Hospitality Marketing
Marketing your restaurant is so important -- but who has the time? There are SO MANY social media platforms, and you're expected to be an expert at all of them, while simultaneously running your restaurant. These blog posts are dedicated to helping you get eyes on your bar or restaurant. Whether they're social media tips, promotion ideas, or giveaways, I'm going to help you find your unique selling point and stand out from the crowd.
How to Get Your Restaurant into the Google Local Pack
If someone asked you, “Where should we eat around here?” you’d assume they intend to go out to eat sometime soon, right? Well, the same is true of Google searches for restaurants. When people search for restaurants in the area, they have high purchase intent. Either they’re hungry right now or they’re planning a meal for the near future. So you want to show up in that search! But here’s the problem: most of the first-page search results on Google aren’t individual restaurants. They’re from aggregate sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor. These sites have thousands upon thousands of pages and huge domain authority. Your little taqueria may have the best…
4 Ways to Learn More About Your Customers—For Free (Beyond Google Analytics)
Think back to the last time you had a conversation with a complete stranger. I’d bet all the janglies in my pocket that that conversation was rather surface-level. Names, area of town where you live, family, maybe what you do for a living. Now think about the last time you had a conversation with a good friend. That chat would have looked quite different. Inside jokes, stories about mutual friends, maybe some deeper insight into how you’re feeling. To connect with someone, you have to know them. And that holds true whether you’re talking about two individuals or a brand and its customers. But as anyone who’s tried to really…
8 Common Copywriting Mistakes (and How to Fix Them)
If I stepped into my kitchen right now and tried to whip up a Beef Wellington, it would not go well. Could I make something halfway edible? Maaaaybe. But I’m not a trained chef. Nor an amateur chef, to be honest. My husband is the cook in this family. I just eat gratefully and do the dishes. If you’re a small business owner or marketer, you’ve probably had to step into the role of a copywriter. But crafting effective copy is a skill that requires training and practice, just like running a successful hotel, event venue, restaurant, or making Beef Wellington. And if you’re not a copywriter by trade, you…
The Meteoric Rise in Non-Alcoholic Drinks (And What it Means for You)
Does it feel like you can’t turn around without seeing an ad or announcement about a new non-alcoholic beverage? People are reassessing their relationship with alcohol, and it’s led to a massive glut in alcohol-free beers, wines, and spirits over the past few years. Alcohol consumption certainly isn’t going away, but many drinkers are choosing to imbibe a bit less often, or less heavily, than they did in the past. Here’s what you should know about this trend, and how you can take advantage of it. The Rise of Non-Alcoholic Drinks An increase in non-alcoholic drinks and “functional beverages” has been on every F&B trend list for the past few…
The Hospitality Industry By the Numbers (October 2021)
Blah blah blah, COVID-19 pandemic, blah blah blah. I won’t insult your intelligence with some boilerplate paragraph about how the past 18 months have been tough on the hospitality industry. You know it. You’ve lived it. Instead, let’s listen to the numbers and see what they’re telling us. Fortunately, it’s not all bummer numbers (although there are a few…sorry). The hospitality industry continues to see big shifts as a result of the pandemic. Some of these effects won’t be felt right away, which is why we need to see the way the wind is blowing now. Get out ahead of these changes and put yourself in a better position as…
How Well Do You Know Your Target Market?
Let’s start with a little hypothetical here. You own a wedding venue, and you’re using your blog to attract organic traffic to your website. Good for you! That’s what I would do in your situation, too. So you’re doing a little brainstorming, trying to figure out what potential brides and grooms would be interested in that could get them to your site. You settle on a blog about how couples can save money wedding planning. You write it up, make sure it’s got some good SEO juice for the keyword “how to save money on wedding,” and wait for the visitors. Over the next couple of weeks, your blog post…
The Easy Guide to Search Intent
Just yesterday, a client asked me to write a blog post around a certain keyword. For the sake of example, let’s say it was wedding caterer Austin*. The client currently appears on page three of Google search results for that keyword, and they want to get up to page one. Now, this company is a Central Texas wedding caterer, and they have a strong website. So a well-optimized piece of content that focuses on that keyword should be able to get to page one. But when I got started, I ran into a snag regarding that keyword’s search intent. And it was a good reminder that not every keyword is…
The Quickest Way to Lose Customers
After a sleepless night of tossing and turning, jarred awake every few minutes by the A/C roaring to life, I finally began to drift off around 7:00 AM. Then… BANG! Thunder that sounded like Zeus himself was chucking lightning bolts at the foot of the bed, and a torrential downpour like marbles pelting the metal roof. I groaned and rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position on my lumpy pillow. But then the wind picked up, adding to the ferocity of the storm and whistling through chinks in the window facing the lake. “Our firewood is getting soaked,” I told Kirby, who also could not sleep. I got up…
How to Share User Generated Content — And Stay Out of Trouble
Around my house, I’m known as “The Disposal.” This is because I go hunting for any bits and bobs in the refrigerator or pantry, and combine them into some kind of Frankenstein’s monster-type lunch — aka, I eat like the garbage disposal. A bit of leftover rice, ground beef, and some veggies? That’s about to be a stir-fry. Some mushrooms and scallions? Hello, omelet-city. I’m all about using what I have and turning it into something to fill the hole in my tummy — to sometimes questionable effect. User Generated Content (aka UGC) is the leftover ground beef in the fridge. You can (and should) repurpose it into part of…
Restaurant Website Content Ideas to Boost Your Search Engine Ranking
In a perfect world, when your customers search for “Best Thai food in town”, your wonderful Thai restaurant would pop up as the first Google result. But you and I live in the real world. And we know that’s probably not going to happen. That’s because of sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and TripAdvisor. These sites are so huge, so regularly updated, and get so many visitors that your little Thai restaurant can’t compete with them in SEO (search engine optimization). So when people search for “best Thai food in town”, they’re going to get a bunch of results like this: The top results are all review sites. But you…
