Multi-Unit Franchisee Magazine Issue IV, 2012 | Page 19

The Greatest Opportunity
for Restaurants Today
“Give the customer what they want - Your Menu….Online”

F

oodservice operators understand the importance of the
first part of this statement, and
have done a great job creating
their dining experience – from restaurant design, color scheme, menus,
beverages, and pricing – to match
their customers’ expectations. But
what do potential customers want to
know BEFORE they walk into your
restaurant, and where are they finding the information they need? The
answer - the number one item people
look for when making a dining decision is your menu, and the number
one place they’re looking for that
menu is online.
Current statistics show that 73%
of online searches are related to local
content, and that restaurants are the
most searched type of local business.
Furthermore, when making a dining
decision, your restaurant’s menu is
more of a priority to these consumers than your location, reviews, ratings and even coupons. Over the past
3 years, domestic searches on Google
that contained the word “menu” have
more than doubled as consumers increasingly make their dining decisions
online. That is why it’s imperative that
every brand migrate this information as
broadly as they can to the digital world.
Clearly, the way diners make decisions
has changed over the last decade. The
question is - has your system has kept
up with these changes to take advantage of these massive number of local
food-related Internet searches?
While most brands have a website,

a presence on Facebook, and possibly
good engagement through Twitter,
these social media tools are only used
by customers who already know your
brand. Your potential customers visit
search engines, city guides, travel sites,
and review sites to find NEW venues,
and they increasingly use itemized
search to find restaurants that serve
the one dish they’re craving at any
given moment.
So if the key influencer in the dining
equation is your menu, and millions
of potential customers in major markets are searching for this information
online, why haven’t most brands created a huge digital footprint that also
allows for itemized search? Here are
a few reasons:
n It is virtually impossible to keep
track of the ever-expanding universe of applications and platforms where you need to post
your current menu
n Ensuring that your menu, pricing, and specials stay current
and accurate poses an equally
daunting task
n Optimizing your menu for mobile apps is not as easy as it looks
(just ask Facebook)
n Making sure that your updates
are simultaneously updated (to
avoid online confusion) takes
technical skills that are probably
not available in-house
Faced with these challenges, most
brands limit their digital presence
to the above mentioned “inclusive”
channels – their website, Facebook,

and Twitter – and thus miss out on
reaching all the potential consumers
searching the Web who are not already
familiar with their brand or their current menu/pricing/specials.
About two years ago, SinglePlatform endeavored to fill this vacuum.
The company has created a simple,
efficient, and cost-effective platform
for foodservice operators to update
their menus/pricing/specials once, and
broadcast this information to the widest net available on the Web. Through
exclusive publishing arrangements
with most of the Tier 1 content distributors on the web (like YellowPages.
com, foursquare, and Urbanspoon to
name just a few), SinglePlatform is
able to leverage its prop ɥ