Marketing That Works with Matt Plapp

This week, my guest is Matt Plapp, CEO of America’s Best Restaurants. He’s a marketer, author, speaker, consultant, and business coach.  He’s owned his own marketing firm since 2008, and since then he’s helped hundreds of companies market with a purpose. In 2016 he changed his focus to restaurants, and today helps restaurants all over the world with their ROI Engine marketing platform. Matt also has a podcast called MP TV, and has released a number of books including the recent book titled Restaurant Marketing That Works.

This episode was actually recorded as an Instagram live that I did with Matt. To be honest, I never thought that it would be a full podcast, but I was so blown away by our conversation that I just had to put it out there. Most of our conversation revolves around how to obtain customer data, and best use it in your marketing strategy. We talk about email lists and how often to send out an email. We discuss using your time and money effectively, and he gives tips on using the Upwork website when you’re ready to hire someone to help you. 

And we’d love it if you supported Chefs Without Restaurants. There are a few ways to help. First, if you have a business or product, we’re always looking for sponsors.  Or consider joining our Patreon. If nothing else, it would be great if you subscribed to the show, rated and reviewed it, and shared your favorite episodes. 

Looking to hire employees for your restaurant? This week's sponsor is Savory Jobs, a job site only for restaurants. For just $50, get unlimited job postings for an entire year. Use discount code SAVORY10 to save 10%.

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Transcript

0:06

Welcome to the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. I'm your host Chris Spear. On the show. I have conversations with culinary entrepreneurs and people in the food and beverage industry who took a different route. They're caterers research chefs personal chefs cookbook authors, food truckers, farmers, cottage bakers and all sorts of culinary renegades. I myself fall into the personal chef category as I started my own personal chef business perfect little bites 11 years ago. And while I started working in kitchens in the early 90s, I've literally never worked in a restaurant. This week. My guest is Matt Plapp, CEO of America's best restaurants. He's a marketer, author, speaker, consultant and business coach. He's owned his own marketing firms since 2008. And since then, he's helped hundreds of companies market with a purpose. In 2016, he changed his focus to restaurants and today helps restaurants all over the world with their ROI engine marketing platform. Matt also has a podcast called MP TV and has released a number of books, including the one recently titled Restaurant Marketing That Works. This episode was actually recorded as an Instagram Live that I did with Matt. To be honest, I never thought it would be a full podcast. But I was so blown away by our conversation that I just had to put it out there. Now I know that you're used to hearing my sexy voice through that new sure MV seven microphone, but unfortunately, I was speaking directly into my phone, not even using a mic. You can still hear me clearly. But it's just not that studio quality. This time. I'd intended to go maybe 15 minutes with Matt mostly talking about the new book. But he shared so many gems during this conversation. Most of it revolves around how to obtain customer data and best to use it in your marketing strategy. We talked about email lists and how often to send out an email. We discuss using your time and money effectively. And he gives tips on using the Upwork website when you're ready to hire someone to help you. I talked with a lot of guests about what their marketing strategy is, but I've never had an actual marketer on the show. I really hope this brings tremendous value to people, Matt was able to actually help me with one of my problems. While we were on the show live. I just know that you're going to find at least one solid tip that's going to help you take your marketing to the next level. I really hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. And we'd love it. If you supported the Chefs Without Restaurants, podcast and community. There are a few ways to help. First, if you have a business or product, we're always looking for sponsors. You can also support our existing sponsors like savory jobs. If you shop on Amazon, we have our own affiliate link, or be like cool kids Matt Collins and Justin Khanna and consider joining our Patreon. If nothing else, it would be great if you subscribe to the show, rated it and reviewed it and maybe share your favorite episodes on social media. The links to all these things are in the show notes as usual. The support means everything to me. And now here's a word from this week's sponsor Savory jobs. Did you know restaurants turnover employees four times faster than most businesses? What if somebody created an affordable and effective hiring solution for the restaurant industry? What if there were a job site that only focused on people looking for food service jobs? What if that site only cost $50 a year to advertise for every job your restaurant needed? Forget the big corporate sites like indeed and monster. Our sponsor savory jobs has a job site exclusively for restaurants. The best part is savory jobs only charges $50 for an entire year and you can post all the jobs you want. And for our loyal listeners. use the code Savory10 and get 10% off. So go to savoryjobs.com and discover the job site shaking up the industry. And remember to use savory10 for 10% off. And now on with the show. Thanks so much and have a great week. Hey, Matt, what's up?

Matt Plapp: 5:24

Living the dream, brother? How are you?

Chris Spear: 5:25

Great. Thanks for hopping in here.

Matt Plapp: 5:27

You're welcome.

Chris Spear: 5:29

Super excited to talk to you today. I guess we'll just jump right into it. I'll post this up live. or post this up recorded after for those who aren't here for the live. But I want to find out all about what's going on. So I guess this is like an impromptu Chefs Without Restaurants Mini episode.

Matt Plapp: 5:44

There we go. Mini episode baby.

Chris Spear: 5:46

Yeah, yeah. So let's get right to this. Who are you and a little background on what you do. I don't want to get much into the whole story. Because there's lots of places people can find that. But just a little background on who you are and what you do for work.

Matt Plapp: 5:58

Yeah, so CEO and founder of America's best restaurants, we have a couple of facets of our company. One part of it is a media company. We're actually our team just left Asheville, North Carolina, we filmed 10 to 12 episodes a week of if somebody will call many diners, drive ins and dives where we're looking to highlight restaurants that you eat at weekly. And so we're launching that TV show in September, we have got to Mercedes, one Mercedes Sprinter van, in this region, one coming online in the West Coast and goals 10 next year, 50 and five years. That's what part of the company. The other part is restaurant Mark networks, which is our marketing division that helps restaurants, build a database market better, and then communicate with customers more often. We've been around I've been around since 99. In the marketing world, I've been around the restaurant game since then, as well, from a marketing standpoint, not an operator, not a chef. Not the smart guys know how to make good food. I can make steak occasionally. And then you've been in this part of it since 2008. Well, I know you've got a new book. So let's get into this. What is the new book? And why now? Why is this book really important right now. So 2018, I had this in here on accident. This is my first book, don't 86 restaurant sales back in 2018. I wrote that book. And my vision was to teach restaurant operators that there is their tactics out there to market better. And I got a little too technical in that book. Because I heard a lot of offers. It's it's sold a lot of copies. I've spoken many shows about it. And I heard from a lot of people that that the book was great, the ideas didn't go deep enough. And I also can't use the tactics that you highlighted in there because there was literally some automation on how to build stuff in Zapier and some different automation tools that are above their heads. So I wrote a second book called some more slices and chosen 19, which was a piggyback little easier version of that. And then when 2019 came around, my goal was to publish a book a year, and so does 19 came around, I started working on restaurant Mark networks. And originally the title was Restaurant Marketing networks. back to the basics, I wanted to write a book, on our theory, a five step theory that we have, which revolves around ABR, our company initials, America's best restaurants, but also attract bill retain, I wanted to write a book about how restaurants can attract attention at the end of the day. That's how you get people to eat your restaurant. If people see you more often and your food's good, and your service is good. They like the atmosphere, they'll come back. But more importantly, how do you take that attraction and build a database? And then retention? How do you retain those customers? How do you keep them opening your emails, keep them clicking your text messages, keep them engaging in social media. So that was what the book was written about. I was hoping to publish it in early the late spring of last year, I finally got out this summer. But during the process, my publisher called me and said, Hey, what did you change with the pandemic on the book? I said, What do you mean, what I changed? Like, well, obviously, you had the pivot. Everybody else did. I said, Well, we honestly didn't. I said, the only thing we did was use the databases more often. So what we were doing before the pandemic with restaurants is the same that they did during that help get customers back in educate them on third party on a curbside on pickup on delivery on whatever. And then it's going to work after so we tweak the name of the book to restaurant market networks before, during and after the pandemic, because quite honestly, the tactics in here are in my mind, kind of elementary, it's how do you get attention? What do you do with the attention? And then what do you do with your database on a consistent basis so that people don't ignore you? And I would also say it's just a good overall marketing book. I mean, our group here is Chefs Without Restaurants. So you know, some of the people here might hear restaurants, I don't have a restaurant, but aren't these tactics applicable to many other businesses?

Unknown: 9:47

I had a friend of mine was in here the other day and I said look, flooring marketing that works, hot tub marketing that works, the tactics are all the same. I just happen to give examples and case studies and various specific use cases for restaurants. But at the end of the day, all businesses survive and thrive, the more people know about you, for example, America's best restaurants, our media company, we spend about five grand per vehicle per week that that's on the road I had a friend of mine today is like, holy crap. $5,000. Because like this week, you spent five like, well, this week, we spent 30 $861. Specifically, we had a good week. I see he's like, but why I said, well, because I want to create that media company number one, but number two, the more restaurants that see us on the road, the more value we build our company, the more people will eventually work with us in one capacity or another. It's the same in any business that whether it's a Facebook, post a banner in your your business, your website, a radio, commercial direct mail piece, a sign on the side of the road, attention, if I get your attention, Chris, if I get your attention 10 times in the next 12 months, I'm going to have a chance of getting you to convert to something, if I get your attention 100 times, you're going to convert 10 times more often, if I get your attention 10,000 that's what it comes down to. But the problem is what I see with attention is attention is rented is that you're typically paying sup for somebody else's audience. Right now we're on Instagram, this is a free tool. But if we want to do reach out these people again, I probably have to spend money to get in front of them. So anything you do out there, from a business standpoint, if you're trying to grow your revenue, you need to think about how you can convert that attention to a database. Because once you get Matt claps information for your restaurant or your car dealership or your hot tub company or whatever, then you can market to me on your time. And it's not I there's a graphic in here I flip through and find is called hope and pray aim and expect on a web page is even on it. It's in here somewhere, I promise. But it's a graphic that says hope and pray is the marketing tactic most businesses use they hope Matt plap had a good experience. They pray Matt clap comes back. They pray Matt Platt tells his friends, you should aim and expect that if you did your job on the front end, and got your customers information, you wouldn't have to hope Matt clap had a good experience of praying that plug came back. You could aim at Matt plap with a text or an email or campaign and expect an outcome a certain amount of time. Yeah, I mean, I think the danger a lot of people get into is these platforms, they think followers and likes equal business, right? And Instagrams a business, right? Like they make money on advertising. I have almost 5000 followers. But when I do a post, I can get maybe max out at 100 people liking that post, how many impressions were there? And then what if Instagram goes away tomorrow? Like what does that really mean that I posted something? For my for my personal chef business, I posted a thing saying, hey, I'd love to have you come on. I'd love to cook for you. Right? And 80 people like that post? Well, what does that mean? Are they even my target customer? Am I getting in front of them? And then what do I do? Even if they are my target customer, I think owning the information is super important. And whether that be an email list or a texting something, I think that's where a lot of people kind of lose out. They think that all this having 1000s of followers and likes and everything is going to convert to business. And I found personally it doesn't. It hasn't for me. Yeah, it I had lunch with a friend of mine today who's been in the tech world for a long time. I knew him from radio, we started in radio advertising. I started in 1999. He had been there about four or five years. And we were talking about last year. And he was talking about this company that he's doing some consulting for how they have a form on their website. And it's a big purchase. That's like 15 questions. He's like, Matt, we came to find out like nine out of 10 of these people in these forms. The sales teams weren't following up with them. They're just sitting there is like they took the time to answer in depth 15 questions. It's not like they clicked a button. And all they had to do was click like, if I click like on this video, if I click Share, if I comment, it took me one second. If I click a button and go somewhere and say my name, my phone number, my email, my birthday, my visit frequency, those are the things we look for for restaurants. Now all of a sudden, I'm kind of vested, I want to know more. And what happens is, like you mentioned, I've seen Facebook pages with 100,000 fans, and they make a post and it gets four thumbs up and one share in there and their mom comments on it. Well, that's because it's paid to play, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google, all those platforms 10 years ago, built up a lot of demand for their bandwidth. And then they got a bunch of businesses on it. And they eventually said, Great, turn the water faucet off. Now you've got to pay to reach those people more often. Because unless you're dynamic and organic content, which a lot of us aren't, then you fail to reach those people and you got to pay for them. So I always tell people, there's a graph in the book that says spend to build, not to sell. Stop using your marketing to sell what you're doing. Use your marketing to build a life list and then sell to those people after the fact. So what are some actionable things people could do? Like right now right off the bat. So right now I would evaluate every place you have potential touch points. So let's look at the five main places we see your website. But your in store, if you have a business that has a restaurant, if you have a need to have a retail store, it's got in store traffic. 85% of people that walk in restaurants leave without giving the restaurant their information, which is crazy. I mean, think about it, your goal is to eventually marry your customers, you want to get their name, their phone number, go on a couple of dates, get engaged, get married, have babies, well, everybody forgets the end of that because they want to marry him the first time they walk in, well, it's not happening. You got to prove yourself to me, in order for me to become a long term customer. So number one, look inside your four walls like my business here. This is my office, I need to look around and think well, we start getting customers coming in here. When it opens up next month, what am I going to do in house to capture everybody that walks in, here's information. Now I'm at an advantage. It's a membership only place so I already have it. But maybe they have guests, maybe they have friends, they want to share something what number two is looking at your current data, online ordering, online lead forms, places that people have given you information and make sure that you have more of it. Don't just get somebody's email address, get their email and their name and their phone number and their birthday and their gender. People give you what you want. And the more information people give you the more vested they are i'd somebody Diego Matt, what if we ask 1000 people to get their email address and we get 1000? What if we ask those same 1000 people? five questions, their email, their phone number, their birthday, their visit, frequency, their name. Now I just got 700 people, I'm like, would you rather have 700 people that gave you everything than 1000, who gave you one piece of item that doesn't really give you the ability to do a whole lot with it. So take your current data and harvest it and re engage them. The third part is your website. Somebody's taking the effort to visit your website. What are you doing when they get there? Is it good looking? Does it suck? I mean, I looked at our websites about four months ago. And I said, Wow, I wasn't impressed. I mean, we had five different sites, the colors are a little different. Some of the links go these places that places we did a complete rebrand. And we're in the marketing world. I mean, I see a lot of restaurants, a lot of small businesses. I was at a restaurant the other day in North Carolina, they didn't have a website. And I'm like, What do you mean, he don't have a website? We haven't gotten one yet. But yet, I probably did open eight years. Like, okay, that has to change. So and let me let me jump in real quick. Like, I think that stuff changes within your business. And you need to re audit it like an example is, you know, I built my business on doing dinners for as little as two up to about 20. And I found doing dinners for two isn't really where I want to be. And it's for but it's like the about page of my website is like I do dinners from two to 20. And at some point you need to go back and look and say is the story that I'm telling online? That's the story of what I actually want to be doing. Yeah, it's something we all need to do. And I catch and I I bring a lot of things up the way I know a lot of these are correct, is I have screwed them up myself many times. And I can't tell you I had somebody recently that downloaded a guide from one of our websites. And I'm like, it's this is an old guy. This is broken. We're this I saw it because it came through messenger. And I asked them hey, this isn't automation. This is Matt himself. Where did you click to get this? And like, Oh, I clicked on your website. I'm like, hey, dumb question, which website we were botch? told me what website I found that on the page. I'm like, how is this still here? And it happens. I know a friend of mine recently and said he sold something on his website that didn't exist anymore. But he was like, I just did take this button off somewhere. So you need to schedule times every week. And this is a good idea. I'm gonna put it on my calendar today. schedule the time every week, take a half hour and look at your profiles online. Look at your Google My Business, your Yelp account your TripAdvisor, Travelocity, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Tiktok, YouTube, website, your email signature, make sure those things are all relevant and correct. And that they're on point. That's what got me when we changed our websites. I was looking one day at all five of our websites. And they all had a different shade of orange. Like we have a brand standard. Like how do we have? Like I can tell these are like consumers might not notice. I noticed. So that's the websites. The third part. The fourth part are your online profiles, Yelp, TripAdvisor fake, Google My Business, those places. And then the last one is Facebook and Instagram. So I mentioned all those five places. Look at those five places. Okay, how are people finding me on Facebook and Instagram? What am I putting on there? How are people find when they find me on Google and Yelp? Where am I sending them from there when they come to my A website, what am I doing to get them to take the action. So all of those elements I just drove you to should take people to one place. Take them the one place a landing page through a quick Click Funnels or high level, a messenger bot, you can send people to Facebook Messenger like we do. And you can easily within 20 seconds, get five to seven pieces of data. And so that is a very actionable step is look at the five places and store website, your current data, your online presence like Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, and then your Facebook and social media, and make sure that the conversation you're having there is asking people to do something. And when they do it, don't have it go 10 different places, it should go to the same place. And you can as simple as going to Click Funnels calm, create a one page little funnel that has a form, and it filled the form out. And when they fill the form out, now you have to do something with it. Now this sounds like a lot for people who maybe are not into this. I think that's where it gets to be challenging. You know, myself, I'm a solopreneur. I have no people working for me, thankfully, I've learned a lot of this as I go. But who should be doing this in operation? I mean, I guess it depends on how bigger the operation is. Maybe the better question is like, How hard is this stuff to learn to implement on your own as opposed to hiring someone to do that? If you've created a business, and you're investing and saying, Hey, I don't think any of us start a business and go man, if this works out in two months, I'm going to keep doing it. We all should be starting a business and saying this is my next 24 months. And having an attorney drop our paperwork, having an accountant do our taxes. I have a company that Mo's my grass. I have one of my employees tell me I can mow the grass boss, Mike, I would rather have you doing your job. Then knowing the grid. I know you can, but I could probably buy the grass. I've actually mowed grass honestly, there's a little tip about me I have allergies I've mowed at one time, like seventh grade and asthma attack almost died. So I haven't done it again, but do what you're good at. And so I think what a lot of us get caught doing I did this myself was I never forget this story. This is about five years ago, I had a bookkeeper, that was $125 a month Her name was Liz. And she would 125 bucks would do all of our books every month, give it to my attorney on my account, my account would audit it. Be ready for tax season every year. I got stupid one day and I'm like I can do QuickBooks. I fired it. And about six months later, I hadn't done QuickBooks in five months. And Scott's like, bro $125 like I seen what you spend on lunch. That's like two days lunch. You got rid of Liz, I'm like, yeah, it took me a year to catch up from what I screwed up there. So what I would advise people, find people to do things for you as often as possible, do what you're awesome at. And don't do what you suck at. You can hire if you're a smaller business, go on Upwork upwork.com up w o rk comm you can go on there and find people from all over the world and say, Hey, I need a landing page created, I need a marketing funnel created. Or if you've actually are investing money in your marketing, which a lot of us should be I do I practice exactly what I preach. I have a company out of Canada that handles our Facebook and YouTube and Google ads for our company. We do that for a living. But he's better at the b2b side than we are we focus on B to C. And so Andrew handles that for us. So I wouldn't I would encourage people to look at their business and say yes, there are some things you can do. You can make Facebook posts yourself, you can shoot video, you and I'm on the phone right now, I'm guessing you might be on the phone, I've got an iPod that cost me $4.58 on Amazon, I've got a little light in my office and I wanted to use it if I needed it. That was like, like$15. So you can create video content, you can make stuff for your post. But if you're trying to create automations, and things like that, you're going to have to probably either learn a little deeper or hire an expert. And when I say expert, you can use that term loosely because I can I can get on Upwork right now. And within 30 minutes hire somebody for under$5 an hour to do something that would take me five or six hours. Now give you one little hack on when you hire people on Upwork. And here's why I like Upwork specifically, number one when people are hired to Upwork employers leave reviews. So you can look and say, oh, Matt is a graphic designer on Upwork. And he can do automation funnels with also. And that's what Matt claps that I needed. So he's a clickfunnels guy. I'm going to hire him Oh, he's had 500 jobs already. And he's got a 9.8 or whatever stars out of 10. That's pretty good. Oh, he's $5 an hour. And he's made $30,000 you can do the math and go crap. He's completed a lot of hours. The other thing up work is when you hire them, they get paid when their screen is moving. So you can actually log in on VR using up work before I haven't I it's one of these things I've seen I've never used it before. So what's great about it What's really cool about it is you can go on there, like we have an editor on their narrow, I can get on there, if I want, I don't deal with it, my team does, I could get on there, I could go to his account. And it'll say he worked 3.8 hours the last two days, it'll show me a 32nd screenshot every 30 seconds, when his mouse isn't moving as keyboards not moving. This clock turns off, he doesn't get paid. He's in a bathroom, he's on Facebook, he's talking to his wife, when he's working, it's taking screenshots of him do the work. And you're like, Oh, that's pretty cool. I've I'm away first, our iPhone up or four years ago, I was fascinated to like, look through an hour of screenshots and see how they went through all the places that I could see what they were doing. The other thing I hacked within Upwork is put something unique in the description, because what happens is people on Upwork have bots that will apply for every job for them. So I always put my team puts in the body, when you apply for this job, reference pink elephant. And what happens is we get 100 applications. 60 of them don't say pink elephant, we automatically disqualify they didn't read the job description, how can they apply for it? And so that's the hack and then go through there and just look and see, have they performed tasks before? Do they have good reviews? Have they earned more I saw when there was like $100, where you might earned 100 bucks at five bucks an hour, you've not really done a whole lot there. But you've earned 10,005 bucks an hour, okay, let's hire this person and put it in there. But don't be afraid to spend money for people to help you do stuff. Yeah, I'm a big fan of navall raava Khan, and he has this podcast. And one of the things he talks about is, is about wealth creation. I know some people say, Well, I don't want to be wealthy, but the point he makes is like nobody ever got to where they are nickel and diming their time, right? He says, you know, like, I buy something on Amazon for $5. And it it's a you know, shirt that doesn't fit like the time it takes to box it up, tape it up, drive to the place, return it for $5 it's like I'd rather just like give it to my next door neighbor. Because all that time is better spent on me creating the big thing, you know, and we do that consecutively as the week goes on. I mean, just the summer we hired someone to do my lawn mowing, you know, I hate mowing my lawn, but you're like, I can, like why am I gonna pay someone but it's like 40 bucks a week to deal with my lawn. And I can be doing like the work that I need to be doing. Well worth it. Oh, it's it's kind of comical. You mentioned my assistant is on off with our van shooting this week. And he fulfills all of our shipments. And so we had like nine or 10 shipments and need to go out this week. And I didn't want to put it on anybody else. Because I actually have a log in the USPS grapple, there's two ways we can ship my books and some other stuff. Like we have welcome packets for clients and get MP gear, all sorts of stuff. And the easy way is more expensive. I literally go on usps.com, I click the bug with their address, print the label, pop it on a box, drop it off. The other way, which is a third of the cost it's $15 or five is I go there with the envelope called media mail. Then while I'm at the post office, I fill it out, I get a stamp, I put it in there I go my way, while I'm looking at this and I'm like, Okay, I've got 10 of these 10 of them, Austin would take the 10 go to the post office do this task for an hour, it's 50 bucks, me, I'm not sitting at the post office. So I spent the $15 per tan I spent 150 bucks instead of 50. And I was able to go there, drop on the counter and get the heck out. And I know I wasted$100 right there. But I also know that I earned an hour of my time back. And for me, I can use an hour of my time to work on myself to watch my son play football, to hang out my wife, watch talk to my daughter, I can use it to work on my business, you know, my time is worth a certain amount you can only you can't get time back. And so I think a lot of times as business owners, we have this idea that we're gonna quit we're gonna buy a book like this, which you should go buy Amazon 699. Right now, by the way on Amazon. When you buy the book, you'll read it. And you'll go man, there's a lot of good ideas in here. Well write a list, what actions Am I going to take? One thing I missed up on I wanted to do in this book I didn't do it was I wanted to put a shade at the end of every chapter with what actions Am I going to take from this? And then the next column? Who am I going to delegate or hire to do this? Because a lot of us get stuck doing things we're not great at. You know, there's certain things we do as a hobby to have fun. Like this weekend, I've got a couple things I want to do. We got a podcast studio. It's ironic I'm out here doing this. We have a podcast studio that's not done yet. And that'll be done but I look forward to it'd be fun for me to go in there and play around and do stuff. It's my free time. But next week, David my technician comes in who's actually going to put put the wires together because that might take too much time for me. But be willing to hire people to do things that you don't know how to do. And at the end that they also look at your time, hey, I can build this thing out and Facebook Messenger like we use or Click Funnels or somewhere like that, and it's gonna take me 10 Okay, well, if you were out selling yourself, whatever you do, whether you're a chef or a restaurant or an architecture attorney, how much could you earn in those 10 hours versus paying somebody to do that? Absolutely. I mean, time is the most valuable resource, isn't it? And the one we never get back, I have a question about building a list. I don't know if you have an answer for this. What would you do if you want it to get a bunch of people's information at an event because that's something I struggle with. I'm a personal chef, right? So I get hired by a woman to come to a dinner for 12 at her house, I've got her info and all these people there, say, this is great. I'd love to hire you for dinner, and I leave some cards on a table. And there's my cards, Graham on the way out. And then I don't hear from a good chunk of that, is there a way while I'm there to really get down to get either get their information and give them something tangible that they're going to take back? And then send me that info? Yeah. So I would have a QR code on a business card that you do a bigger card, you do not give out a you have in your hand and you say, hey, by the way, a lot of you and you let the host know this ahead of time, that, hey, when I do events, you know, I hear a lot from people that they'd love to have me out. So when they're on site, I'm going to be giving away a free meal to somebody present. And so have that card, and let them know and physically have them do it. Hey, by the way, a lot of you have said you loved it Did you know she told you, somebody here is going to win this for free at their house. And so all you got to do is scan this code, it'll take you let's say my world Facebook Messenger, it'll ask you three questions, your phone number, your email, and consent that you're in the contest. And we're going to draw it and we'll draw it tonight at the end of the night for one of you to win dinner. And so then you have them scan that code, you just got 12 people to put their information in there. And then you let the host know something like, hey, if you if you're cool with me doing this, it's 10% off your next event. It's a perk we give to people because we grow on referrals. And people who eat our food at places like yours, are the ones who want us to come in. So then you literally walk around, hey, are maybe having a table, hey, you've seen a table, scan that with your phone, they're all customer QR codes. Now, thanks that pandemic here four years ago, they thought they were some kind of alien barcode. But yeah, scan that QR code. At the end of the night, I'm going to draw a winner. That's how you got to do it, then. Because if you have them, I'm going to draw it at the end. I mean, they have to be a moron not to scan it. And if they're really interested, they're going to scan it, and you draw the winner, you get six people, right, you want to get that prize out. And for me, if I had a person, birds of a feather flock together, if somebody is at that house, they're probably in the same income class, and same circle, that all of a sudden they scan it and they scan it, boom. And then you can also put something in there, hey, by the way, forward this to a friend who you think might be be interested and will give what there'll be entered in our next contest or something like that. I love it. That's why you're the man like we didn't even talk about this ahead of time. I didn't know if you could solve this problem. And it was actually something I was thinking about. As we were talking. This wasn't on my list of questions. And just as I'm thinking about, you know, you're talking about customers coming into restaurants, and I listen to you on other podcast talking about some different tactics. And I'm thinking, well, this is what I struggle with is like, again, these getting all these people's information. So I think this is great. And I'm looking forward to like putting this into action. I got to figure this out. I don't think I could get it done for my party I have on Friday, but I'm gonna get that QR code thing going. We have a party Friday. Yeah. Okay, then. Email me when we get off here. I'll personally build it for you. Oh, awesome. We'll figure out a way I'll get with me and my team and we'll get this done for Friday. That way, you can have the QR code literally having a little table topper and do it because the problem we have in business Yeah, they always say you get 0% of what you don't ask for. And I'll never forget this story. My dad like I on Thursdays when I'm home in town. I do an interview with my dad three o'clock on Facebook and YouTube called fire with dad. My dad's a truck. He's like a human cartoon character. And I'm going to ask him tomorrow we're gonna talk about stories of the crazy crap he's dead. But I never were at Yamaha's deal. I mean, we were a boat dealer. We're at Yamaha's dealer meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. There's 5000 dealers there. Were the number three Yamaha dealership in the country. So we're a big we're a big player in Yamaha design. And my dad's talking to Phil disco, the head of Yamaha marine first ever employee of Yamaha Motor Company on US soil like 20 years prior. And so we're sitting there talking to my dad says sometimes pontoon boat he's got and we're not poor. So we got money and we have a boat dealership. And my dad it cracks me up he goes, You know what? phileas Yeah, he goes, my pontoon boat has a Mercury on it right now. I just realized that. Would you ship me a Yamaha? 40 horsepower fourstroke motor from my pontoon. That Phil looks at me goes, Okay, sure. And I'm like looking like what You we have those in stock. But my dad but the other business we have to pay for my dad we get dumb like why did you ask him as like why the hell not? And you get what you asked for. And I talked to Phil the next day and Phil walks up he goes when your dad crash, I'm going to Vegas, I bought a Yamaha like 25 years. Nobody has ever asked me for a motor. You know, it showed up the next day at our store a free motor. Because they called me and they go Hey, Matt, we got a motor just showed up. It says attention your dad, what is this? I said, Oh, it's his pontoon motor for disco gaming, can you go to his house, get his pontoon boat, put it on there. But I think a lot of us fail to realize you get what you ask for. And if you don't ask for it, you don't get it. And if you put something in the consumers hands like trade shows I do trade shows. I don't like three people today have been here at our business, we have a 50% person conference that at a lower level that BMI chapters, right. Three people today walked up here and asked for my business cards, they wanted to refer their friends here. I gave him my book. I don't have business cards. I gave him a book, I got their information. And I said, Hey, here's my phone number, how do I contact you, you need to get people's information. Because that's that's all you have, especially if you're out there. Let's say you do two dinners a week, that 52 weeks, there's 110 times, times 10 people, you know, there's 1000 people, if you get 500 of those people to scan that coding information, I guarantee you there's 40 to 50 deals in there that can be had. Yeah, and again, I think the follow up of now you've built this email list in MailChimp or whatever you have 500 people's phone numbers, like, I think a lot of people then don't take action on it. You know, I always have whoever contacts me for a party opt in, I asked if they want to opt into my email list. And I actually, you know, that's part of the very first intake when they do a questionnaire for me, I say on there, do you want to be a part of my email list? You know, you'll get sporadic recipes entering the contest, and it's there and people opt in, I have to then go make sure I'm following up on that. Because I've got these people say, yeah, here's my info would love to be on your list, I want to enter contest, I want to get recipes. Now I have to make the time to follow up on that. I think that's again, where a lot of people kind of fall short. Yeah, and that's, that's where you can do two things, you can do automation, or you can do one off, we used to use a lot of automation on my personal email. And I just wasn't happy with the results the past year, so two weeks ago, and you know, my team gets with me every week. And we create to one off emails, one that goes out on Wednesday, and when it goes out on Sunday, and they're one off, but we have in our schedule. She knows every Wednesday and every Sunday today's went out like two hours ago. And I approved it this morning. But we already have an idea of what the content is going to be. But we've kind of we're trying to change something up on it. But you can also create automation to where you go in there. And you say you know what, create 52 recipes, build it, we use a program called drip. There's also a program called high level, Click Funnels, you can create Constant Contact, you can create a nurture series where it's 52 recipes, 52 emails, and whenever you bring somebody into that list, and they get tagged, and they go into Constant Contact or MailChimp or high level or drip, it automatically puts them in a campaign. And every week, they get their way they get their email. Now one one tip on nurture sequences, people have a tendency to do them every seven days because they want a week. But have that sequence go every six days because what happens is, a lot of you have a tendency to do a nurture series like that in automation every seven days and it goes every Tuesday every Wednesday. Well people have different habits. In that way. You can look back in like three months and see what days emails get opened better. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays Fridays, do you have an opinion on how much is too much with email? Because some people say you can never go too much. But as a recipient, I feel like if I'm getting bombarded like every day with emails at some point, I'm like, you know, all it is I signed up for your email list to get my free burrito on my birthday. But like you're emailing me four times a week, like that's to me too much. Do you have an opinion on that? So I have an opinion two ways on that on that on the frequency and on the the content? So number one, yeah, there is too much. There's a website called the climb cL YMB. They sell outdoor stuff. I've bought 10 pair of shoes from there in the past five years. The only option they have or maybe they don't i don't even get their emails. And once I'd opt out, the only option they had as of like two years ago was a daily email. And I emailed them and said, Hey, I buy from the climb all the time I dig your stuff. You have a dead weekly, I don't need i'm not buying crap every day. Like No, we only have an option because they have deals in this. So I opted out. Then come to think of it now I think I bought a pair of shoes from climate like a year that if I had like a weekly email versus a daily which cracked me up, they didn't have it. I probably would have bought more. But I think you've got to look at people I think ideally, two to three times a month is when you should communicate with people I think weekly is a little much depends on your business. And I say that we communicate with our list twice a week for my marketing firm. But I'm not selling anything as content, hey, today's podcast is out, hey, this is out. So if you're a, you're dealing with consumers, two to three times a month, if it's b2b, you can get away with more because you typically have education and content to put out. But also the other side of that is, think about what you're emailing, because 90% of businesses, especially restaurants, email, everybody, and your list the exact same thing. And then every week, it's sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, you know, one of our most successful campaigns this past couple months, was Mother's Day and Father's Day for restaurants. And the campaign didn't actually talk about the restaurants. And hey, click here, we want to know your special memory that you and your mom had, click below to go to Facebook to tell us about a memory of you and your mom and drop a picture in the comments. You will be registered or win a$25 gift card, the email had nothing to do with the restaurant, it didn't sell food, it didn't have a link to their menu, their website, nothing had a link to the Facebook post. Because all we were trying to do was to get opens, we were trying to get opens on the on that on that email, we are trying to click on that email, and trying to get people to engage. And people's minds are kind of screwed up when they think you're trying to sell them something. And you don't. They're like, Oh, this email, I don't realize it consciously but their brain does. They're accustomed to every car dealer email, they get selling cars, every restaurant email, they get Taco Tuesday, be different. have content in there that gets into taking action, because when you get them to click or open, that's what you want. It's a conversation or Hell, I had one one client of ours we talked to back during the pandemic, when April of 2020, they sent out an email to a big list of like 8000 people, and it was one line. Hey, it's so and so at the restaurant. Just checking to see how you're doing is everything okay? in your in your house and your family? They had hundreds of replies. And they replied. So sometimes you got to go a little more personal. But you know, content is a key thing there. If you look at it, like you're saying two emails a week, 52 weeks a year, that's 104 emails, if every email goes to the all the audience and goes to an only sells your company, you just wasted a lot of bandwidth. And the people that opened it in week one have died off by the week 26. Yeah, that's the same with just posting in general on social media, right? Like every Instagram post does not need to be. Here's my food at the restaurant come to the restaurant. Here's the special I've got like, what are you providing? How are you engaging with these people? So that you're staying, you know, on top of mind, but it's not this pitch, every time. Think about your business. I mean, people don't and this isn't an insult. They're not hiring you for the food. They're hiring you for the occasion. The food just happens to be badass. So let's talk about anniversaries. Put up there, you know, there's Valentine's Day, there's Mother's Day, there's Father's Day, there's, you know spouse's day, daughter day, Sunday, Dog Day, there's all these days, there's months, cat day, I'm sure it's out there. You know, get people to engage for different reasons, but also maybe get into a gauge on occasions. You know, maybe once a week have a theme where you get on there and say, Hey, we want to know about your special anniversary. This is Mike and Cindy. They've been married for 25 years. Who else has an anniversary this week? Who do you know that has anniversary. Now all of a sudden they start tagging it and people start thinking all they did our anniversary dinner last year. Let's hi let's have them out this year. So think of those different events. I'm in Kentucky Derby parties are huge. So I was a private chef doing catering Derby parties in Kentucky. I might be putting stuff up here. That's a maybe a bad example because it's one day, but I'd be putting stuff up on Facebook in April, like who's gonna win the derby this year? You know, so you got to find ways to engage with people why? I don't go to like last night my wife and I didn't go to barley corns. I have dinner. We went to barley corn to have dinner, have their food with the volume coins and enjoy each other's company. The food was the byproduct. And so I think a lot of businesses, they just sell too much it sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. Yeah. Well, I think this has been so amazing. What if you had like one last nugget to share with our audience today? Is there anything you want to go on record with before we get out of here? I just say the thing I talked about earlier on spend to build, you know, spend your time, your money and your efforts to build a database because this ring right here my wife 22 years as of two and a half three weeks ago, had I not asked for her phone number at study hall at Morehead State University, I'm more than likely wouldn't have got the first date. And it's the same thing with your customers that people that are trusting you. I mean, think about it from a business standpoint. If you're a restaurant, they've driven to your place. They've called They've walked in, they've given you a credit card. they've, they've trusted you with their time and their money. But also they've probably past 30 or 40 other businesses. If they're hiring you for catering, they probably looked at five or 10 other people. So you've got a fish on the hook, get their information so that you can develop a relationship with them down the road, the most valuable asset, any business can have, in my opinion, outside of an awesome team. And product is a database of people who know like and trust them. Phenomenal pitch that book for me one more time. What's this book you got there? go to Amazon look up matte black restaurant marketing that works. I think it's 699. Right now, it's funny, Amazon, I don't know how their system works. We asked them to put it it was originally 25 bucks. That's what they want it to be. I think the price they want is $29 within a couple months. But I asked him to put it on there for like 699 for about a month. So that as many people can buy it early on, because it'll help the algorithm get people buying it. But it's a great book. It's and I guess I can cover the word restaurant. If you're not the restaurant. Well, at the end of the day, it's going to teach you how to attract attention, how to build a database for that attention, and then how to retain customers by using email, text and social media marketing correctly once you have the people's information. I love it. I was reading the book earlier today. So hoping to put a lot of it into action soon. Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it and to everyone who checked out the episode. Thanks for hanging with the Chefs Without Restaurants Instagram podcast today. Thanks for listening to the Chefs Without Restaurants podcast. And if you're interested in being a guest on the show, or sponsoring the show, please let us know. We can be reached at Chefs Without restaurants@gmail.com Thanks so much.