Restaurant Marketing: How Shake Shack's new marketing plan added over $334 million to their revenue
In a recent interview, burger chain Shake Shack's Edwin Bragg shared how they turned their marketing on it's head with amazing results. Here are the big changes they made...
- They stopped advertising in newspapers and magazines because they found that they can easily eat up your marketing budget with very low returns.
- They bring new customers in with email marketing. By getting existing diners to join their email list and encouraging new customers to join too, they have a database that they contact regularly to tell about their great restaurants and great meals. They use lots of great food images in the emails as well as clear calls to action to get their customers to eat with them.
- They realised how important dogs are to many of their customers and so they introduced a menu for dogs alongside the normal menu for humans. This has gained them an enormous amount of goodwill from dog owners as well as lots of free publicity on social media from their happy dog owning customers.
- They feature their customers (and their dogs) on Instagram. Photos of dogs enjoying the dog meals get a huge number of likes. And the owners post a lot of their own photos of their dogs enjoying the meals too. All free advertising for the restaurant.
- They think local even though they are an international chain. Each restaurant has some unique photos, artwork or memorabilia that relates to their own city and their own community. This helps to create lots of word of mouth marketing for them.
- They get involved in the local community by helping local charity partners and running a free community fitness programme.
If looking at restaurant marketing in a different way can make such a massive difference to Shake Shack, what could it do for your restaurant?