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How Cause Marketing Can Improve Business For Restaurants

Summary:

WEBINAR OFFERS 10 TIPS FOR GETTING INVOLVED IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES

July 26

How Cause Marketing Can Improve Business For Restaurants

Nation’s Restaurant News
Mark Brandau
July 23, 2010


Cause marketing not only affects a restaurant’s reputation in a positive way, but it also makes strong business sense as a way to focus a brand’s social-media strategy and to engage with staff and customers, according to a webinar promoting Share Our Strength’s Great American Dine Out.

Diana Hovey, senior vice president of marketing for Corner Bakery Cafe, and Amanda Hite, chief executive and founder of Talent Revolution, praised the power of charitable involvement — in their case, with the Great American Dine Out — in a panel discussion titled “Drive Sales with Social Media and Cause Marketing.”

Hovey, who also serves as chairwoman for the marketing advisory board for the Great American Dine Out, said getting involved in a cause, as Corner Bakery did last year with the event, benefits a brand’s reputation, its employee engagement and its guest engagement.

“The bottom line is that we need all three of these objectives to be met, and [cause marketing] does that and is good for business,” Hovey said. “One of the nicest surprises was the level of enthusiasm and pride of our involvement with Great American Dine Out among our staff. They loved that their efforts could contribute to a solution to ending hunger. Our customers did too, and [the cause] justified their decision to visit our restaurant more and to spend more money.”

During the Great American Dine Out, which will take place Sept. 19-25, chain and independent restaurants nationwide will raise funds for Share Our Strength, whose mission is to end child hunger. More than 3,500 restaurants participated in last year’s event, Share Our Strength said.

Corner Bakery got involved last year by offering a bounce-back coupon for a free Whoopie Pie to any customer making a $1 donation to Share Our Strength, Hovey said. The initiative raised $23,000 from Corner Bakery guests, who also redeemed 32 percent of the bounce-back coupons, generating incremental sales for the chain.

The brand will build upon that success this year by offering multiple bounce-backs for a $5 donation, Hovey said, adding that Corner Bakery’s goal is to raise $100,000 this year.

Cause-marketing events like the Great American Dine Out not only raise funds but also the profile of any restaurant making the effort to increase its social-media awareness, said Hite of Talent Revolution, a human resources consulting firm.

“You can use this Dine Out event as a model to learn how to use social media in your restaurants,” Hite said. “But, not one of these platforms will replace or give you a short cut to building trusting relationships with customers or going out of your way to show that you care. The power behind this is the relationship building.”

Pointing to several restaurants’ integration of the Great American Dine Out with their social-media initiatives as examples, Hite shared a 10-step plan for becoming active in online communities and using them to drive sales:

• Be there — While Twitter and Facebook have the furthest-reaching presence for restaurants, don’t forget about YouTube and the benefit of having a proprietary blog. “One of the easiest ways to get your restaurant on the first page of Google search results is to have great videos on YouTube,” Hite said. Starting a blog on any of the free publishing platforms like Blogger or Typepad gives restaurants “a voice beyond 140 characters or a status update,” she said, adding that all the different platforms should be linked back to a restaurant’s website.

• Listen to the conversations — Restaurants can easily search for what has been said about their brands through functions like following Twitter hash tags.

• Join the conversations — “Respond to the people talking about you, and be personal, authentic and conversational,” Hite said. Don’t just start pushing out slogans and advertising copy, because people tune that messaging out, she said. Talking about a cause to which the restaurant is dedicated makes a good subject to starting talking about.

• Host “meet-ups” or “tweet-ups” in the restaurant — Asking Twitter followers or Facebook fans to meet each other in real life is a popular draw, Hite said, especially when they can do it for charity. “The cause is the perfect reason [to get together], and the restaurant is the perfect place,” she said.

• Play Foursquare — The location-based social-media platform allows restaurants to offer plenty of deals and recognition to their most frequent customers, and it’s easy to provide incentives to check-in during the week of Great American Dine Out.

• Recruit and engage brand ambassadors — Hite recommends identifying social-media friends with the largest networks and asking them to spread the word about a restaurant and its involvement with a charitable cause.

• Leverage video to personalize invitations — Recording a video greeting to the most influential people in a restaurant’s social network is a popular way to personalize the call to action and increases the likelihood the message gets passed along.

• Participate in industry social-media events — In the case of the Great American Dine Out, a Tweet-a-thon scheduled for Sept. 20 is meant to involve all participating restaurants in order to promote the nationwide event. When all participants agree beforehand to tag social-media posts with the same key words, the event’s prominence increases.

• Distribute a special offer — Driving traffic to a restaurant, whether on a specific day for a fundraiser or during a random slow period, can be achieved quickly with a coupon or other offer sent to social-media fans and followers, Hite said.

• Run a contest — Hite suggested that restaurants run contests on Facebook or Twitter during the Great American Dine Out to increase participation. Customers could win gift cards for answering trivia questions on Facebook or retweeting a message about the event on Twitter.

Fishbowl Marketing hosted the webinar. Click here for more information about the Great American Dine Out.

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