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Supercharge Your Restaurant's Marketing Game With Jackie Bebenroth Of Muse (Ep 214)

publication date: Jul 30, 2024

author/source: Jaime Oikle with Jackie Bebenroth

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Are you ready to supercharge your restaurant's marketing game? In this episode, Jaime Oikle dives deep with marketing maestro Jackie Bebenroth, Principal at Muse, to uncover how strategic branding can skyrocket your restaurant's success. Jackie shares her expertise in brand strategy and content marketing, drawing from her vast experience working across the food system and her personal insights as the spouse of a restaurant operator. From perfecting your visual identity to leveraging local influencers, Jackie offers practical tips and innovative strategies that will keep your restaurant buzzing and top of mind. Whether you’re navigating the complexities of social media or seeking cost-effective ways to tell your unique story, this episode is packed with actionable advice to elevate your marketing efforts and boost your bottom line. Tune in to discover how to make your restaurant not just a place to eat, but an unforgettable experience!

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Supercharge Your Restaurant's Marketing Game With Jackie Bebenroth Of Muse

Folks, welcome to the show where we bring the tips, tools, and techniques you need to know to make your restaurant more profitable and successful. I’m your host Jaime Oikle. I got a great episode for you with Jackie Bebenroth, Principal at Muse, which is all about brand strategy and content marketing. I always love talking about marketing. I’m looking forward to this. Jackie, tell me a little bit about your backstory and your company and we’ll dig in from there.

Restaurant Marketing

Thanks for having me. My firm specializes in brand strategy and content marketing for food-related businesses. I’m very familiar with organizations across the food system from agriculture to manufacturing into restaurants and even advocacy. I always like talking to restaurant operators in particular because marketing can be so complex. It’s almost like feeding a beast to market a restaurant. Everything always has to be on. You always have to stay top of mind. I am also married to a restaurant operator. That’s why I have an additional perspective from the couch at midnight of talking through all of the many challenges of running a restaurant.

I’m sure they get heated discussions there at home. That’s good. I’m glad you brought that up and you have that background on both sides of the fence. Let’s talk about marketing because there’s so many pieces of it and I want you to direct it while I poke and prod a bit. On your website, I know there’s a graphic that talks about phases and things of that nature but start off in general. Restaurants, especially smaller restaurants, don’t do a great job with telling their story, telling who they are and telling why they’re different. Can you elaborate?

What I found in working with restaurants is the first and foremost priority is making sure the visual identity is right on target. That means your logo, signage, menu, and website. Everything is consistent. It looks great. It’s done in a professional way to reflect the quality of your menu and experience. When we work with restaurants, we often start there because that’s the first impression in the community.

You want to make sure that’s dialed in. Oftentimes, we have the saying, “They eat with their eyes.” Within that visual identity, we often include extra emphasis on food photography. Even videography plays a big role in ensuring you’ve got a selection of ongoing images you can use in social, your website, and all of those things. Our work in brand strategy, we do a lot of work in positioning and messaging, but for restaurants in particular, we do focus and emphasize more the importance of your visuals to, again, reflect the quality of the experience.

It’s amazing. It’s better now, but it used to be so bad. Restaurants would have very poor photography. That’s crazy. Your food and restaurant is beautiful. At least we all have pretty good cameras just sitting on our phones these days, but it’s been surprising over time that people don’t do that well and so forth. Now you talked about video. Let’s stay in the photo-video realm for a little bit more. How can restaurants get good photography? What should they look to shoot for video, short form stuff or medium form stuff, long term or talk to the chef? What are some ideas you think?

Hiring Influencers

One of the more resourceful and creative ways that I’ve seen restaurants go about building their photography library is by hiring influencers. Now, certainly you can hire an agency like mine. We’ll do that for you, but we found more often there’s these social media influencers that specialize specifically in your community. They take great pictures and video. You can double up on that.

One of the more resourceful and creative ways that restaurants go about building their photography library is by hiring influencers.

You can invite a number of influencers in, for say, media-only events. Put out your best dishes. Have them come in and take the pictures for their own feeds, but work a deal with them to also take pictures for you and your brand. We’ve found that if you give them credit when you’re posting it on your website or social, you can often get that work at a discount.

It would cost less than working with a larger agency. There’s certainly places where an agency would be beneficial and you want that additional professional shine. If you want to save some money and get a quick, maybe it’s a day-long event and you get maybe a year’s worth of video and photo content. Plus, you get all of that exposure through the influencer network. That is like checking a bunch of boxes all in one. That’s a great tip. I would encourage restaurant operators to evaluate that.

Thank you for bringing that up. The marketplace has changed in that regard in terms of the influencers and the audience size that average folks can have. It used to be, “Let me get a big city glossy magazine to cover my restaurant.” Its changed. In fact, we published a piece on influencers in the restaurant that had some good ideas as well, so look for that on the site. Any tips on how to find those folks in a local marketplace?

It’s in your best interest to look into your community and understand who’s doing the food coverage on social. It’s relatively easy, having your own Instagram account, which is a necessity for restaurants. Looking at different hashtags in your area and understanding where that coverage is coming from. Not just in your own small community, but region wide as well. Food is such a passionate subject for people. I continue to be surprised by all of the free content that is put out into the world by these influencers. It’s because they love the subject and they want to keep doing it and sharing it with the world.

Have you seen or even at your husband’s restaurant, the usage of staff to create images and videos at all or picking up the phone and filming something for the special of the day? Not getting too overly critical about it and getting it out there.

People value authenticity in social. You don’t want to be too perfect and into producing. There’s a place for that with more high-end restaurants. They might go that route or even chain restaurants. For the most part, if you’re a regional multi-chain independent, having maybe one of your core GMS be responsible for that. Tuning them into the opportunities that they should be looking for on a daily basis.

The benefit of having someone in-house do that is there on the scene all the time. They’ll be able to break their phone out, take some footage, upload it, and do things relatively quickly. That’s just one more thing you’re adding to their list. They may not be tuned into newsworthy or social worthy moments that are happening.

It’s a good idea to have a plan for them and get them to commit to a consistent cadence of X number of posts per week. Get them to understand what are some great topics that are aligned with your brand. If you’re a chef forward brand, you want to have more culinary perspective versus being more of a service forward brand you might have more front of the house.

Publishing Content

I appreciate that. Let’s stick with the cadence there and the amount of content because it can span from once a week recommendation to hit them five times a day on different channels. Do you give any guidelines? Do you have any additional thoughts on how often people should publish to different channels and whatnot?

It depends on your market and how busy and saturated the restaurant scene is. In Cleveland, for example, we have a pretty spectacular culinary scene. We have a ton of independent restaurants here. They’re all posting on a regular basis. If you’re within that, you risk getting lost if you’re only posting say, once a week. We would recommend clients in Cleveland to step that up in post multiple times.

If you’re in a smaller market, it’s a couple of times a week. Stay in current with the goal of staying top of mind when the moment strikes. When that question comes about, where do you want to have dinner? Where do you want to go for dinner? You want to be top of mind and perhaps you are because someone saw your post, versus if you want there. They might go to another brand that’s doing it at a greater frequency. That’s always a challenge to stay top of mind in the mix of everyone else. That is the true reason to invest in social.

Stay top of mind in the mix of everyone else.

My brain defaults to three places. The first three places that I think about when we’re coming home from practice to eat at. If something doesn’t disrupt my pattern to think about something else. I default to the easy three places. When it’s Friday night, we’re going off for a special, I’m thinking like 5 to 7 places but you got to get into their pattern. If somebody hit me a couple of times that week, now they’re in my pattern. They’re in our little texturing of conversation of where we’re going to go. If you’re sitting outside of that conversation, you’re falling off people’s things. I know I can’t keep too much in my head anymore.

I know and one thing I will say to add quickly to that. People put a lot of time and effort in social. It’s obviously a must have for restaurants. In content strategy and storytelling strategy, we call this building on rented land. What’s dangerous about investing in rented land, meaning your landlord is like Instagram or Facebook.

They can change the rules at any time and we’ve seen this over the years where it’s become more pay to play. If you’re boosting your posts, they’ll be visible. If not, you might not be as visible as you want. What we recommend is making sure that your social aggregates into your website may be on your homepage. When someone goes to check out your menu, they’re seeing all of your posts on your homepage because that’s how you maintain visibility for all of that effort you’re putting in social. Otherwise, you post and it disappears. Make sure you’re getting residual visibility from that. It’s an easy thing you can do and it pays off.

It’s a big deal. I’m glad you said that. Something that I was thinking about was very similar. You could build a big audience on Facebook or Instagram or elsewhere, and they can literally change their mind the next day and that audience is gone. The algorithm changes or TikTok might get canceled out of the US. I don’t know. That could happen. If that was your main strategy of attracting users, that may disappear. You need to have your own audience and build your own email list, SMS list and things like that.

Marketing Strategy Playbook

You made a good point, owned media versus stuff. You can control it. You own all those email addresses versus you’re renting space on someone else’s platform or paying for advertisements on the radio or billboards or wherever. Those rules can change. You have something on your site called the Marketing Strategy Playbook. What’s going on there?

As marketers, we have so many options. There’s so many different tactics you can choose. The question is, where do you spend your time and effort? Especially for restaurants, where we’re working with slimmer margins. There’s not hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on marketing. Where do you get the best bang for your buck? Our marketing playbook helps especially smaller businesses orient their marketing dollars by asking real questions about their goals and their audiences to get those wheels turning and guide them into making the right decisions on how to allocate funds and resources.

I want to ask you a follow-up question there. You could talk about a couple of examples. I saw some examples on your site. When you ask them about, “Who’s your audience?” Do they sometimes say, “It’s well,” but they don’t have a good answer. Do you find that?

Yes.

Not to put you on the spot there or throw anyone under the bus, but people don’t do a good enough job identifying who their target or their audience is. I’m sure you guys get to the heart of that so why don’t you stick there for a little bit?

This affects everything from the nature and the personality of your brand to the music you select in your restaurant. I remember going through this with my husband when we built his first restaurant brand. We thought, “Who’s coming in here? What do they want to listen to?” Knowing who your target audience is, it’s so important to cater that experience to them specifically.

Your target audience affects everything from the nature and personality of your brand to the music you select in your restaurant.

What I would recommend to restaurant operators is potentially doing an exercise where you select 2 to 3 audiences. One audience might be, what is the profile of your regulars? That customer or guest profile might be geographically convenient. They have these things in mind when they’re selecting a restaurant. This is how we help them choose our restaurants as their usual place, their neighborhood place to go.

Maybe young families with children because you have a family friendly menu. You have options for children. That could be another persona. Maybe it’s business travelers and you want to get those big expensive accounts. Understanding who these people are and walking through what their motivations are for choosing your restaurant is very important. It helps you make brand and marketing decisions. It also helps you make decisions about your menu in the experience that you provide.

I’m going to stay in the similar realm. I found a quote on your site that stays in the same general area. It says, “We help leaders break through the limitations of perception and determine their brand's real underlying value.” I wonder if you could talk more about that. People have a perception of what they are in the marketplace. It attaches to their brand. What do you think?

This is especially important for established restaurants that struggle to stay relevant where all of these newer modern or more modern restaurants are cropping up around them. You mentioned this email database earlier. This is a great tool not only to promote events or LTOs or whatever it is that you have going on. Also, reaching out to survey your guests database to help you understand their perception of your place.

Where do they find the most value? Is it in your pricing and how your menu is priced? Is it in the menu itself? Is it in the specials? Is it in the great service at the bar with the bartender? Where do they find the most excitement? What makes them come in? One question that we encourage if you’re doing a guest survey is, please tell us the first three words that come to mind when you think of the restaurant. That alone will give you a sense of their general perception. You can determine yourself if you want to build on that or shift that perspective in a different direction.

I appreciate that. A lot of folks are guilty of not talking to their audience enough to get that feedback. I know I am too. I haven’t done a survey to ask for opinions on things in a while, so we can all point our fingers at ourselves as well in that regard. You can get that valuable feedback from the marketplace.

I want to go back to allocation for a second because folks will say, “I don’t have money to advertise. I don’t have money for marketing. How much should I spend? My restaurant does a million dollars in business. Should it be 4% or 5%? Should it be as much? Should I always spend money when I can make money in terms of return on investment? What do you think about it? As you talked about, “Margins are tiny and restaurants. I don’t want to waste money. I want it to be effective.” How do you account for restaurants?

There’s no easy answer for this. What I will say is, if you are a newer restaurant, your marketing budget should be bigger because you have to climb the mountain of awareness within your community. You don’t have to do that all with paid advertising. You can do that in very creative ways with PR and get free coverage. You can do it with that influencer program that I mentioned earlier.

You can sponsor local events, show up, and have a booth at your local farmer’s market. It doesn’t all have to be financial. It can be time, effort, and donation. When my husband was just building his reputation, we often committed to these pro bono events and doing these like sponsored events or fundraisers or whatever.

The more awareness you build in the community, he was much more selective about the fundraisers that he contributed to because he didn’t need the exposure as much. I don’t have an easy answer for you in terms of 8% of your net profit. It’s hard to say. It’s based on how competitive the landscape is and how new your restaurant is. For the most part, I always encourage restaurant owners to be very resourceful. If they have the time and energy to find those freebies that will contribute exposure in the long run. Also, that quick points a PR, broadcast PR, these morning shows.

We get so much play out of these morning shows like going on and doing a little chefs demo with the local morning host. You’ll get a quick hit of traffic that entire week then you can take that segment and post it on your website as well. It’s things like that. It doesn’t cost you anything. All it costs you is the time it takes to get on the show.

As you said, you get that quick hit but that lasts for a while then, for years, you could say, “As seen on blah blah morning shows.” You can use those. Very good advice there that you can get creative. You can do guerrilla marketing. It doesn’t all have to be about spending a big amount on one media platform hoping that it works out. Try a bunch of different things. Especially if you’re a small operator. Dip your toes in a few categories and pull some users from each area, the school donations and the team donations.

There’s so many opportunities to become part of your community and your point is great. When you’re full and busy, you can be more selective about those things but in the beginning, don’t close any doors and so forth. A couple of other notes I have but before I do that. Is there anything we haven’t hit on that you want to hit on more directly, marketing wise or thought wise or umbrella size? There’s a whole other brand of content marketing that you can get into. What do you think?

Storytelling

Earlier in our discussion, you mentioned this concept of storytelling and we can talk about its place in your world of how you share your brand narrative. What I will say in working with clients, some of whom have origin stories and they have these wonderful histories that they want to share with the world. Other restaurants we’ve worked with have strong culinary philosophies that they feel strongly about placing forward in their brand messaging.

What I would say is people often select first on the experience of the restaurant. Am I going to get an excellent meal quickly at a good price? You have a great service experience. You have to hit those marks first. Your reviews are key in that. That is the decision-making process. Is it convenient where I’m located? All of that shallow stuff that people think about.

When you get them in the door, that’s when you have the opportunity to share more stories. Whether it’s the server standing at the table telling the story about the sourcing. Perhaps it’s a little blurb on the menu talking about the family and the Heritage where this menu is inspired by. I believe the best storytelling happens when the guests are already in the door. You can’t expect guests to care about that until they get there and you check those boxes on what it is they’re coming in for to begin with.

The best storytelling happens when the guests are already in the door.

The thing that I was thinking about as you were talking there, the experience as a whole. If you spend money and drive people into your restaurant, the experience and the food stinks then everything is not going to work. You certainly have to be dialed in in all respects. You have to be dialed in your operation side as well.

Your costs have to be in line because if you drive a bunch of traffic but it’s on profitable. That doesn’t work either. It’s a chicken and egg but once you have stuff ready that you’re ready to drive traffic in. That experience in the review. We could do a whole hour just on the review process, I’m sure. We do have some content on our side from the Yelp folks and others. That is a big piece, especially for restaurants. People go there first, Google reviews and Yelp. It is a big deal. Hopefully, you’re paying attention to your reviews, folks.

One more quick note on that because this is an important point to make about the purpose of storytelling. When good stories are told and people believe in them, they are way more likely to spend more money. If you’ve had to elevate your price points for one reason or another, that storytelling component is extra important to help people understand why you’ve made those decisions. You don’t have to tell them, “My cost of labor went up and my supply chain is crazy.” Help them understand the thought and intention that has gone into this experience and they’re likely to pay more and not complain about it.

When good stories are told and people believe in them, they are way more likely to spend more money.

Rebranding

That’s a good point. A question for you, if you want to share any case studies. I did have a question about something you had on your site. If folks ever go through a rebrand, maybe they want to change their content or pivot or change their logo and their colors. That’s a big decision. How do you go about something like that?

It’s a big decision, so expensive and time consuming but it’s important. I have two points about that. The first is you should look at your brand like an asset of the company like you look at your equipment in the kitchen. It depreciates over time. Smart operators are putting money aside to reinvest in their equipment.

I recommend the same approach for the brand. The brand supports the overall marketing budget but it’s a different budget because it doesn’t necessarily result in instant ROI. Your brand investment is not going to drive people in the door tomorrow, but it’s going to keep them coming in the door. That’s my first important point.

The second important point I’d like to make is that you don’t always have to completely overhaul your logo in your interior design of your restaurants. Make those big expensive changes to make a difference and stay relevant. You could change and continue to renovate your menu and innovate with technology that makes service quicker. You can continue to market those updates to people in new and exciting ways to stay relevant.

We do a lot of work with Nestlé Professional. They are very big on helping large-scale restaurant operators continue to renovate their menus for relevancy. The larger chains are doing this all the time. They could be doing it seasonally or a couple times a year. Those are very important considerations as it relates to your brand that may not require, as I said, a big overhaul but certain things you can do within the restaurants to continue to evolve with the times.

Jackie, we’ve covered a lot. I want to go to either parting thoughts or wisdom or a book recommendation or anything in that regard or a resource to point people to. Anything in that realm you can touch on then we’ll wrap up.

Resources

I encourage all of our clients to watch the Simon Sinek TED Talk on Start with Why. His whole methodology is about, “People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.” Especially in the food world, we found if you have a purpose in the why behind your story. That ultimately keeps people coming in the door for much longer.

It creates loyalty and increases your guest’s lifetime value in many different ways. That would be number one. That book Unreasonable Hospitality, I’m sure you’re familiar with it. I have given that as a gift to many of my clients because it not only applies to the restaurant world, but great service across the board. I found that to be my favorite read.

Good stuff. I appreciate those too. We were remising not doing it directly. I have it in my closing notes, but hit people with your website or any social channels you’d like to send them to.

We’re at MuseHeadquarters.com. Again, we work with typically multi-chain restaurants and also bigger food manufacturers as well these days. You can find us on Instagram at @MuseHeadquarters and @JackieBebenroth on LinkedIn.

That was Jackie Bebenroth, Principal at Muse. You can find them at MuseHeadquarters.com for more great restaurant marketing, service people, and tech tips. Stay tuned to us. In the meantime, do us a favor. Give us a like or subscribe or review. That helps us get the show out. With that being said, we’ll sign off. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Jackie.

Thank you, Jaime.

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