How One Restaurant Used its Blog and Twitter to Increase Sales

I want to say up front that this story is an oldie but a goodie and shows some of the early success that restaurants were able to have utilizing social media marketing to achieve their goals. Having said that, let’s turn back the clock to the fall of 2008 when our last Presidential election was in full swing.

West Cafe of Portland, OR faced a very difficult proposition in the early autumn of 2008. Operating as a small upscale neighborhood restaurant that had only been open a few years they had the added downside of being located near Portland State University where people tended to be more price conscious. The owners knew they needed to do something fast if they wanted to stay afloat in this economic downturn. They watched as other restaurants in higher traffic areas start to cutback or close altogether, so what chance did they have?

The traditional advertising that they had tried in the past had given mixed to bad results so they had to look elsewhere. How about Internet marketing? That road didn’t seem to promising either, their website was a single page that received at best 5 to ten hits a day; no real search ranking there. As they dug a bit deeper into the analytics they discovered that most of the traffic came from repeat customers who where just looking for operating hours or a phone number. They also wanted to expand their jazz nights from twice a month to four times a month to maintain consistency but the numbers just didn’t warrant it.

With little money and time the thought of rebuilding the existing website wasn’t really an option. Instead they chose to create the West Cafe Blog and implement a social media campaign to drive people to their door. The beauty of building the blog on the Wordpress platform was that it was inexpensive to build and had easy content management as well as built in search engine optimization tools. The blog included various categories to support their offerings and draw in customers. They provided weekly event reminders, drink specials, and the monthly jazz calendar. Using key-word rich text they were able to start gaining search engine ranking and the site traffic started to gradually flow.

But the blog by itself would never have driven enough traffic in the time frame that they had available. What next? Can you say Twitter? Fortunately for West Cafe the city of Portland is continually rated in the top 5 U.S. cities for Twitter usage so it made perfect sense to use this social media platform. They started by offering the city’s first ever Twitter generated restaurant coupon that offered a free wine, beer or dessert with the purchase of an entree. They reached out to key local tweeters and targeted jazz fans to create a word of mouth buzz for the establishment. Many of the people they were reaching didn’t even know the restaurant existed before they were contacted via Twitter.

It was now time to get really creative and since the Presidential election was in full swing with dire economic predictions being made, they decided to give that a positive spin. They launched a five point plan to help locals deal with the economic downturn:  1) Daily Dow Drink deals, 2) “Let them eat cake” mini cupcake give away, 3) $10 Bail-Out Menu, 4) A Bootleg Bash, and 5) an Election night extravaganza. The most effective of this five point plan was the Daily Dow Drink deal. Each day they created a drink special based upon how much the Dow went up or down. Accordingly a blog post was made about the drink special and it was tweeted out to all potential customers that afternoon. Within a few short weeks West Cafe was ranking in the top fifteen in Google search results for Portland Happy Hour.

West Cafe also used their blog and Twitter account to promote various jazz events which brought in enthusiasts that would otherwise not have dined at their restaurant. They surged to the top ten in Google search results for Portland Jazz Bars. This enabled them to offer jazz every Saturday as opposed to twice a month.

Lets sum up the results:

• Website traffic increased 500% from September to March
• Page views increased 300% from September to March
• Traffic from search engines increased from 42% to 70%
• Time on the site increased by 25%
• The number of pages indexed in the search engines increased from 27 to over 100.
• The campaign received visibility in Google, MSN and Yahoo for over 30 targeted, non-branded keywords.
• The campaign achieved rankings within the top 10 search results in Google for these key terms: Portland’s best dessert, Portland Jazz Club, Portland Jazz Bars, Downtown Portland Happy Hour, Portland Oregon Cafe, Portland OR Cafe.

The following numbers represent the percentage increase in sales revenues by month:

• September – 100%
• October – 12% increase
• November – 32% increase
• December – 26% increase
• January – 25% increase
• February – 34% increase
• March – 20% increase

West Cafe also received quite a bit of unsolicited press coverage due to the success of the social media marketing campaign. The local TV stations and print publications began to run stories telling the West Cafe story. Imagine what they could have achieved if the had the likes of Foursquare or Gowalla at their disposal?

photo credit: Rodrigo Galindez

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