I wrote this past Saturday about different reasons people give to not have a website for their restaurant. I missed one though, an important one.
“A website is a waste of money. We spent 10 grand on a new fancy website a few years ago, and it didn’t change our business at all. As far as I’m concerned they’re a complete waste of money.”
These are serious people, and their concern is definitely a real one. An investment their business has SHOULD have a return, otherwise why do it? Proving an ROI from the investment in a Restaurant Website and Internet Marketing can be difficult, but it’s not impossible. The key thing to keep in mind though, that a website is a tool. It’s not a solution. The website helps you CREATE a solution.
More often than not, people who didn’t get an ROI from their website bought a 10 grand dud that they threw up on the web and ignored and abandoned and then were upset that it wasn’t making any money for them, even though they weren’t even adequately tracking to see if it were the case.
Ok so… How CAN we not only prove an ROI, but make one more likely? There are a variety of ways, and it involves both online and in-restaurant activities.
1) Track Your Specials. Let’s say you sell pizzas and you have 20 different gourmet pizzas. Well keep track of how many of each you sell every day of the week. Even chart it on a graph (visuals help). Then offer an online special. Put it on your website, put it on Yelp, put it on Foursquare, Tweet it, Put it on your Facebook page. Don’t mention it in your restaurant. Then see if there is a difference in the numbers sold. Or you could even make an original creation as an online special and tell people to ask for the “secret pizza of the day” on your website. See how many people order it.
2) Make it a Game. Game mechanics are a great way to get people involved from a customer loyalty standpoint. Complicated systems can be expensive, but there are inexpensive third party options, or you could run it yourself from your website. Have people sign up on your website, have them participate in your “game” and then track the results of that. The more people participating in the game online, as well as in restaurant, are definitive numbers.
3) Have an Internet Marketing plan. Honestly, this is the most important, and in many ways encompasses the above two options.
If you aren’t tracking your website traffic, and comparing it for correlations or causation’s with your actual business, it makes it hard to see if there is anything in common. Start with the tracking of your website, see what kind of traffic you’re getting there, what kind of traction you get on Twitter, Facebook, and Social Media, and work on an Internet Marketing plan for 5-6 months (we are blogging about a rough internet marketing plan for restaurants as well, it’s something we help all our customers with custom plans for their restaurants, as well as implementation.). After a few months, depending on your plan, and how well you’ve stuck to it, you can then compare your website traffic, and other internet marketing intitiatives, with your actual customer receipts. If you’ve increased your traffic, grown your Facebook fanbase, grown an email marketing list of hundreds of customers, and coordinated it all, and more such as contests, specials, and game mechanics, through your website, you WILL see an increase in your overall business.
—
Websites are tools. If you don’t use them, they can’t help you at all. If you spend money on a website, and then ignore it, you probably won’t get much out of it. If you bought a SUV to drive up into the back woods to go fishing, and then left it parked in your garage all the time, would you complain that your new shiny unused SUV never caught you any fish? A website, and spending money on one, for your restaurant is only the start. It’s purchasing a TOOL to help you increase your business. It alone can’t do that. Not without your help.
But if you use that tool, then we can help you track and prove the ROI of purchasing it. If you’re interested in more contact us today to talk, and even try a membership, no contracts, or if you have a great site, let us help you maintain it and enhance it only $50 per hour – we can do many updates in an hour.
Leading up to Mother’s Day, I constantly watched Twitter for holiday specials and promotions. Many restaurants did a nice job of promoting their offerings, but I had no way of knowing if they were successful or not. But let me tell you a story.
Attention eating establishments – if you do any takeout business or take reservations via phone, your phone number should be listed as text and NOT an image on your site. Why, you ask? When someone views your site on a cell phone, if your phone number is listed as text, it is automatically converted to a click-able link so all your potential customer needs to do is hit the link and they’re calling you for an order or reservation! 
