Part two can be found by clicking here.
SUMMARY
In this series of posts over the next five weeks, I will be covering how we used social media to grow our business, particularly with Facebook advertising; what we learned, things to pay attention to and ideas for you to continue the trend and move into the future.
WHY LISTEN TO ME
I’ve been in sales and marketing for over twenty-five years, originally as a financial advisor for one of the big brokerage houses. More importantly, my sales experience led to being one of the original members of the sales and marketing team for what became Move.com.
Here I grew a sales team, oversaw marketing and helped grow the business to over $30 million in sales with three hundred employees. From there I launched my own start up focusing on sales and marketing, raised money and then sold the business. Tired yet? I was, so I slowed down and worked a normal job in corporate American before moving into small business with my wife, running a hugely successful restaurant in Reno Nevada that has been recognized nationally and regionally.
BACKGROUND and the GOOD YEARS
My wife started Dish Cafe fifteen years ago in Reno, Nevada. At the time we were one of few places that offered any type of local, organic food. There weren’t many choices anywhere in town to find items such as free-range eggs or organic greens and many people were more concerned about how much they could eat for the lowest possible price.
It didn’t take long for us to stand out. Almost immediately the local food section in our newspaper started covering us, doing reviews, articles and interviews; marketing took care of itself. We never spent a dime on advertising or salespeople. We had it made.
Fast forward to 2009. The business is going well, there is steady growth each year and our catering business is now starting to take off. We’d been in business for eight years at this point and I had recently joined my wife from corporate America to take over the catering side of the business which was growing faster than we could handle, again with little to no effort on our part other than making great food and being on time — doing what we promised.
We received a phone call that changed the trajectory of our business from The Food Network during my first year at Dish. One year later we were on their hugely popular show “Diners, Dives and Drive-ins”. The marketing we received what was probably worth a million dollars and would last years as the episode was replayed over and over every couple of months.
Business increased over 80 percent that year alone and we had to struggle just to keep up. Marketing — what marketing? — we didn’t have to worry about it!
THE CHALLENGE
Four or five years ago the Reno Food scene started to change in a big way. Where we once stood out, we started to lose some of our appeal. Not because we stopped innovating or creating new food with amazing ingredients but because there was a whole new crop of restaurants opening that were also making amazing food.
To make matters worse, though we have an incredible location next to the largest regional hospital in town, we are off the beaten path a bit. At the time, the restaurant revolution started in Reno in a new part of town, south of downtown, called the Midtown district.
Restaurant after restaurant started to open in this area, housing started to gentrify in the area and the food scene changed from just Reno in general to Midtown.
For a few years we didn’t see any change in our business. We worried a bit but our catering business was growing in the twenty percent range each year and the restaurant was still growing over ten percent each year in revenue.
All good things come to an end — well, not if you’re paying attention, which we were, but we weren’t at the same time.
We finally had a challenging year in 2016. The cafe business was basically flat for the first time in fifteen years, although the catering business was still growing faster than we could keep up, with us turning down business each week.
We started to realize though that good food alone wouldn’t keep us growing. We were a brand long in the tooth, outside of the cool district in Reno, doing absolutely — no marketing or advertising. Our demographic has inched up in age — our average customer was over forty — and we had almost no brand recognition in the eighteen to thirty-five market.
THE SOLUTION
We had always had a Facebook presence — over 6,000 followers at this point — but we didn’t do much with it. Periodically we would post a cool picture or update our specials but never a concise strategy. My background is in technology, sales and marketing, so it wasn’t a stretch to build our social media brand online, though we never used it to our advantage.
One year ago, we decided we needed to remind and reengage with people that had forgotten about us, let them know that Dish was still here and the food was just as amazing as it has always been; not just good food — amazing food. So, we started to post our weekly specials with high quality pictures, posting each week to Facebook and spening a small amount — $25 to $30 each week — to get the word out. The results started small but over time they increased incrementally. We knew we were on to something.
Over the last year we were able to ascertain the best way to advertise these specials, which days and time worked the best, who to target, how much to spend and which posts got people the most excited.
Then a month ago we decided to really ramp up our activity on our Facebook page, positing more pictures, more behind the scenes content and really engaging with our customers. The results can be seen in the graphic below. More importantly, our sales have increased over ten percent in a short period, our employees are making more money in tips, the business is making more revenue and the catering business is getting more calls than we can handle.
WHAT’S NEXT
Over the next four weeks I’m going to review in detail each of the steps we have taken since January of this year to increase our business and focus on social media. These steps include advertising on Facebook and Instagram, setting and sticking to a schedule with social media postings within a larger strategy and redesigning our webpage to support the efforts.
We’ll be sure to share with you how we learned everything there is to know about Facebook advertising in order to make the most of every dollar we spent and ultimately how you too can increase your business through the use of social media no matter the situation.
Stay tuned — it’s going to be a fun ride!
Visit Dish @ www.dishcafecatering.com
Visit Joe @ www.linkedin.com/in/joe-j-horn/
