Can your food do your marketing?

Let’s finish up using the Task Unification template. If you remember, we were discussing how some of the existing components of your restaurant (food, location, customers and staff) can help you with marketing. You came up with some great ideas for the location (serving dinner to customers on the roof, placing signs on the building) and for the waiters (friends and family discount, having them run your social media campaign during down time). Now let’s focus on the last two components. The food – how can the food market for you? What? How can the food market for me? Yes. I just asked that Well, if the food’s really good than people will tell their friends about it. True. Maybe I can put our logo on the food. That’s nice thinking. But only customers in the store will see the food and once they eat it, no one else will know about it. What if we found a really nice party in town and then we donated some of our signature logo’d food for the party. A lot of people would see it. That’s a good idea. And what if the customers got a free dessert if they took a picture of the logo’d food and posted it on social media and tagged their friends. Nice! Love it. And I’m sure it was by accident, but I think you’ve actually touched on the fourth component – the customer. By posting on social media, your customer has now taken on the additional job of being your marketer. So every time we incentivize a customer to tell their friends or their social media contacts, we are in essence getting free, or cheap, marketing? Exactly. You were worried about getting new customers without paying for a marketing expert. But using the Task Unification template, you were able to come up with many ways to market with your current resources. I just thought of another one. I know we mentioned waiters last time but what if one of the waiter’s responsibilities is to take a picture of each customer’s table. They can then tell the customers about the incentives we are offering if they post the picture on social media. This way, we know that we’ve asked every single customer if they’d like to participate in the social media incentive program. Love it. You don’t even need me anymore. And look how much money you saved!