RadYes

Restaurants

Brand Advocacy: 4 Simple Steps To Build It From Scratch

Existing customers are one of the most valuable assets to market your business.

Sure, you might be leveraging your existing customer base for repeat purchases through loyalty programs, retargeting campaigns, etc but have you utilized it as a marketing asset for brand advocacy?

A significant number of businesses focus on new customer acquisition when the fact is that acquiring new customers is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones. 

Providing exceptional quality and service is pivotal to business success, but going that extra mile to convert a satisfied customer into a brand advocate boosts your marketing effort tremendously.

Brand advocates are the people who genuinely believe in your products and will recommend them to others. They will leave positive reviews, tag you in their online content and vouch for your brand. Brand advocacy in today’s age is simply your traditional word-of-mouth with an online twist!

If you are wondering, why do we need to draw our focus to these brand advocates rather than resort to other advertising channels, we have the answers.

According to Neilson, 90% of customers find recommendations from people they know trustworthy. This is higher than any other channel of advertising.

As per Social Toaster, word-of-mouth advocacy increases marketing effectiveness by 54%, making it one of the most affordable and cost-effective ways to bring new customers.

The four stages of building a customer advocacy channel are as follows:

  1. Find and Engage Your Potential Advocates
  2. Request for Action
  3. Reward Your Advocates
  4. Repurpose User-Generated Content

1. Find and Engage Your Potential Advocates

Not all customers will become your brand advocates. There will always be a set of customers who will visit or order online and not return for a repeat purchase. Some will become regular customers, but a handful of them will go out of their way to share content and reviews about your brand.

It is essential to recognize the right advocates and engage them in a manner that makes them feel affiliated with your brand.

Starbucks ran a low investment advocacy campaign in 2013 called #tweetacoffee, allowing customers to buy a 5-dollar gift card for a friend by tweeting the friend’s Twitter handle and Starbucks. The campaign clocked a revenue of $180,000 and helped the brand identify advocates and potential customers for Starbucks. The campaign’s real win was that it helped link 54000 customers’ Twitter IDs to their mobile phones and customer IDs for future marketing endeavors.

2. Request For Action

On average, Food and beverage posts on Instagram drive an engagement rate of approximately 1.06%, which is the highest amongst all social media sites making Instagram an engagement powerhouse. 

Within Instagram, User Generated Content (UGC) is considered the most authentic, garnering a higher average engagement rate.

With user-generated content, users get authentic reviews about products and are more likely to trust it over any other marketing content.

Encourage your audience to engage with you online through contests, giveaways, taggint them in your posts/stories etc. Actively look out for hashtags related to your restaurant and location tags in case someone hasn’t tagged your restaurant directly. It is essential that you document reviews, comments, feedback, and tags to repurpose it for marketing. One way to encourage user-generated content is to create a photo-op at your restaurant – a tiny corner with a cool sign or a mural that creates an iconic, “gram-worthy” background for photos. Keep the restaurant’s hashtags and social media handles near it so that people don’t miss out on tagging you.

Upshow is a tool that takes user-generated content and automatically displays it on the screen at your restaurant.  It is an effective technique to encourage your audience to generate content for you as it gives them the thrill of seeing their content displayed on your restaurant screen.

3. Reward Your Advocates

You might wonder, “Why do we need to incentivize our advocates in the first place? Shouldn’t they want to promote my content? After all, they love it!”

An incentive is a perfect way to thank your brand advocates and forge a long-term relationship. Some simple ways to do this are by incentivizing writing a review, sharing a photo by offering gift cards, personalized thank you notes, or giving free appetizers to such customers. It is essential that optics focus on the organic nature of this association and the reward does become the driving force but remains merely an encouragement factor.

Psst, ensure you give credits or seek permission before sharing user-generated content. 

4. Repurpose user-generated content

There are many things you can do with user-generated content apart from resharing them on your social media handles.

Diners often check out the restaurant’s website before deciding where to eat, so prepping the website with user-generated content will add to the authenticity. You can embed such content on the website by picking up 3 or 4 pieces to serve as testimonials.

Another innovative way is to use it on marketing collaterals to bridge the gap between an inquiry and action.

You can also create opportunities to involve your audience to be a part of your growth story. Kadalas a see-facing restaurant in Kozhikode, India conducted an online photography contest where the customers were encouraged to click photos in the restaurant and share them on Instagram using their hashtag to win an opportunity to get them featured on their anniversary special menu.

This unique content created by the customers adds to the trust and involvement of existing and potential customers.

Use this simple four-step RadYes strategy to build a brand advocacy strategy for your restaurants. We are all ears for more ideas. Let us know if you’ve got any other brand advocacy-building tactics or examples in the comments below.

Set Up A Successful National Day Campaign

With National Day around the corner, we understand you have much to take care of.

To ensure you make the best use of this long weekend, we have created an easy step by step guide to help you get started. You can also download the handy RadYes Campaign template to plan and manage your campaign on RadYes.

Free Download: RadYes Campaign Template

Step 1
Derive key insights from your previous campaigns and pixel data. 

This will help you define important variables for your National Day campaign. Look out for insights regarding:

Best platforms to advertise.

Campaign objective and conversion event that have delivered good results in the past.

Audience demographic details.

Campaign budget bifurcation across different platforms.

Offers that have delivered well in the past.

Step 2
Make an exclusive National Day Offer.

This promo code can be advertised on multiple organic and paid marketing channels. Make the following checks when making the promo code:

Does this give an exclusive advantage that is available to your customers on direct orders only?

Any rival promotions that are running simultaneously and might confuse the audience?

To create a sense of urgency, the validity of the promotion is restricted to the National Day weekend only.

Step 3
Activate organic channels with National Day content and offers.

Ensure the following activities are ticked for maximum impact:

Post regular content and stories announcing the National Day promotion.

Use relevant hashtags for better reach.

Pin the National Day promotion post/video on top of your Social Media feed.

Step 4
Set up conversion based Social Media ads/Google ads to boost direct orders.

While setting up ads on your social media platforms, do the following checks before you go live:

Ensure that your ads are optimized for conversions.

Use multiple ad sets to target different audience sets.

Ensure a sufficient ad budget for a high impact burst.

Give the ad adequate time to learn and optimize. Start Now!

Avail the RadYes National Day Offer: Get your own online ordering platform free for a month!

Step 5
Utilize brand advocacy to amplify the impact of your campaign.

While designing an influencer marketing campaign keep in mind the following dos and don’ts for campaign success:

Collaborate with multiple influencers in one go.

Shortlist influencers from different categories for better reach.

Assign individual promo codes to track the effectiveness of the collaboration.

Step 6
Retarget your existing customer database with an SMS campaign.

SMS campaign can be used to boost the reach of an existing marketing campaign. Do the following to maximize the click-through rate:

Add the promo code and ordering link within the SMS.

Personalize it by adding the first name of your customers.

Use a link shortener to leave more space to add text.

Add structure to your campaign with the RadYes Campaign Planning Template. Click the button below to download it for free!

Free Download: RadYes Campaign Planning Template

Key Factors To Ensure Advertising Success

Ads are an integral part of the digital spectrum to enhance visibility.

For any offering or category, there can be multiple advertising avenues that are cost-efficient and effective when it comes to sales. This article will help you understand how advertising, especially on digital, is to be done.

Advertising success relies on the following key factors: 

Bidding/Auction

Advertising on social media solely relies on impressions. Impressions come about as a result of winning auctions for a place in someone’s newsfeed. A reliable top of the funnel must be set up to ensure that the bottom of the funnel yields good results.

Time

No ad will yield results immediately. The process begins with a learning phase that can last anywhere between a week and a month. The whole idea is to build a long-term potent funnel to identify what works for a particular brand.

Data

In the long run, data helps a brand sustain successful results. The more customer data that is acquired in terms of intent, the better positioned a brand is to create similar audience profiles which lead to more sales. Therefore, either time or budget has to be exhausted to feed the data engine.

To achieve your target ROAS, RadYes recommends the following key steps: 

  1. Extensive Experimentation
  2. Scale Or Continue Testing
  3. Long Term Value
  4. Continue Testing Creatives
  5. Test New Features Immediately

1. Extensive Experimentation

At the onset, it is essential to take notice of all that has been implemented/experimented till now when it comes to advertising on all social media channels. This means increasing budgets where the conversion rate is higher and test platforms with a different creative approach where the conversion rate is low. This is essential in ensuring a baseline understanding of where the major chunk of ROI comes from.

If the brand is still in the early stage of amplification, all platforms must be tested to ensure a stellar understanding of where the audience with the highest propensity to buy lies. The overall idea is to find the perfect audience cohort across social media channels and ad placements to get to a rate of Best Practices conversion which can eventually yield a greater return on ad spend as compared to the start, where the ROAS is expected to be low.

2. Scale Or Continue Testing

Once the initial testing period is over, extensive data must be analyzed to understand where the ideal audience lies or to get a speculative idea of it. The learning phase for a conversion ad on Facebook ends at 50 conversions. Till that is achieved, it is even more difficult and ill-advised to jump to a conclusion.

Advertising takes its time and therefore it is essential to continue it till the learning phase of any ad ends. The exceptions to this rule include all advertisements that have a terribly low yield when it comes to traffic/link clicks and are fairly expensive.

Key metrics to arrive at this conclusion are:

  1. CPM: Cost per 1000 impressions
  2. CPLC: Cost per link click
  3. Cp1000R: Cost per 1000 people reached.

If these metrics are comparatively higher than other testing ad sets, then the ad set in question should be paused. If other ad sets are yet to hit 50 conversions, but the quantum of traffic is high and the cost per metrics are low, it is advisable to continue those ad sets at the same pace so as to ensure they can reach maximum efficacy and provide max value.

3. Long Term Value 

Based on these steps, with proper optimization, it is essential to harvest the data generated from the initial ad sets to create multiple custom and lookalike audiences and employing a test budget on them. These audiences are far more likely to yield maximum value at the lowest cost and must be tested.

The overall idea is to create a system that has been tested enough to create a likely interpretation of the quantum of conversions it can generate. Once the initial phase ends, brands can look to scale budgets to increase the quantum of orders they would like to generate with constant optimization. This process takes time but if implemented correctly is most likely to create an efficient revenue stream that is cost-effective and reliable.

4. Keep Testing Creatives 

The creatives being used need to be given far more credit than is usually attributed to it. It is essential that the creatives used are updated in new ad sets and new styles are tested to define the potency of the particular style.

The same offer or promotion can be communicated in multiple creative approaches and tested to see which one works best. This makes it easier to define a style that works best for the brand, rather than relying on just one style and hoping that it works.

We suggest having a creative refresh every month after an extensive review of the current style that is being used. This defines the quantum of traffic a website receives and is therefore essential to the overall process. Analysis here is necessary to ensure how the campaigns should proceed.

5. New Feature Out? Test It Immediately 

If the advertising platform launches a new feature or ad format, try to start an ad campaign as soon as it goes live.

The algorithm will always prefer content like this as it would want to show more of it to its users and will reward your spend on it, therefore more impressions are almost guaranteed.

If you need help with any of the steps listed above, feel free to drop an email on the email ID mentioned below. Team RadYes will be happy to assist you.

The New Normal For Restaurants

The COVID 19 pandemic might be temporary; however, it is causing a permanent impact on the restaurant industry world over.

We are already witnessing a significant change in the customer – restaurant relationship and the restaurant – aggregator relationship. While the first warrants a massive revision in the safety and sanitation expectation by the customers from a restaurant, the later is under severe scrutiny over the ownership, dependency, and commissions issue.

With precious learnings from the crisis embedded into both the consumer and restaurant psyche, the changes will be massive and long-lasting. Needless say, the post-COVID 19 restaurant business will be different in many aspects.

  1. Business Model
  2. Customer Data
  3. Direct Ordering
  4. Restaurant’s USP
  5. Customer Expectations
  6. Paid Digital Marketing

1. Business Model

With the dining capacity unlikely to come back to full occupancy any time soon, restaurants are focusing on infusing profits back into the system through food delivery and takeout services.

In the food delivery space, restaurants are further trying to reduce their dependence on food aggregators – inching towards building a system that grants them greater ownership of the ordering and delivery process and better profits. With delivery ecosystems like RadYes, gaining traction amongst restaurateurs in the middle east, the shift is likely to cause a more significant rift in the restaurant – aggregator equation.

Other than this, online ordering platforms, digital menu builders, app, and website builders are already witnessing a surge in demand as merchants gravitate towards single-brand focused solutions.

More and more restaurants today are investing in building their ordering capability and fleet of drivers to get direct orders without compromising on data and commissions. The trend will expand further in the post-COVID phase.

2. Customer Data

The lack of customer data handicaps the possibility of retargeting the customers, promoting brand loyalty, and drawing critical insights to make the product and marketing campaigns better. It ensures that the restaurant remains dependent on the platform to drive order volumes and keeps investing money for customer acquisition. The amalgamation of this data at the aggregator’s end makes it a double-edged sword. It can provide critical business insights to help your competition scale up for a higher price/package.

Restaurants have now realized the importance of owning their customer’s database for both – refining their marketing activities and ensuring repeat orders. Hence, orders coming through the restaurant app, website, social media handles are likely to become far more critical for the restaurateur, as it will provide data that is pivotal for new customer acquisition and retention. With an intent to capitalize on this demand, there are new aggregators in the market with a plan to modify the existing aggregator model by sharing the customer data with the restaurants that opt-in.

While the ownership of data is an issue that will definitely gain prominence, it will also be a welcome change for restaurant owners.

3. Direct Ordering

Commission-free direct orders delivered to the customer’s house is the golden goose category that restaurants will want to focus upon. Multiple solution providers are helping restaurants become more active online to achieve this. With a focus of putting the restaurant first, RadYes is leading the bandwagon with an end to end solution that is fully loaded with features and pre-integrated 3rd party tie-ups. It provides an ecosystem that helps restaurateurs acquire, engage, and convert customers without charging any commissions.
While there is minimal focus on customer retention and repeat orders in aggregator apps, with the RadYes loyalty program the customer is hooked and coming back for more.

4. Restaurant’s USP

A greater focus on enhancing the restaurant’s unique selling point will be witnessed. To stand out from the crowd for the limited demand in the market, restaurants will focus on sanitation, innovation, and creative ideas to get through to the customer. Now is the time for restaurants to popularize their strength and uniqueness. With direct orders taking center stage, greater advocacy and word of mouth will help drive direct orders, and that’s the goal every restaurant will be aiming for.

5. Customer Expectations

The customer’s expectation from the restaurant has already undergone a massive change with sanitation, food quality, and sourcing of raw material, becoming the primary reasons for evaluating a restaurant. Quality control and sanitation inspections will be taken far more seriously, and visuals of staff wearing masks and gloves will become a standard feature to convince potential business customers.

With COVID 19 hitting the economy world over and many people losing jobs, customers will place greater importance on discounts to get maximum value for money spent as compared to before.

Sparsely populated restaurants, with a focus on sanitation, discounts and deliveries, will incur more operational costs than they were undertaking before the COVID 19 phase.

6. Paid Digital Marketing

The F&B industry has largely underutilized social media platforms until 6 months ago. Merchants are beginning to discover the massive scope of social media platforms. What started as a pure customer engagement platform has now evolved into customer acquisition, conversion, and retargeting platform for restaurants.

With geo targeted posts, boosted within the delivery circumference, merchants can redirect customers to their ordering platform with one click.

However, with organic reach on the platform going down year on year, paid campaigns will be required to reach a bigger audience and encourage conversions with CTA buttons like see menu/shop now.

Paid campaigns on the google search engine and other marketing platforms with a direct link to the landing page to place an order are going to be a common feature. While this will ensure direct traffic every time a potential customer looks up a restaurant online, it will bring back control and ownership back in the hands of the restaurant owner.

COVID 19 has fast-tracked some of the impending problems that restaurants were facing already. The situation has yet again underlined the need for a long term perspective on making businesses more profitable. A holistic merchant-focused solution is the need of the hour, and RadYes provides you just that. Schedule a demo with our team to better understand how can RadYes equip you to adapt to the changes mentioned above.

5 Ways Social Media Can Benefit Your Restaurant Business

If you are only using social media to post pictures of your restaurant, it’s time to up the ante.

As a restaurant owner, you already know that Instagram and Facebook are powerful tools to increase your client base. The ‘click it before you eat it’ phenomenon can help you accomplish this in multiple ways.

To help you maximize your benefits from these platforms, our experts dug deep to list 5 can-do (must-do) goals along with easy ways to achieve them. After reading this blog post, you will know how to do the following through your Facebook and Instagram business account:

  1. Increase Your Client Base
  2. Sell More And Sell Better
  3. Augment Your Restaurant Branding
  4. Humanize
  5. Address Feedback

1. Increase Your Client Base

Invest in paid campaigns to promote yourself to newer audiences. 60% of Instagram users use the platform to discover new brands. By making a strong visual identity, you can generate interest amongst a new audience set on the platform itself.

Devote time to do hashtag research. List down the hashtags by popularity and relevance and use them to be discoverable. A study by TrackMaven suggests that posts using 9 hashtags get the most likes. We suggest, start big and let analytics on your business account dashboard guide you towards which hashtags work best for you.

Replicate the broad persona of your existing customers who visit your restaurant or your competition to create audience sets on Facebook. Promote your ads and posts amongst these groups to reach out to a larger audience that shares similar interests.

Through geo-targeting and hyper-local ads, target only those people who can order with you. Reaching people who can like but not order is good to grow popularity but bad for return on ad spend.

So don’t just be liked; be discovered and experienced by a whole new set of customers through Instagram and Facebook.

2. Sell More And Sell Better

At the time of writing this article, there were 366 Million #food pictures on Instagram. While Instagram has started shoppable ads in some regions, it is largely underutilized by the FnB industry.

Use RadYes to convert your customers on social media platforms itself. RadYes boosts your posts hyper-locally and enables your customers to order with you on Instagram and Facebook. You also save the amount you pay by way of commissions to aggregators when you generate orders from your own social media accounts.

Alternatively, you can also include a link to your own order management system or your phone number in your bio or contact button. Your audience can order with you directly if they like your feed.

3. Augment Your Restaurant Branding

Make your brand easily identifiable by maintaining a similar look and feel of your brand, both online and offline.

Define your restaurant’s tone of voice and personality characteristics, this flows into every communication between your restaurant and your customer including your menu, online posts, customer interaction, etc.
Display your uniqueness in full visual splendor on social media platforms. Let your customers know how your food and people are different from others in the same industry. This goes a long way in building brand recall.

4. Humanize

Give a consistent voice to your restaurant. Let your customers interact with a personality and not a place. This boosts brand loyalty and increases customer retention and repeat orders.

The most followed restaurants on social media platforms don’t just talk about their food but also about the people and experiences, their food brings to the table. Sweet Green Restaurant (@sweetgreen) is one of the most followed restaurant accounts on Instagram, it focusses its Instagram activity on building communities through healthy food.

So, define the difference your food is making in the lives of the people who work there as well as those that dine there. Periodically sharing stories of your customers and employees goes a long way in giving a human touch to your restaurant.

5. Address Feedback

Social media platforms are a great place to understand what your audience expects from you. These platforms provide a positive and personal way to address negative feedback about your restaurant. Direct messages and responsive comments show your receptive attitude towards your customers.

Of all social media channels, Instagram gets the highest engagement. Hence, it plays a vital role in connecting you to your existing and potential customers. Proper utilization of the channel ensures your customer generation and retention efforts pay off magnificently. Schedule a demo with RadYes to understand how you can do all of the above in the simplest and most cost-effective manner.

Use tools like Social Bakers and Social Searcher to monitor brand mentions. You can draw precious insights about your strengths and improvement areas with these tools. Also, use the medium to collect positive mentions about your brand and share it with your audience.

Go ahead and multiply your followers and orders by simply optimizing your social media pages.

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