Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Tracy Sabbatis. I manage the regional guides at Mannix Marketing, along with Valleri, who is our Director of Sales. For those of you who aren't familiar with the regional guides and the tourism part of Mannix Marketing, we have several sites, from Albany to the Adirondacks. We have millions of website visitors and hundreds of thousands of social media followers and newsletter subscribers. Valleri will be taking you through 10 tips for marketing your restaurant or craft beverage business. A couple of housekeeping items before we get started. We'll be recording today's webinar and sending it to the attendees this week. We're going to be covering a lot of tips today. So in addition to sending out the webinar, we'll include a checklist with bullet points from today's presentation. If you have any questions, enter them into the Q&A, and we will leave time at the end to answer those. If we don't get to yours, we'll follow up later. Valleri, take it away. Good morning, everyone. As Tracy said, I am the Director of Sales at Mannix Marketing. I help people from Albany to the Adirondacks market their businesses online. I know there are quite a few people on the call who have been open and doing business during this crisis. And I also know we have some who have just decided to open. Hopefully you will find some helpful tips, no matter which one of those categories you fall into. Before we dive in, I do want to just say, now is not the time to stop marketing your business. I know when money is tight, a lot of people think, oh, the first thing they should do is stop advertising. Research shows that anyone who markets aggressively during an economic crisis does far better in the recovery. You also want to note that there are not as many people advertising right now. So you have an advantage of getting more eyeballs on your information. Let's dive in. The first thing you need to do is make a plan. Obviously, if you're a restaurant, a distillery, a craft beverage place, you are going to be doing takeout or delivery. So what does that look like? What are your new hours of operation? Are you going to do a full menu or a limited menu? You might love your signature poutine or have the best French onion soup in town, but are those good options for takeout or delivery? Think about what you have and how it's going to look when it gets to the end user. Lake Ridge did it a nice example. They just pared down their menu. They've chosen a few items, and they're offering it in serving sizes of one, two, and four. So think about what you have that will look the best when it gets to your customer at the end. Are you offering any family meal deals? Those are really popular right now. The Queensbury Hotel, which has Park 26 and Fenimore's, is doing a different meal each day. I believe they're also changing that weekly. By changing it weekly, it gives them the opportunity to get some repeat business. Having limited menus also makes it easier for you to keep all of your ingredients on hand. Think about what else you can do. Ravenous is offering meal kits. You can bring home these three different crepe kits and make them at your house. Not only is it something different that they can offer, but it's also something fun that people can do with their families. How do you want people to order? It's something you really need to think about. Do you want them to call you? Do you want them to email you? Do you have online ordering setup? Or are you going to start using third party delivery? However you are going to have them order, make sure that's front and center. Have you thought about how you're going to handle alcoholic beverages if you're a restaurant? You can sell them as part of your meal deal. Or you can have them be add-ons. Can you offer gift cards or merchandise for sale online? Racing City Brewery has taken all of their gear online. If you don't have a shopping cart on your website yet, it's really easy to add one. Is this a good time to start shipping out your product? Nine Pin Cider thinks so. How will you be helping your community or your employees? Saratoga Five Points is now offering free lunches to anyone in need. Whatever you decide to do, make sure you are flexible. What works today may not work tomorrow. So don't be afraid to change up what you're doing. With all the new menu items that you have, and the new ways you're doing business, you want to make sure you have new photography to go with those. People are really visual. It's really a lot easier for you to sell food and drinks when people can see what they're getting. Poke Bar came up with a new matcha lemonade. So they did this cute little post to showcase their new product. Photos and videos also provide good content for social media and email marketing campaigns. Here's a great behind-the-scenes video of a chef preparing food. You can also get in the pictures with your food. You are part of your brand. People want to see you. This is one for Morgan&Co at Easter just showcasing their Easter potatoes. Nothing exciting, but just getting real and being in there with the food. You can also try maybe doing some black and white behind the scenes photos, like this one from Three Vines. Take a moment to think about what you can do differently and how you can showcase the new things you're offering. Once you decide what you're doing, you need to make sure your information is up to date. Your website is the place people are going to go to look. However, you may not want to update that daily. Power's Pub took this opportunity to put their hours of operation on there, but they're also telling you to go to Facebook, because that's where they're going to be updating everything. You should have a Google My Business and Bing Places listing for your business. Make sure those are updated as well. Even though City Beer Hall is closed, it's still up-to-date information. The last thing you want is someone to show up at your business during hours that you're not actually open. You need to update your social media pages as well. This example is what's called a pinned post. Pinned posts stay at the top of your Facebook feed, so no matter when someone goes on your page, this is the first thing they're going to see. All your other posts will show up under this. But this is at the top. Lizzie Keays used this great example to say when they're open, how they want you to order, and even offered a special. The great thing about this, too, is if something changes, you can change the pinned post. You want to be in the now. Don't ignore the fact that we are in the COVID crisis. We all know people might be a little reluctant to eat out right now. They might be concerned about what you're doing as a business to protect them. I love this example of Mario's showing off their sparkling clean kitchen. You could also show off what you're doing for safety guidelines. Be human. It's OK to be fun and show your personality. Dizzy Chicken is being really light and funny in this Instagram post, while still giving the message that they are open and ready to take your orders. One other thing you want to do is be grateful. Everyone is trying to support their local restaurants, especially their favorites. Here's a post where Hideaway is talking about how much they appreciate your business. It also shows a nice behind-the-scenes photo showing that it's hard for them too, so we're all in this together. How can you be helpful? Springbrook Hollow Distillery pivoted their business and is now offering free hand sanitizer. You can go up there any weekend and pick up two free hand sanitizers. That's a great way to help out the local community. Is there something you can do to help out? Maybe you decided not to open. So what is your life like now? Osteria Danny is taking this opportunity to stay connected to their guests by telling them what they're doing while they're home. So what are you doing that you can put out there to your guests? You want to send out all of your information via email to your subscribers. Send out your new menus. Tell them what your new hours are. Tell them what you're offering now. If you have a weekly menu, send it out like Prime did here. You can send that out more than once a week. If you have daily specials, send them out. Your guests want to hear from you. So don't be afraid to use the tools you have to let them know what you're doing. Social media is probably more important now than it has ever been. People want to know what you're doing. But they also want to support you. So they're looking at your social media, and sharing your post, and telling people what you're doing so that they feel like they're supporting you. So make sure you're giving them things worth sharing. Obviously, you are posting your hours. You're posting your menus and how people can order from you. I guess I'd consider making that a pinned post on Facebook. It's the only place that you can pin a post besides LinkedIn. But consider having that information front and center. You want to post your daily specials using photos of your food. A picture is worth a thousand words. People are much more likely to buy something that they're visualizing. We love how Century House showcased their entire corned beef dinner here. It makes me want to order it. I don't know about you. You can post your new weekly menus. Salt&Char has a fantastic deal on a three-course menu every day. It does change up each week. So they're putting that out there. I believe they're sharing it on their social media more than once a week. But you do want to make sure you get that out there. Do avoid the common mistake of using photos or PDFs of your menu. People can't read that. There's no way they can read the font. Another tip is that you also want to avoid just using big blocks of text. I see a lot of people just doing a very, very long post of what they're doing. And Facebook doesn't show that to as many of your followers. And your fans are going to be less likely to share that. So give them something pretty to share. You also want to make sure you're posting often. Why do you want to post often? First of all, you want to stay top of mind. But you also want people to know you're open. If it's Wednesday, consider doing something like Orchard Tavern has done with their free winged pinwheel. A lot of people do Taco Tuesday or burger and a beer on Thursday, so do these kind of posts, so people know you're open. Tipsy news puts we are still open in every single post they do. So are you posting enough for your customers to know that you are open? Make sure that they realize you have something going on every day. If you haven't done so before, you can use Facebook or Instagram stories. Here's a great example by farmstead flatbread. They just posted up a nice picture of their pizza. But how can you maybe use those stories to grow your business? Similar to the message that Hideaway posted about being thankful, Dave at Ravenous decided to go live. He's talking about how he's thankful for his customers, how he's grateful for the business, and what he's doing now. Speaking of going live, how about considering some virtual opportunities to connect with your customers? You could do a cooking show. You can demonstrate how to make a signature cocktail. DZ Restaurant put this cooking show on YouTube. By putting it on YouTube, they're able to repurpose that content. It can be used on their website. It can be used in email marketing. It can be used on social media. So what could you do to showcase what you're doing right now? You can celebrate a milestone. Normally, Adirondack Winery has a huge party to celebrate their anniversary every year. Obviously during the COVID crisis, they are not allowed to have a large gathering, so they took the party online. I think that's a great idea. Artisanal Brew Works normally has new release parties for all of their businesses and their new beers, so they took that online. You can do something a little different. Maybe you want to stream some live entertainment. You see a lot of people who have live acoustic music. Saratoga Winery here is doing a line dancing class. Palate has events almost every night, so they've taken their true crime night to Zoom. So what are you normally doing that you can't do now that maybe you can take online? Or what can you do something that's a little extra to continue to connect with your customers? Don't be afraid to ask your customers to support you. They want to. So you need to give them some ideas. Besides ordering from you, what can you have them do? There are a lot of best of, fab five's, favorite this, favorite that, industry and community polls going on right now. So we are running all of ours for Albany.com, Saratoga.com, Lakegeorge.com. So here's an example of Dunham's Bay they have not only the lodging, but they also have a restaurant. So they're just asking people to vote for them. Don't be afraid to ask for that support. Maybe even do it a little bit more now than you would have in the past. Ask people to share your social media posts or review your business on Facebook, Yelp, or even Saratoga.com. Don't be afraid to ask them to do something for you. Ask for help to support your employees. Tattoo Taco set up a GoFundMe account to support their employees who aren't working right now. Consider doing something like that and having your guests contribute. Ask your guests to buy gift cards. Gift cards can be donated to people in need. They can be donated to front line workers. Or you can use them in the future. But it's a good way to get some cash to the businesses that you love now. Build your email marketing list. I hope that all of you have an email marketing list right now and that you are utilizing it to its fullest. But no matter what, you want you have the biggest and the best email marketing list possible. Not only can you use it now, but you can also use it when the stay-at-home order is lifted, so you can hit the ground running. You can do giveaways, polls, and quizzes on your social media. People will be asked to give their email address when they enter. If you want to reach a larger audience, I encourage you to partner with us on one of our web sites. The example shown here is the Docksider Restaurant, giving away four $25 gift cards. We do all the work, so you don't have to. So you're busy doing other things, so why not let us help you out with that? We set up the give away. It's going to be promoted in our email newsletters. As Tracy said, we have tens of thousands of subscribers there and hundreds of thousands of social media subscribers. So all of those giveaways get promoted to that crew. At the end of the giveaway, you are going to end up with anywhere from 500 to 1,000 new email addresses. You can use those now. You want to go ahead and send out the weekly deals, the daily specials, any discounts that you're offering. Or if you're changing the way you're doing business, you have a whole bunch of people that you can let know. You can also let them know what you're doing when you reopen. What are your new hours? What are you offering? Share the menu. How are you doing business? Maybe you're doing something different that you want to know. Regardless of what you're going to promote, having an extra 100, 200, to get the word out to is definitely going to be a bonus for your business. You also want to use this time to try to reach new audiences. Obviously, we're in different times. So you can't continue doing everything just the same way you did it before. This next example is not a restaurant. But it's a really great idea. Impressions in Saratoga decided to do porch packages. Porch packages are little goody bags of things from Saratoga. You can call them and place an order. And they actually deliver it to people's front porches. Or they will have them shipped anywhere in the US. What they did is a press release to the local media. I have seen their porch packages on multiple news channels, in about a half a dozen different newspapers, so if you have something that you're doing differently now, consider doing a press release. If you're doing a new meal kit, if you are doing a program to support the community, consider getting that information out through the media and taking advantage of reaching new people. Please, use your industry and local influencers. Saratoga, Albany, Lake George, we are so blessed to have so many foodie groups and local websites that support the restaurant industry. Make sure they know what you're doing. We are sharing a lot of restaurant posts. But we are also doing specific posts for people. we are finally going to reopen. And we're doing it for Easter dinner. Can you help us get the word out? So we did this Facebook post on Saratoga.com them. I am happy to report that they ended up selling out of product. We've also done them for cookie kits, and pizza delivery kits, and just special offers. So there's a wide variety of ways that you can promote your business using influencers. Also, use our email list. We have a total of over So you could use all of those. Or you can use a portion of those. Maybe you just want to reach the 10,000 people in Albany. Whatever you decide to do, we can send out a message all about your business to our subscribers. In this example, Adirondack Wine and Food Festival wanted to sell more tickets last year. So they utilized our entire email list to send out information on the festival and ask people to buy tickets. So think about what are you offering that might be a good fit to tell the world? We are happy to help you get the word out. And I'm sure there's many other businesses that have email lists that they can send out things for you as well. So those are the 10 tips. I do have a bonus slide for you. I'm really just going to give you a few tips here. I know that you guys are all very, very busy trying to figure out what you're doing now. So I hate to throw this out there. But you do have to plan for the future too. Some day things will return to normal. Maybe it won't be the same normal. Maybe it will be slowly getting back to normal. But you need to also start planning for that. What are you going to do? Did you learn things during this crisis? Will you different business practices in the future? Maybe you're going to have your tables further apart. Or maybe you're going to have a different menu now, because you found things work differently. What are you going to do different that you need to tell people? You want to also plan it out any special offers or incentives that you can offer when you're open again. There is going to be a lot of restaurants and a lot of breweries and distilleries that are all vying to get the same business. I think we all can realize that not everyone is going to go out when the time comes. I think there's still going to be people reluctant. So what can you do to stand out to those people? And what can you offer that's going to make them want to visit your restaurant or your distillery instead of someone else's? Use this time to take lots of photos. If it's possible, get photos of all your regular menu items in addition to the new things. You can use those menu photos to make a gallery on your website and your social media pages. All these photos are going to come in handy for marketing in the future. I'm going to reiterate this again. Build your email marketing list. Whether you do it on your own, or you reach out and partner with us, this is going to be a huge factor in helping you reach a new audience of people. Make sure your website is up to date. If you've done something new, now's the time to add it. If you think you might want to take orders online in the future, go ahead and get that added now. Also fine tune your social media pages. Make sure you have an editorial calendar. You can schedule out posts for the future. There's a lot of things you can do to prepare for your business in the future. Whatever you decide to do, or if you need help, please don't hesitate to call me. I love to talk about marketing. I get really excited brainstorming new ideas with people. So I will always be here if you need me. So that kind of wraps us up. I know that we've probably got a few questions. So I'm going to turn this back over to Tracy, so we can answer your questions. And as she said, if we don't get to your question today, we will email or call you with an answer. I also just also want to reiterate, please do call us if you have any questions or need some help. Back to you, Tracy. Thank you, Val. That was great. We did get a couple questions in. You said, don't ignore COVID. Do you have any other suggestions on what we should do? Sure. As I said, people are reluctant to go out. They're concerned about cleanliness. They're concerned about how you're handling the food. So don't be afraid to put out your statement on what you're doing. If you're doing curbside delivery, or contactless delivery, let people know what you're doing. Don't be afraid to take a picture of what that looks like. If you have people coming out and handing you the food with the gloves on, make sure you're showcasing anything that you're doing. And make sure you're reiterating any safety precautions that you're taking. Another question that came in is how much do you charge to use the email list? There's someone holding an event, and they're interested in how much it would cost. It varies, depending on what you want to market, whether you want the whole list for yourself or a part of a list. I would love to have the opportunity to speak with you more about that. So if you could type in your email address in the Q&A box, I will make sure we connect directly on that one. Another question that came in was you mentioned taking a lot of photographs of food. I'm not a very good photographer. Do you know of any photographers that they could get at a good price? Yes, we do. We have actually have quite a list of photographers we can recommend. I'm going to ask you, again, if you could please give us your contact information. And we will get you the list of photographers that you can use. Another question, I see you're sharing a lot of restaurant posts on your Facebook pages. Are all of those being-- are you charging for all of those? We're charging for some of those. It depends on what you want to do. We are randomly looking at posts, seeing which ones are good. As I said earlier, people want to share your posts. But they're going to want to share things that are pretty, that are concise, that they think their clients would be interested in. So we are selecting the ones that we are sharing. If you have something specific that you want to market, like 15 church did, they guided us in what they wanted. And we also paid extra out to Facebook to make sure it reached the audience they wanted to reach. So we are charging for those posts. If you have something specific that you'd like to talk about and brainstorm, feel free to give me a call. And we can go over what that would look like for you. Great. Someone asked if they could get on the list of photographers and videographers. They would love to help out. So absolutely, just send us your contact information. Can we get links to both of your presentations, so they can be shared. We will definitely be sending out a link to this presentation for you at the end. It will probably go out by the end of the week. We are also going to send a check list of the top 10 things that you should be doing. So you'll have that handy as well. You mentioned posting quite a bit on social media. How much is too much? I don't think that-- if you post 10 times a day, that's probably too much, because it's going to take up a lot of your time. But Facebook's algorithm, the way it works, doesn't necessarily show every post that you make to every person. So I would say you can post a couple of times a day. I really want to emphasize that what you're posting is quality information, that you are posting your hours, your specials, that you're open, and trying to get that stuff out there daily. If you're only open on Thursday through Saturday, make sure at least on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, you're posting something, so people know you're open. And maybe you use the days you're not open to post some different information, like your behind the scenes photos or your posts thanking people. But definitely, at least on the days you're open, make sure you're posting at least daily. That is it for the questions, unless there's a couple more that anybody wants to send in. Looks like that's it for the questions. Tracy, did another one pop in the bottom? It's somebody sending in their information. Gotcha. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. I want to reiterate again, I love talking about marketing and brainstorming with my clients. So please, absolutely reach out to me if there is anything you want to talk about. Thank you, everyone. Bye bye.