Kulture Konnect Blog

Good news! Your restaurant is everyone's favorite place to stop by and enjoy dinner every Saturday night. The bad news? This has resulted in longer wait times for guests.

Though wait times are a factor that can be out of your control, there are different ways you can try out to reduce wait times for your guests. Let's go through 5 ideas you'll want to consider.

Online Food Ordering is a Trend

Your customers will no longer have to wait for a seat. Instead, customers will be able to stay in the comfort of their own home. For this reason, more restaurants are turning to mobile food delivery services for help, not to mention, it's growing quickly.

A Statista survey showed 20 percent of its participants claim to use a food delivery service at least one time every week. Numbers also show that within one year, the food delivery service went from contributing 30 billion dollars to the overall sales of the restaurant industry to an increased amount of 206 billion dollars (Statista). What a difference a year can make.

There was one point several years ago the Kulture Konnect Blog went dark for a few months. This is a classic example of "Do as I say and not as I do!"... Please, don't ever let your blog go dark for three long months as we have done. Of course, there are a bazillion reasons why we put a tragic halt to our content marketing machine like getting too busy to manage the content, prioritizing our client work over our own marketing, scrambling to get everything done before the holidays, etc. As they say though, hindsight is 20/20 and looking back today, those excuses seem to be small potatoes. After looking at our website analytics (comparing/contrasting, before and after), we learned some lessons the hard way and we want to share these lessons with all of you in the hopes of inspiring you to keep chugging along the content marketing train. Here is what we noticed when looking at our metrics over our dark period.

You already own a restaurant and it turned out to be a success. Your next goal is to expand and you're considering different locations. Do you want to expand locally? Or do you want to take it up a notch and open in a different state? And if so, which locations should you consider? New studies show there are 10 U.S. cities you'll want to explore. Let's take a look.

photo courtesy of Arlene Garcia

Look around right now.  

Just stop and take a look at your desk or your chair or the cup you are drinking out of.  Someone designed that; someone with a focused desire to reach out to you through a structured idea.  They made that thing you are looking at right now.  Does it inspire you or make you feel flat?  Does it brighten your day or darken it? Have you really thought about why you chose that dress or those glasses or that phone? 

Designers have their prints on everything we see and touch.

With social media being utilized as a marketing tool to build and grow brands, engage with consumers and reach a specific target audience, you want to be able to measure and review your monthly analytics effectively. Each platform whether it might be Facebook, Instagram or Twitter includes an analytics page designed to help you understand the behavior of your fans and consumers.  Depending upon the results from your analytics page, you should be able to glean from your data in order to make better marketing decisions. The problem is with an overwhelming amount of social media analytic data to process, it is fairly easy to leave out the most vital metrics and determine which metrics really matter. We can help.

We designed a Social Media Reporting Toolkit for business owners and professionals that will help you focus on the most important metrics and setting the right goals. In result, proving ROI. 

Your social media metrics have been around as long as you can remember but even with that said, so many restaurateurs have never really mastered what to do with their monthly data and how to get the most out of it. Which is why Kulture Konnect's co-founder, Jorge Pacheco, offered a free webinar this past Tuesday titled, "Restaurants 101: How to Analyze Your Social Media Metrics Like a Marketing Pro," to share with restaurateurs the tools to understand and utilize their social media metrics like a marketing pro.

Each month, our team prepares a social media report for our social media clients and at some point we asked ourselves, as much as we prepare and meet with clients to go over numbers, do restaurant owners truly understand what these numbers mean?

Kulture Konnect wants to help restaurants utilize their social media marketing to it's full potential. This webinar will give restaurant owners a clear understanding of how to read monthly social media metrics, teach them which metrics matter the most, why they matter, and how they can make the most of these metrics proving ROI.

Facebook and Instagram have proved to be two very effective platforms when it comes down to marketing brands, but what about LinkedIn? For years, LinkedIn has been known to be a wonderful community for entrepreneurs, professionals and a variety of businesses to connect. Today, the professional social network has become so much more. Over 500 million people are said to have a LinkedIn profile and are actively using it daily to locate jobs, network with consumers and businesses. Now, businesses and professionals are using LinkedIn to build relationships by marketing themselves as well as their companies... but how? There are several ways to market your business on LinkedIn. Let's begin.

The internet took the world by storm and advanced digital technology to a whole new level. It provided us new ways to transact and do business. E-commerce was born, and people could buy and sell across the world from their computers.

We found a different way to interact and stay connected. Social media sites played a great part in all that. Almost everyone is on social media nowadays for one reason or another.

As you must have noticed, wherever people congregate physically or virtually, there is a potential for business. The social media players apparently know this, and use it to their advantage.

This gave rise to what is now officially tagged as social commerce. To put it simply, social commerce is a cross between social media and ecommerce. And the name rightly did justice to the merger.

Today, we’re serving up fresh takes on three risks to avoid – and three risks to embrace – when running your company’s social media account. Employees take note: where and what you choose to share on social media channels can either work in your favor, or ruin your business’s reputation. Not all risks are created equal, and for restaurants, social media posts can turn sour faster than milk if not managed correctly.

First, let’s start with some of social media best practices including social media risks for your company and employees to avoid.

We live in a world where simplicity reigns, where we are constantly attempting to update the outdated and push the envelope to begin that next big trend. With technology and the way we receive information, brand design is constantly evolving to take advantage of the newest technology available. In recent years, you have watched your favorite companies such as Pepsi, Stub Hub, Pizza Hut and more make changes to their logo design bringing them up to the next level. This year, back in April, American Express did just that with the help from Pentagram partner, Abbott Miller. At first glance, the American Express logo redesign is not necessarily noticeable. This is because Pentagram made the change so subtle that it's almost hard to tell.

Very quickly, before we go into full force on the logo redesign, let's get into Pentagram and Abbot Miller. Pentagram is the world's largest independently-owned design studio known for their good designs. Their works range from product packaging to exhibitions and installations, and everything in between when it comes to print and web. Built up of 20 partners ranging from London, Berlin, New York and Texas, these wonderful artists are all practicing designers. Abbott Miller, who has been a partner of Pentagram since June 1999, pioneered the concept "designer as author" according to his bio, "undertaking projects in which content and form are developed in a symbiotic relationship." Miller is also a graphic design teacher at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.