Secret Sauce - The Restaurant Marketing Podcast · James Eling |Restaurant Marketing, Strategy and Tactics

169 - 7 most common Restaurant Marketing mistakes (Take 2!)

July 28, 2023·31 min·5 clips

Episode 169 revisits older restaurant marketing lessons and the changes James is seeing in the market now. He uses the seven common restaurant marketing mistakes to separate owners stuck working 70-hour weeks from operators who are building busier, more profitable restaurants. The point lands quickly. A restaurant can have great food, a strong story, good people, and working processes, and still be the best place almost nobody has heard of. The missing piece is visibility. James keeps dragging the idea back to owner-level questions. Who knows the restaurant exists? Why do they come back? Does the money being spent create regulars, or just noise? His coffee story makes that feel practical. He talks about a place where the people remember his order, even when he walks in with his wife. Convenience helps, but the personal recognition is what turns a coffee stop into a habit. He likes the coffee, thinks it is the best in the local area for his taste, and can see why other customers would become regulars too. Then Facebook gets blunt. If a restaurant spends a hundred dollars a month and only a few one-time visitors become regulars, the campaign can still pay for itself. But running a page is not the same thing as advertising. James calls Facebook pay-to-play, then points to restaurants spending five hundred or a thousand dollars a month on page management while putting no ad budget behind the posts. That is the expensive miss. The page may look active and the content may be there, but the market barely sees it. The episode stays grounded in operator math. This is less about social media theory and more about whether marketing brings enough people back often enough to lift revenue, profits, or free up the owner's time. The close turns commercial, with James offering an obligation-free online presence audit for restaurant marketing ideas, including options for operators with no budget. He also points listeners toward Restolo and SEO Plus for bookings, customer details, and marketing plans.

As heard by us

James argues that restaurant marketing only works when visibility turns into steady customers.

James makes a plainspoken case that restaurant marketing falls short when owners pay for activity without enough distribution behind it. The point lands because it stays tied to operator math: local fit, ad spend, and the difference between a Facebook page that looks busy and a…

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You're paying to be busy, not to be found.

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