If you have been to the movies lately, you may have seen a trailer for a film called Horrible Bosses. Well, I haven’t seen it yet but from the trailer and descriptions, I get the gist, as should most restaurant owners. The movie reflects a larger reality in the American workplace, that employees are not happy with their bosses (more than ever). A worker’s dissatisfaction with their relationship with their...

Studies reveal that many American restaurant workers don’t know enough about food allergies. Restaurants with employees unfamiliar with food allergies risk mistakes that can cause serious injury to customers, liability to the restaurant and a following of people who will at every opportunity try to sink your restaurant (think Yelp). In some cases, a restaurant owner could lose everything if a customer suffers sufficient injury. If your insurance does not...

Google knows there is money to be made in local  search advertising . Google designed Boost, their new service, for the marketing needs of small businesses like restaurants. Boost is currently available across the entire United States, it may very well attract many SMBs to online advertising because it targets customers who are actively interested (since they are searching) in what the SMB offers. Boost, which uses the pay-per-click model,...

Social media has eclipsed search marketing to become the primary marketing outlet online for small businesses, according to research carried out by American Express OPEN and Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). Simply put, more small businesses use social media than search engine marketing or online advertising, and small businesses plan on contributing more to social media in the upcoming year.

Restaurant owners cannot overlook the new off-shoot of Facebook Places, Facebook Deals. Facebook Deals, which is currently available for free, is a potent marketing tool for businesses to reach the massive, interconnected and involved online Facebook community. The model is simple: restaurants, as a part of Facebook Deals, reward customers for “checking-in” to their businesses with the Facebook Places app on their mobile phone. In total, Facebook Deals provides restaurants with four different types of deals which will be discussed later on along with who should use what.

Family and friends have a huge influence on decisions; one is definitely where we dine. Family and friends orient us, making sense of the dizzy options we are presented with everyday. Therefore, restaurants should never underestimate what effect a recommendation or bad review can have.

A restaurant’s menu is a psychological chess match. Beyond descriptions that make the dishes appetizing, marketers and restaurant owners, using typography, arrangement and design, must shepherd customers to the dishes and distract the them away from pondering the prices. In contrast, customers attempt to weigh their gastronomic desires against the prices. Who prevails can be crucial to the restaurant’s success as a lot is in the balance when customers opt...

We can learn a lot from the example of SEOmoz, an internet marketing company that tripled its Twitter community in a year. SEOmoz is one of the industry leaders in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), another way of saying the improvement of a website’s organic (meaning not advertisements) ranking on search engines. Originally, SEOmoz worked as consultants to companies that wanted to increase their visibility on search engines. Now though, they...

Successful Email Marketing, a highly effective marketing technique, is dependent on having a sizable and updated email list. That doesn’t happen overnight and involves a certain degree of strategizing. But without an active list, email marketing is less helpful in marketing your restaurant.  A recent article explores a couple strategies that I will add to and explain. There are four proven ways to collect email addresses. Two are in restaurant...

Facebook has been playing catch up, and has finally started to heed the demands of a loud but vocal group of marketers and business owners. Facebook took the first step in improving the merged Facebook site to match the features that were available through the Facebook Page. And now heeding the cries of dissatisfied businesses, Facebook has created an unmerge function to those hapless businesses that merged their Facebook Page...