about the actual human and I think, email is amazing. I actually think text is just as good, if not better, because people are more on their phones than they are even in their email, especially the next generation. Talk to me about why it's important for you to control that guest experience, then putting it out to the social media, mavens that are going to be able to change their logarithm and change your entire business overnight.

Rev Ciancio: 20:17

I love this question. Thank you. and I don't want to discredit SMS. I love it. It's just harder to do than email. so that's why I default to email cause it's easier. He I'm a marketer and I'm a performance marketer and I'm also a growth hacker. And so to me, it's what is the least amount of effort I can put in for the highest amount of reward? And that's not because I'm lazy. It's because I'm efficient. Okay. And that is email. Email is the least amount of effort for the highest amount of reward. Think about it this way. Social media, the content monster is always hungry. Okay. And expert would tell you, Oh, you need to post three times a day or every day or whatever. But the truth is you actually only need to post every other day. But still, if you're creating three to four pieces of content and social media a week, that takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of creativity. It takes a lot. I sit on that couch right there. Okay. And it takes me three hours to create a TikTok. that's a lot of my time.

Jeremy: 21:11

Yep.

Rev Ciancio: 21:11

Cause I can send an email in 10 minutes. So number one, email is easier. Social media takes forever. Also, when I post something to Instagram, and you touched on this, they show it to like one to 2 percent of my guests and then that's it. And then 24 hours later, that content essentially is dead. Nobody's ever going to see it again. They've scrolled past they're on a six other things, which means I spent a ton of time to have nobody see it versus email. Okay. Which I can create a nice looking email again, logo button. Photo two sentences, send in 10 minutes. Once I have a template and open rates, the average industry open rate for the restaurant business is like 20 to 30%. So you tell me, do you want to spend hours a week for people to see 1%, 1 percent of people to see your content or 30, right? And so fastest, easiest, most scalable way to get, stay top of mind with the most amount of your guests, number one, priority, local search, number two, email.

Jeremy: 22:09

talk to their owners out there that say, but I don't have anything exciting to talk about. And I'll give you a quick story before I jump into that. And I could, for those that are on video, they see Reb shaking his head going, no. You do have something important to talk about. Talk about your food, talk about your experience, talk about your staff, but you have these owners that do this. And so I'll give you an experience very recently, local taco brand that used to be in our top five. We used to go there all the time and somehow they got moved out of the top five. And I say, somehow they got moved out of the top five and I wasn't on their list. I got into their list. And amazingly I've been there twice in the last two weeks because I started to see the content. They created a new menu item and they created crave ability for something that I'd been thinking about and now it turned into a purchase. And now I've been twice. And likely this weekend or early next week, I'll be going one more time because I'm thinking about it. And so they're top of mind there. So for those, listeners that are out there going, but I don't have anything important to talk about. I don't want to be one of those social media people. I don't care about, people don't care about me. I just want to deliver a really good guest experience as a marketer. Talk them off the ledge that says, no, you have to talk about these things. And now a word from one of our sponsors. Every restaurant operator understands the chaos of a Restaurant kitchen during the meal rush restaurant technologies, oil, total oil management solutions, and end to end automated oil management system that delivers filters, monitors, and recycles your cooking oil, taking the dirtiest jobs out of your kitchen and letting your employees focus on more important tasks. Control the kitchen chaos with restaurant technologies and make your kitchen safer. No upfront costs to learn more, check out rti inc. com or call 888 796 4997.

Rev Ciancio: 23:53

I got sick of restaurants saying that to me, I've, it's interesting. I've. Unbelievable amounts of patience until I don't. And, I had, I've had so many restaurants say Oh, email's I was like, okay. I sat down and in 30 minutes, I came up with 52 weeks of email ideas that any restaurant could do. Cause it's that easy. Do you have menu items? If all you did is once a week feature menu item, here's sandwich number one, here's sandwich two, here's sandwich three, here's french fries, here's chips, here's soda, here's whatever, I guarantee you have 25 to 30 items on your menu. If you sent two emails a year featuring that sandwich once, Nobody would remember the last time you sent the ham sandwich. if all you do is what's called a menu item feature email, you will still beat your competition because that's why I'm going there. I want a pepperoni pizza. I need the turkey sub or whatever. If all you do is a menu item feature, like you will beat your competition. Now, do you have catering? Do you have a birthday party program? Do you have loyalty? Do you, there's the balloons. Do you work with, do you work with a charity? Do you ever have events? Do you do something special on Christmas? Are you closed on Labor Day? Are you trying to hire employees? are you starting an SMS club? Do you want me to follow you on social media? look, Jeremy, literally I'm one sec in 60 seconds. I just gave you 14 email ideas.

Jeremy: 25:11

and I think that it's, to me, it's a lazy answer and I'll challenge them. And I know you like to challenge your listeners and the people, it's a lazy answer. It's because you don't want to put in the work to try, because at the end of the day, you're going to get better at it as you try. And you're going to come up with ideas. And I guess the other piece that I would say is go use the internet to say, Best marketing ideas for restaurants. You're going to find hundreds of different ideas for those things. Use chat, GPT, let it sit and look at your website and say, Hey, what are some things that I should be talking about? Rev, I'm going to flip real quick to tech. we've got maybe 10 or 15 more minutes. People think I got to have all of this tech to be able to do all of this. You were in a bar, you were incredibly successful with an Excel spreadsheet, an email blast engine, and you were And not a whole lot more. So while we sell technology in our business, while I refer people to technology, while we've had fantastic technologists, technology can change your life, but only if it's executed properly, having the fundamentals of doing this, talk us through what your thoughts are on what are the things that are the building blocks and the fundamentals to be able to get into people's inbox appropriately. Not get stuck in spam filters, be able to communicate with them and make it easy. as you said, because you're a lazy marketer and you want to make sure that it runs on its own without having to spend three hours building the tech doc.

Rev Ciancio: 26:32

so are you asking for email best practices or tech best practices?

Jeremy: 26:35

What kind of tech, what tech platforms should everyone have to develop even a basic market marketing strategy as you talked about?

Rev Ciancio: 26:43

Great question. thank you. So number one, go get a listings management provider. I talked about local search. I went deep there. Don't do it yourself. get a tool like it's what there's great tools out there. You put in your name, your address, your email, your phone number, blah, blah, your menu, and it just manages Google. Yeah, it doesn't do that. do that. They're cheap. They're easy. They work really well. Go get one and don't get one. If they don't manage your menu, if they don't manage your menu, it's the wrong provider. They need to manage your menu. Number one, number two, get email. if you can't figure out constant contact and MailChimp are so easy to use. I prefer MailChimp. I find that most of the There's not a ton of integrations to either of those in our industry, but the ones that the technology integrates are mostly MailChimp. Go get a MailChimp account. They're free. That's free to start one. So get a listings provider, get email. And then this is the one, this is like the biggest unlock. Okay. who wants free wifi? Doesn't matter because some people do put gated wifi in your restaurant. We, my burger shop is in Times Square. Okay. We, people are inside our store on average, like 18 minutes, like this. Jeremy, we add 75 to a hundred people to our database every single week because we have free wifi,

Jeremy: 28:00

That's amazing. Yeah. we had a former guest on the show. go, goes on wifi Todd. Todd Myers was on the show and he sells a product, but there's other providers out there that do that. You're offering wifi oftentimes to your guests. If you're not dating it and capturing data about that guest, that's the way to build your email list. You don't have to, we've all been to the places that have little things to fill out and somebody has got to go key that email address in there, Do it digitally, do it in a way that, you know, that, that makes your life easy to your point, because many of those gated wifis can connect straight to MailChimp. So you don't even have to push those things over and then your MailChimp or your constant contact or some other email mechanism. So that's the minimum. what other things I guess, are you seeing on the horizon, Rev? Cause there's lots in the way of data. I think it's probably the biggest area of opportunity. We're generating more data than we ever have. we know that Google and Facebook and all of these people know more about us than they ever have. We as on offline providers, don't have as much data about our guests. We're starting to figure out how to blend those offline and online worlds together. Where's it going and where do you think people need to be looking towards the future? If I've already got all the kind of my basis covered, what are the one or two things that you think are going to now next level up people's lives and be able to drive guest engagement, guest behavior, driving them into the store, driving more wallet, spend all of those kinds of things.

Rev Ciancio: 29:21

Hey, man. so I had the chance to speak with the chief marketing officer at Wendy's last week. I got five minutes. I got to ask two questions. I was like, look, you're in charge of one of the biggest brands out there. legacy brand, everybody knows it. You have tons of awareness, frequency is probably high. And I got to ask her a couple of questions and Her answers were validating. And one of the questions I asked was like, what are your North Star metrics? And one of the things that she said to me that I was like, I can't believe I didn't think of that. And it was guest sentiment, guest feedback. How happy are your guests? So what I would tell an operator of any size from Wendy's to independents is measure your guests feedback. How do they feel about the restaurant? And not anecdotally, I don't mean do table touches be like, Hey, was that cool? find a way to operationalize. Getting guests feedback, analyze it and work on it. I'm gonna tell you a really funny story. We use a really great tool called Ovation, right? And so we essentially ask every single guest, how was it? Whether digitally or in store, it doesn't matter. Okay. I got a review. I got a private message from somebody who gave us a review that said, Hey, your food was too salty. And I was like, whatever we get this all the time. Like it's French fries and hot, like it's salty food and everybody's talents for salt is different. But then I got another and another, and I was like, wait a minute. This is a pattern. Like I can recognize a pattern in the course of three or four days. I got six or seven people telling me it's too salty. I'm like, okay, I'm going to go look into this. So I call our GM and I was like, what is something happening? Like I got eight guests telling us our food's too salty. is there a no salt convention in town? what's going on? And it turns out that like when we season our burgers, we use kosher salt and cracked pepper and a new employee didn't get that in the manual and they just put in table salt.

Jeremy: 31:03

Oh, yeah, I've done that before on accident before when I was smoking a brisket and it wasn't good.

Rev Ciancio: 31:08

Yeah, no, it's terrible. But literally, like we did legitimately, they were too salty. And had I not had a feedback tool that helped me figure that capture and figure it out, I would still be like making people angry with salt. So like that, like super important, right? is get guest feedback.

Jeremy: 31:24

a good guest experience regardless. Back to your point earlier that says, Without a good at guest experience, no amount of marketing is going to fix that. Sorry. I'll let you keep

Rev Ciancio: 31:32

Yeah.

Jeremy: 31:32

just, I want to reiterate that point.

Rev Ciancio: 31:34

You have to get feedback from as many guests as possible. You have to pay attention to it and you have to reply to it. Okay. So that's what I'm going to give you. I'm going to give another tactic. So this is the other question I asked when the CMO, and there's a bunch of people in the group, we ended up having a conversation and I said, look, everybody talks about, The biggest bucket of opportunity is getting a guest who's only come once to come a second time. And I don't agree. I don't agree at all. Cause let's go back to the least amount of effort, highest amount of reward. Okay. If somebody's only ever been to a restaurant once and not gone back, the reasons they didn't go back, it's too wide. What if they were just visiting in town? What if they turned vegan? What if they didn't like it? What if, what if, they're visiting their mother? there's too many factors of why somebody didn't go back second. Okay. I think the biggest bucket of opportunity is people who've been second, but not third time. Okay. If you've gone back to a restaurant twice. The chances that you live or work near that restaurant are much higher than if you've been once. but if you not got them a third time, I actually think that's the biggest bucket of opportunity.\So I asked Wendy CMO, I was like, how do you get Wendy's guests to go from two to three? And I won't tell you her answer, but essentially we ended up having a conversation in a group and we all came to something based on analysis, based on history, this is what we came up with. Incentivize a habit or channel switch. Okay, I'm gonna explain what that means. If I've only ever eaten lunch, getting me to come eat dinner is a habit switch. If I've only ever ordered a chicken sandwich and I've never ordered the turkey sub, that's a habit switch. Incentivize me to switch a habit, okay, to get to from second to third. data shows that once guests have had three experience with the restaurant, their LTV jumps by 33%. So it's worth it. Okay. Now a fulfillment switch is if I've only ever ordered online, but I've never dined in store or I've only ordered grub hub and I've never ordered direct or I've, I've only eaten store. I've never ordered catering. So essentially, if you can take your database and go show me everybody that's been twice, but not three times, figure out an incentive that gets them to switch a habit or fulfill a channel,

Jeremy: 33:39

Love that. And that's funny that you say that. Cause, we actually just ordered online from a brand that we always go in house and the experience was actually better online than it was in house. And I talked to, I happen to be a customer of ours and I talked to him, on your point about guest feedback, we've had multiple guests on Zach's been on before. We've had, Alex from tattle on before. There's a couple of different guests, feedback sentiments. And I would tell you that our family as a family of six, we have not gone back to brands that I've complained about if they don't fix it and they don't respond to me, which is why it's so critical for you to be aware of what those people are doing. Rev, like you were teasing earlier, we could talk for hours and hours. I very much appreciate you coming on and just sharing, some good tips for people to take action with. It's great that they are thinking about these things. It's great that they're obviously learners because they're sitting here listening, if they want to engage your product services, things that you might be able to help them with, how do they get in touch? What does that look like? what would you say for restaurant operators? And or tech providers that haven't seen the Hawaiian shirts, haven't seen you out at trade shows, haven't watched you eat pizza like your mother says, if they haven't done that and don't know how to get ahold of you, how should they get ahold of you? What's the best ways to get in touch and, and what should they expect from you?

Rev Ciancio: 34:46

the most colorful way to ask a simple question thing. if you're looking for restaurant marketing tips, Tricks and tactics. I write an almost weekly blog post on LinkedIn, where I literally share restaurant marketing tips, tricks, and tactics. And the easiest way to find that is I have a directing URL. It's restaurants grow. tv. So if you go to restaurants, plural grow. tv, it'll take you right to my LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe. I don't charge anything for it. And you mentioned it, but I literally I will literally tell people exactly how to do here's how to increase open rates. Here's how to help local search. I write reviews of what I learned at these trade shows. Like just, that's the best way. If you want to see me point at pizza, follow me on Tik TOK or Instagram. And I'm just my screen name, Rev Ciancio. most people are like, I don't know how to spell that. I run the account called fun with fries. That's my fry account. And my link to Rev Ciancio is in the bio.

Jeremy: 35:39

Love that. Yeah, and I'll link all of that in the show notes, both on YouTube and in, in the blog post. Rev, I'm looking forward to spending some time with you at some trade shows coming up. thank you to, thank you for just giving your wisdom. And I know we'll probably need to do this again. Cause there's so many more things we could have talked about to our listeners, guys. Thank you guys for spending some time. If you haven't already, subscribed to the show, please do share this show with your friends and, make it a great day.

36:01

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