Home | Internet & Tech |Restaurant Marketing Frustrations, Challenges & Revolutions with Brendan Sweeney (Ep 191)

Restaurant Marketing Frustrations, Challenges & Revolutions with Brendan Sweeney (Ep 191)

publication date: Apr 7, 2023

author/source: Jaime Oikle with Brendan Sweeney

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Running Restaurants | Brendan Sweeney | Restaurant Marketing

Join Jaime Oikle from RunningRestaurants.com as he speaks with Brendan Sweeney, the CEO & Co-Founder of Popmenu, about all the cool stuff they're doing for restaurants. They discuss the importance of having all marketing touchpoints in one place, the frustration with PDF menus on restaurant websites, and the evolution of restaurant websites. Brendan emphasizes the importance of utilizing technology to enhance the customer experience and increase sales, and he suggests that cross-selling, upselling, and recommending pairings should be built into the ordering process.

Other highlights from our conversation include:

How Popmenu got started
How tech is helping bridge gaps in marketing for restaurants
Getting restaurant websites and online ordering right
How to know your customer better and why that's important
The power of the marketing flywheel
Doing your menu right online can be a powerful sales tool for your restaurant
The importance of having an efficient and effective off-premise ordering/takeout/delivery capability
and more...

Be sure to check out the episode. Find out more at https://www.popmenu.com and https://www.runningrestaurants.com.

Thanks to episode sponsor Zinch - https://financingthatworks.com

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Restaurant Marketing Frustrations, Challenges & Revolutions With Brendan Sweeney

Introduction

Coming up on this episode, I speak with Brendan Sweeney, CEO and co-founder of Popmenu. Now, as you know, I love talking about marketing and tech, and we get into some good stuff in this one for sure.

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We've got a great episode for you with Brendan Sweeney, who is the CEO and co-founder of Popmenu. Welcome, Brendan, how are you?

Thanks, Jaime. Appreciate it, I'm doing great. How about you?

Quick Brand Introduction

I’m good, we just talked briefly before we started and I said that if I were to do anything in restaurants, it's to wear that marketing hat. That's what you guys do. I'm looking forward to our talk for folks who may not know the brand yet. Give a quick intro.

It gets harder and harder each year. We add more and more functionality and capabilities, but essentially, the basis of Popmenu, why we started it, and why we continue to do it is we just feel like there's never been great technology tools for restaurants when it comes to acquiring and engaging customers. As the digital world's gotten so complex but also so necessary to engage, it's been something that restaurants have been challenged with and haven't had a great solution.

Our idea is, instead of a typical restaurant having 10 to 15 tools, pieces of software, freelancers, agencies, et cetera, how about one login, one tool, one support path for as many marketing functions as possible, in addition to ordering, and some more logistical pieces. We're built for independence because we felt like they had the least amount of tools available to them.

We're just about helping restaurants in a simpler way that's more under their control. That's a first-party tool, not a third-party platform to get more butts and sees. To get more orders and to do it in a way that gives them time back because the complexity of approaching digital for a restaurant is just as painful as the cost of it. We're here to help on both of those fronts.

There's a graphic on your site that I like that shows the life cycle of the interactions. The reason I like it is because you could do different pieces of it, but if you miss a piece here or there, the pattern really, their pattern goes away. So talk about how you guys end up being there for that process. What do you think?

All of those different pieces, that hodgepodge that I described that most restaurants use to market, they're not connected. It's the other piece. It's the only modern business. That's the way I've been doing internet products for 20 to 25 years. Enterprise and more already modernized businesses when it comes to marketing and front of house.

They all have these tools where it's all in one. Where that's especially important is having one singular view of your customers, whether they came in from a Google search, whether they came in from a Facebook ad, whether they've ordered with you or not before, whether they've ordered on-prem or off-prem, et cetera.

The importance of all of that being in one place gets greater and greater every day as restaurants are going to be challenged more and more to compete with other restaurants, especially as I feel like the industry is getting more and more savvy. You have to know your guests well. We've been doing this for six years. Everyone's talked about how important it is to know the customer. No one seems to know what that means or how to act on it.

For us, all of that wheel and all of the pieces in the wheel, whether that's your website, whether that's being integrated with Google My Business, whether that's emailing, texting, social, whether that's ordering, again, on-prem or off-prem. Having all those touchpoints in one place means that you have this unbelievable perspective on the guest that can then be utilized to make more and more efficient marketing communications.

One thing that's been true of the restaurant industry forever and is still true is we're really bad at not weaving Popmenu, but the industry overall is really bad at segmenting audiences for marketing messages and then giving them a message that's tailored to activate them. It could be someone who hasn't ordered from you in 30 days. It could be someone who loves a specific burger you have, et cetera.

One thing that's always been true of the restaurant industry is that we're really bad at segmenting audiences for marketing messages and then delivering a message that's tailored to activate them.

In general, the marketing that restaurants do is extremely basic. It's extremely one-size-fits-all. It's extremely spammy. It's like, “I'm just going to keep messaging this customer over and over until they come back in.” With us, everything is more personalized, everything is more automated. What you have is these smarter messages going out that don't overwhelm people and they speak directly to the things that they're interested in or their attributes.

That's why it's so important to have a tool like this where it's all in one because, again, the time and the cost of cobbling together an email tool, a social tool, a website, this and that, pales in comparison to the lack of understanding on a holistic basis of who these customers are and what's the best way to get in front of them.

At the last part there. I know I have a book here that I wanted to find. I had to take my headphones off for a second. This book goes way back. It's called Hug Your Customers. This was really before even a lot of the tech you could do. The idea of it is really powerful, it talks about a tailor shop, but they knew who their best customers were. They knew what they liked, what they wanted, and so forth.

When you do that, it makes a big difference. If you were to go into any restaurant and ask, “Who are your top twenty customers?” They may start rattling off some names. The data is mushy in the background, what they like, how to market to them, and so forth. Now, technology can do all those things in the background. It's really powerful. That aspect of knowing your customer is super getting more and more important.

PDF Menu Frustrations

I read somewhere on your site, PDFs, and when I hear Popmenu, I think maybe you started with menus in your mind and there was a frustration with PDF menus on websites as I did. I've been in this for twenty-plus years now and that's how restaurants started. I pop their copy of their menu, boom, put it online. It's hard to look at, hard to change. Didn't make sense. I know that's a big focus for you guys. Let's go there for a bit.

The idea originally came out in 2014. Even then, I was like, “What?” I built small business websites well over twenty years ago. Some of them are restaurant websites and they had PDFs then. I understand why, as someone who does design, you did the PDF to do the print version and just threw the PDF up onto the website. It's just the easiest, quickest way to do it.

Even back in 2014, I remember just comparing multiple restaurants and saying, “Where are we going to have this a company dinner, a company event, or whatever?” I was thinking, why am I looking at text? Every other business that's out there, I have photos, reviews, ratings, social validation, and all these criteria used to make the decision, but here it's just text.

What does that lead to? I go to a restaurant, I might hear about a restaurant, go to their website, see a PDF text menu, and say, “That's interesting.” Now let me go to Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Open Table and look at pictures and reviews to see if this is the right decision to make. The insight that started us was just, “That should all be in one place and it should be under the control of the restaurant.”

I think PDF is just an example of how restaurants have band-aids and rubber bands patched together into a digital experience. This thing was already made, it was suitable for print. I'm just going to put it on my website. Then you lose so much. I just talked about all the criteria people want, but it's also terrible for indexing and search engines.

It's not good at all on phones. At the time in 2014, it was when we were massively moving to mobile and near-me searches. I just thought that this is going to change. A lot of this is just that the restaurants should have the same tools that retail has, that e-commerce has. There's no reason not to have those tools, not just for ordering, but for marketing. The menu is the most important asset that a restaurant has.

It should be treated with that kind of respect. It should be treated with that love even. What we did was from day one, we built a menu experience that functions like a modern e-commerce multi-step, multi-call-to-action funnel. It's a lot of words. What does it mean? While you're browsing a menu, even if you're not ordering, it means you're getting more information, but we're providing prompts for the guests who are browsing to share a bit about themselves too.

Yes, I do want to be part of your VIP club. Yes, send me offers, things like that. Also, the dishes you click on and view, we store about you so that we know which things you're considering. What have you ordered? We store that. What do you review? What do you share? All these different things make your profile, and that makes it easier for the restaurant to know how best can I reach you to get you in here once and to get you in here again and again.

There are some basic differences that we can infer from consumers with PDF versus a dynamic experience. “The text is not great.” “I don't get pictures.” This and that, but even for the business, it's just a deeper understanding of who this person is and how we can put the things they're looking for in front of them faster. We've all been trained by Amazon on it, and I talk about that a lot. Amazon knows so much about you.

It can be creepy, and we’ve tried to balance this off where it's not just knowing everything and sending creepy messages to guests. Some things are reasonable to know and reasonable to use to put more desirable dishes in front of people. That's what the dynamic experience allows, it just opens up this world of marketing that's more akin to what modern retail e-commerce does.

Restaurant Websites

Amazon comes up quite a bit. We're big customers here, ordering all the time, and they do a great job with recommendations. In a previous interview, we talked about that aspect of making recommendations based on previous uses, and restaurants aren't doing that very well now. That's where things are heading. You talked about photos, you talked about the dynamic stuff, the texture, the SEO. If you were to go back and think, even on websites, what are you seeing restaurants do well on websites these days that maybe they haven't done well in the past?

I talked about this over the years, and people have made mistakes as simple as not having their phone number, not having their address on their main page, and things of that nature, I don't see that as much anymore. If you were to ask a restaurant, what are the few checkpoints that you want to have on your site these days? What do you think?

The company is called Popmenu. It's all about the menu to me. The biggest mistake before was not keeping info up to date. That could be your menus, or it could be your limited-time offers. It could be your pricing, et cetera. You have to think about your menu as your inventory. What do I have to offer now and people just expect inventory to be in real-time? You don’t go on Amazon and order something and they say, “Just kidding, it is not here.” Just kidding, it’s $50 more.

Keeping your info up to date has been a mistake for a while but that is less of a problem. The biggest problem now is people understanding what the website is for. One of the things that we run into and companies taking on the same challenges as us or our competitors run into is, you will talk to an owner who will say, “That site, my brother doesn't like it. He doesn't like how that looks. I want to feel better about what my brother thinks.” It is a “Form follows function.”

The biggest problem now is that people don't understand what the website is for.

This thing is a capture point that you are using to get more business in, and you have to understand that consumers don't care. There's an aesthetic component to it. We have some beautiful sites that look incredible and different, but the basics are, do you have your information in front of people and are you capturing information right to contact and personalization that will help you make a marketing flywheel? That's what the website's there for. I feel like we're helping educate the market on this form-follows-function idea and that this is more of a CRM than it is a business card online. I don't think it's a mistake.

I just think it's something where the industry hasn't been educated on that approach. Again, when you talk about retail e-commerce and modernized businesses, they all operate in that way. I don't think it's a mistake. I just think it's a part of the evolution of the industry that's going on right now that people need to understand. Not only is the website not the endpoint, it is just a component of this overall platform that you use to maximize digital and get as many butts and seats as possible.

Online Ordering

I also look at it from the online marketing, the online ordering piece. If I'm on my phone and I'm using the website to navigate, it does have to work because I will bail out very quickly, especially on my phone. I’m much more patient on the desktop because there's more space. Let's talk about online ordering. I'm sure that piece has become more and more important for you guys over the last two years.

I'm just speculating, with the COVID hit and the need for it popped up. Maybe it's not something that was originally in your mind when you guys started. Maybe it was just developed menus and then people started pulling you towards that. Is that what happened? What are you learning most about online ordering?

We're coming up on three years since the start of the craziness. We had to order way later in the roadmap. I thought that piece of digital was way better covered than what we were doing, which was more marketing. It's way more involved digitally. You're integrating so many different channels and things like that.

I was more of the mindset that while there are a lot of orderings covered pretty well, all of these other ways of reaching people are not covered well, let's go there. Maybe I don't like to compete. Let's go do stuff that fewer people are doing. Then COVID hit, and then the first thing that happened was our communication tools became way more important. That was evidenced, I can think of. It's almost three years ago in the next couple of weeks. Maybe it was the 13th or 14th of March 2024, something like that.

That's right. Right before St. Patrick's Day, in my head, there was this nervousness. If we let people party on St. Patrick's Day, it's going to be a nightmare. Perhaps that was true, but that's what always sticks in my head. You're right.

I will always remember St. Patrick's Day. I expressed my Irishness heavily that day. It was an intense time. The mandates came down, and people had to shut down. We found that just our clients didn't know what to say. What are you saying to your customer base and how? It's just tricky. We had built-in great simplistic emailing tools that allowed you to message your entire customer base all at once.

People didn't know what to say, so we put a template in that covered everything about COVID. We preloaded it and said, “This is there for you. You can just send it out to your entire follower base or you can adjust it for your area or your restaurant.” We put that in, and in one day, we had more emails sent than any previous month combined.

With that opening, the start was that communication is going to be way more important. Are we open? Are we not? Are we doing takeout? Are we not? Do we have family meals? Do we have toilet paper with our family meals? What's going on there? The communication tools were really important, but then instantly, our client base was, and was even more so at the time, independent full-service restaurants.

A lot of Mom and Poppers say, “What am I supposed to do now?” Getting on order, we can rewind to the beginning of 2020, the state of the industry report from the restaurant association said 37% of restaurants were doing off-prem of any kind at that point. Can you imagine, 37%? A lot of people don't even know how to do online ordering.

Our fantastic team that's way smarter than me said that we need to build ordering, and we're going to put everybody on it. We did it for two weeks. Then we launched on March 27, 2020. Got our first orders and we've added ordering clients every single month since then. It is still a smaller part of our business. We're still more focused on the attract and engage, but the transact pieces are part of it now.

For me, I feel like there are a million ways you can get online orders through your site. I’m not one of those, I don't think third-party platforms are evil, this and that. Sure they're self-interested and sure, they can make things hard for the owners. I think if you're really smart and how you use it. If you see it as an acquisition channel, not an operational channel, I can get new people through here, but then from then on, they're going to order through my tool, and it's going to be better economics for us.

I love that approach, and I think the most savvy operators do it that way. I think of it as just tremendous for engagement and remarketing. As soon as somebody orders with you, so much more, and then you can use that information to tailor personalized marketing. Real quick, I keep talking about personalization of marketing and things like that. It's not something that the restaurant should have to do themselves.

We should be doing it. We have over 10,000 restaurants on our platform. We have 30 million consumers engaging with our restaurant websites in a month. We should know what should be sent out. You shouldn't have to, as an operator, deal with that. It's a big principle for us. When I talk about getting this information for personalization, it's not like, now go get a slide ruler and a spreadsheet and figure out who you're sending, what, and when. We should be doing that for you.

I think having the ordering plugged in with the marketing piece and making this holistic flywheel is what I'm most excited about on ordering. Of course, everything we already know from COVID, if you can't have people in the building, you can stay alive. It's a business when you are allowed to have people in the building. It can be a nice income stream, as long as it's managed the right way. That's not just signing yourself over to a platform. It's being strategic about it.

Question for you and maybe you don't have to know the right answer to this, but you mentioned back three years ago, that 37% figure. We talked briefly before today about a new report coming out. Do you think the number is a hundred percent now? Is it 90%? Pretty much everybody's had to figure out how to do takeout and delivery. Is that fair?

That's fair. I saw the number yesterday and I haven't memorized it yet, but I think it's 80%. I want to say that's what's in the restaurant report. It's hard to say how could anybody be doing no off-prem, but I'm sure there are just some situations. There were some super high-end finance, especially, of course, tasting menus, and things like that. Some people say, “No, I'm not putting this in a package.” It's more than doubled, and nothing has ever more than doubled in three years in the restaurant space.

Upselling Strategies

Yes, it's table stakes. You have to do it well. Any quick tips you would share with folks to do it well, whether it's in an upsell on the app, making recommendations while they're already online ordering? You can think about it for a second, but one of the things that you need to realize when someone has decided to dine with you, whether it's in person or not, they're there. They're a captive audience now.

They're willing to spend. Now, not to be greedy, but how can we extract more out of them? Whether it's another beer, another wine, another set of fries, or a dessert. They're about to give you their money. How much more of it can we get? It's an important piece. Any tricks you've seen digitally to capture more dollars?

In my opinion, what you're describing with the cross-selling, upselling, and recommending pairings like the technology should be taking care of that for you. When it comes to the actual ordering user experience, you can make some decisions on what's being included as a recommended dish. I think if you're recommending something with everything because you're doing that in the restaurant anyway, right?

It's like on-prem, your front of the house is saying, “This is great with this.” Et cetera. You should certainly mimic that conversation in the ordering path, but the mechanism for doing it should be built into the technology. I think honestly, the biggest thing is super simple. It's just utilize that contact data you got from ordering.

Utilize the personalization data you got from what they order and make better marketing messages based on that to get them back. In the moment of the order, some things are just basic econ practices. Again, we can go back to Amazon. How much stuff have you added on that you didn't know you wanted?

I guess I will get the cable for this thing that I bought. I guess I will get these filters and this battery. That stuff will happen as a matter of course, replicating the server conversation so that you're recommending things that could be novel or could be interesting to the customer is important. It's the basics though, “You ordered from me, that means me. That means I'm going to stay in touch with you and use what I know about you to get you back more and more.”

I think one thing for sure that I saw early on when we started the business was that restaurants have been sold a lot of different stories about technology and marketing. Most of the stories are complex, you need to let me handle it. You need an expert, you need a bunch of tools, you need this and that. It is simple.

Keep it from being this crazy high-minded thing where you say, “Let me think about my tone for five months.” “Let me think about my personality, my persona that I want to express.” It is simple. It's food. People want to see that food and they want to understand why it's different, which usually just involves seeing it. Then they want to hear from you and see it again.

It doesn't have to be complex. Our most successful marketing messages are pictures of food, especially something new, a limited-time offer. They want offers for sure of all kinds. One of the quickest, easiest tools. When I talk about reviews, we capture reviews on a first-party basis. At every single dish in every menu on Popmenu, you can review that dish.

We deliver those directly to our clients. In the Popmenu for Owners app. They can respond directly, which is great, especially if it's a bad experience, if you respond immediately, it's not going to Yelp or other third-party platforms. You can also choose to display it on the dish to help sell that dish, but one of the most effective marketing tools is just share that review.

You're getting these first-party reviews, just push that out. We make it easy in our tool to push great reviews out to social. If you're showing people offers, dishes, and reviews and you're doing it once or twice a week, you're going to be in great shape. You're going to maximize visibility. Now, we're excited because, in the coming months, we're going to be releasing more and more features that have to do with ROI.

If you're showing people offers, dishes, and reviews, and you're doing it once or twice a week, you're going to be in great shape.

ROI is not just on the platform or what you're spending with Popmenu, but the components of it. Emails and texts that are happening. What direct orders did that lead to and how much? What indirect or inferred orders did that lead to? That's going to get better and better over time but the reason I bring it up is we see a very clear and direct correlation between marketing views and ordering volume.

I know that as marketers, that just makes sense to us. I think because we haven't had ROI data in the space, there are plenty of people who doubt it. We did a social campaign. I don't have any way of knowing if it did anything. I'm going to assume that it didn't or one person came in and told me they saw this campaign. I'm going to assume that it worked.

Now we're putting more and more ROI data in place, but the message there is marketing impressions equal and increase in volume. How many impressions does it take? There's variability there. What kind of restaurant are you? What kind of market are you in? Just being simply visible and putting the things that are unique about your business in front of the people who already like your business at a nice pace, that's no magic wand.

Marketing impressions equal an increase in volume.

Popmenu's Coverage

You're exactly right. You hit a lot of good points there. There's so much more we could cover. I want to dig into some more of this stuff. I want to invite you back. You talked about 10,000 restaurants. That must mean they're everywhere. Talk about your geographic coverage. Can folks reach you guys from anywhere? Was it the best place to go? Your website, is there an app? Is there a download? Send them where you want. What do you get?

Yes, Get.Popmenu.com is the place to go. We're everywhere. It doesn't matter. Huge markets, small markets, villages. We've got some of the highest and full-service restaurants on. We've got sports bars, we've got boba tea, we've got food trucks. It works for everything. The best thing I can say is just come and get a demo because it's really hard to describe. There's so much in there. As we put more and more in, it becomes harder to just say, it's just this. It used to be just websites, but websites are just one component of an overall digital strategy.

I think if you come to get to the website and sign up for a demo, we're not going to push you super hard. You just see it. Generally, when people see it, they buy it. It's just a great investment. It's a cost reduction. It's a reduction in complexity. It's a reduction in the time you have to spend on the topic, but it's keeping you in front of and capturing more and more of the people who can just grow your business.

Conclusion

It's a great collection of tools. I spend time on the side and add that and that. Just knowing when I know from the past that those all used to be separate pieces and you had to manage them separately and the nightmare that involved. Knowing you can get it all in one place is a big win. I appreciate digging in today, folks. That was Brendan Sweeney of Popmenu. You can find them on the web at popmenu.com. For more great restaurant marketing, service, people, and tech tips, stay tuned to us here at RunningRestaurants.com. We'll see you soon. Thanks, Brendan.

Thanks a lot, Jaime. Appreciate it.

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