The Simple Serve Flywheel: A Guide to Restaurant Digital Marketing Success
In today’s accelerating digital landscape, restaurants are constantly seeking innovative ways to attract and retain customers. This post aims to offer a simple flywheel depiction of Simple Serve Social’s philosophy. This model simplifies the complex world of digital hygiene for restaurants around what the end goal is inevitably, but often danced around: revenue growth. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the Simple Serve Flywheel, explaining its intuitive components and exploring how it offers a complete restaurant digital strategy.
Understanding the Simple Serve Flywheel
At its core, the Simple Serve Flywheel is a framework that emphasizes the interconnectedness of various digital hygiene strategies for restaurants. It consists of four key components, each playing a vital role in driving growth and success for restaurants:
1. Increase Engagement
Engagement is the cornerstone of any successful digital strategy. It involves creating compelling and relevant content, and more importantly, interacting and elevating the content of your customers, consistently. From mouthwatering food photos to behind-the-scenes glimpses of kitchen life, to reposting stories, posts and reels of your customers, engaging content flatters and captivates the audience’s attention and encourages interaction. Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter give restaurants unimaginable reach and serve as powerful channels for fostering engagement, allowing restaurants to connect with customers on a personal level.
To increase engagement, restaurants can leverage various tactics such as maintaining a robust social media posting schedule, highlighting and resharing all customer-generated content and of course review response and elevation. By actively engaging with customers and responding to their comments and messages 24×7, restaurants can push the flywheel into the next section:
A note about consistency: A restaurant that churns out a world class post that checks all the guru’s boxes done once a month, will always be outclassed by a restaurant that consistently cranks out good (never mind great) content 5-10 times a week, 52-weeks a year. We aim to be your simple solution to cranking out great content and interactions, week-in, week-out.
2. Increase Loyalty
Building customer loyalty is akin to building reoccurring revenue streams with built in growth for your restaurant. Loyal customers not only entomb your restaurant in their weekly plans, they also serve as brand advocates, spreading positive word-of-mouth recommendations to friends and family. In the digital landscape, restaurants who prioritize professional, friendly and consistent interactions will outpace their peers in reoccurring revenue generation (read: loyalty).
Your restaurants digital hygiene plays a crucial role in nurturing customer loyalty. Engaging with every customer interaction across social, interacting with all reviews and elevating positive ones, leveraging customer data for personalized email campaigns, SMS texts, etcetera, your restaurants can strengthen the bond between you and your customers. Increased engagement, followed by building a loyal customer base results in increased followers.
3. Increase Followers
A robust digital presence which results in a loyal customer base ultimately expands the reach and visibility of your restaurant. By increasing followers on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and X, the same digital activities a restaurant is performing will be amplified (leveraged) to a larger and broader audience: this is the promise and potential of the digital world – more input for the same output, done consistently.
There are acute ways of growing your digital following, from requests on receipts and tables to follow your restaurant, running adds and campaigns across social, paying local influencers to post about your restaurant, all good ideas, but in truth your following will grow organically with a consistent digital presence. Simply, building a sizable following is a byproduct of increased engagement and customer loyalty: are you starting to see how the flywheel works yet?
4. Increase Positive Reviews
Online reviews play a significant role in shaping consumer perceptions and influencing purchasing decisions. Positive reviews not only serve as social proof of a restaurant’s quality and service but also contribute to its online reputation and search engine rankings. Conversely, negative reviews can tarnish a restaurant’s image and deter potential customers.
Increased followers gives a restaurant more opportunities to solicit positive reviews from their increasingly loyal customers, pulling new customers into the beginning of the flywheel: Engagement. This is the circle of life, or really, the Simple Serve circle of why any of this matters anyway: Revenue Growth.
Why Do Any of This: Revenue Growth
All of the activities of the Simple Serve Flywheel are done in service of revenue growth. You can think of the center of this flywheel in how we organize our vision statement for your restaurant, our business, and all of the activities we pack in to our Simple Serve Core package: Revenue Growth. For a neat summary: Engaging with your customer base across all key digital platforms, consistently, leads to a loyal customer base (read: reoccurring revenue). A more loyal customer base will grow your follower base, both on and off digital platforms, which give you a larger pool of engaged and loyal customers to elicit positive reviews. More positive reviews lead to new customers who are pulled into the Engagement arm of the flywheel, starting the process over and incrementally growing the thing that matters most: Revenue. This cycle spins faster and gets larger over time with the same amount of input, creating leverage (read: more revenue).
Conclusion
The Simple Serve Flywheel is a framework for how we run our business and our services tailored for your restaurant. By focusing on increasing engagement, loyalty, followers, and positive reviews, restaurants can create a rapid flywheel that will feed itself, growing larger with the same inputs, creating leverage. Simple Serve Social aim to be the ‘easy button’ for bringing your digital presence from 0 to 100 with our Simple Serve Core Package, which goes beyond social media to include community engagement, reputation management and packed full of revenue generating activities. Schedule a free consultation to learn how we make maintaining an expert online presence Simple.
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