Alternative Strategies to Growing your Digital Sales w/ James Buell from World of Beer Bar & Kitchen

This special edition of The Digital Restaurant podcast features James Buell COO of World of Beer Bar & Kitchen, discussing the innovative approaches to digital customer acquisition. The conversation revolves around how the integration of technology, particularly through partnerships with companies like Nift, plays a crucial role in driving customer engagement and loyalty.

James shares his journey from a marketer to COO, emphasizing the value of mentorship and seizing opportunities within smaller, nimble teams. World of Beer's focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences, both in-house and digitally, through their open floor plans, exceptional beer and food offerings, and customer-centric operations, is highlighted as a key differentiator in the competitive restaurant landscape.

The use of digital tools, such as the World of Beer app, enhances customer engagement by offering personalized recommendations and encouraging exploration within the beer community. The discussion also delves into event marketing and the strategic pivot to grassroots approaches, effectively bridging the gap between digital presence and physical experiences.
 
Nift emerges as a pivotal partner in acquiring net new customers by leveraging geo-targeting to introduce World of Beer to potential patrons who have yet to experience their offerings. James underscores the importance of the first visit, facilitated by Nift's unique approach to customer acquisition, which not only introduces new customers to World of Beer but also significantly impacts average check sizes compared to traditional marketing methods.

The conversation with Nift also covers the mechanics of their model, emphasizing the symbiotic relationship between digital initiatives and physical customer experiences. Nift's ability to generate new customer visits without cannibalizing existing clientele and its measurable impact on business metrics such as average check sizes and customer acquisition costs underscores its value as a digital marketing tool.

James' narrative reflects a comprehensive digital strategy that embraces technology, personalized customer engagement, and partnerships to enhance the dining experience and business growth. His insights offer valuable lessons on the dynamic interplay between digital innovation and operational excellence in the restaurant industry.

Learn more about Nift at www.gonift.com

Learn more about World of Beer at www.WOBfranchising.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I feel like the restaurant industry has been talking so much about loyalty and remarketing and bringing people back and hugely important. I think it's way easier to bring someone back than to find someone new. Generally, this sounds like a program that totally different, in that it helps restaurants find someone specifically who is totally new, who then later you get the opportunity to wow them when they come in and then to remarket to them and all those things, but, as you said, to get them into the four walls and have that great experience.

Speaker 2: 0:29

Yeah, there's folks out there and I'm not knocking them in, and in certain markets we do it who are still doing the tree chop campaign top of your building, five miles out radius. Let's send out direct mail and let's put one, two, three offers and let's see what happens. And that's like how I view an opportunity. Like that is let's see what happens, right, it could be good, could be bad, could be somewhere in between, but the cost outlay, it's out there, right? So if it costs you $6,500 to send out X number of direct mail pieces, that's a sunk cost, that's done. Then you have the redemption cost, right? So what are the offers you're giving? What is that off of your food costs? How's it hitting your comps and promo line et cetera? That's an additional cost and that's the unknown right, that's the unknown cost. And then you're hoping that those folks come in and if, let's say, you give them a $10 off 20 voucher, you're hoping that if you want the ticket to be $42 and they're giving you 32 hard cash, you don't know.

Speaker 2: 1:24

As folks got away from more traditional avenues like that into the digital world, there always seems to be the next thing that says oh, we're going to get you this return on your spend.

Speaker 2: 1:34

What I would say with NIFT is, again, I can track it in real time. I've got weekly reporting by location that's doing this. It says here's how many folks picked you Out. Of those folks here's who came in, I can validate against our POS and then I know how much they're spending. I know, when those folks opt in, how much they're spending, what it looks like in their basket size. I can run and validate those users against our loyalty members and then see who opted in Because, again, if we're doing our job right, when these NIF users come in, they're not part of the NIF pool anymore. Now NIF's going out and finding new she's and he's to come in and enjoy a world of beer and we can get them into our funnel that you so eloquently touched on before, meredith, where, again, where I'm doing the digital experience and just cycling those folks through it and they're becoming our real life UGCs, if you will.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Can we go back to this whole TripAdvisor thing? Because?

Speaker 1: 2:25

I think for people who don't know what this is they're like.

Speaker 1: 2:27

How did TripAdvisor get involved?

Speaker 1: 2:29

I'm confused.

Speaker 1: 2:30

I know I felt that way when we first started talking about it, and I think it's fair to describe NIFT almost as like a marketplace where they are bringing value to someone like TripAdvisor or an e-commerce brand or lots of different folks out there primarily internet-oriented companies that, for whatever reason, want to give a gift to their users.

Speaker 1: 2:53

Right, whether it's, in the case of Tripprovisor, for leaving a review, maybe it's for being a super loyal customer, whatever their motivation is, they want to give a gift and in order to do that, nift provides them with lots of different choices of different types of gifts that they can give, and you, as World of Beer, have opted into becoming one of those gifts, and so, in that way, it's almost like World of Beer is getting access to the TripAdvisor consumer, but only those TripAdvisor consumers who say, oh, of this list of gifts, I'm really interested in the world of beer, and so, in a way, they're opting in and signaling to you I am an interested type of consumer where your brand makes sense to me. I'm going to tell you that by choosing your brand. Is that a fair description?

Speaker 2: 3:41

Honestly, you hit the nail on the head. Here's what it is.

Speaker 1: 3:43

I like to turn everything into math because I'm a finance person, and so what I'm trying to figure out is who pays for what in this whole chain. So the consumer never really pays anything, aside from when they redeem. If they redeem for more than the value of the vouchers, you're going to end up paying a whole bunch and you're paying as World of Beer, as gift, that's being given whatever discount that you choose to offer, and maybe a small fee to access that consumer, and then is TripAdvisor paying. That's what I'm trying to do here. I'm just trying to turn this all into math.

Speaker 2: 4:15

I can't speak for the TripAdvisor side of the business equation. I'm sure there's a NIF person who can clue us into that side a NIF person who can clue us into that side but I don't know if that's just something that they're utilizing the sheer size of their database or if it is something that TripAdvisor is paying a fee to have as a surprise. And delight.

Speaker 3: 4:32

The thing that's really interesting to me is that it seems a win-win-win James across the board right? Because as far as I'm concerned, this seems to be like a very easy way for you to have a measurable approach to be able to bring customers that aren't currently with you. When someone's getting something from DoorDash today, they're paying the 20, 25% fee every time, regardless of whether they've come to you before or not. This time, because of that ability to extract current customers out of that, it's making sure you're targeting customers that have otherwise perhaps not visited world of beer before. But there must be a catch it. How easy is it for you to be able to get your restaurant working with niff? One of the big challenges we run up against when we speak to technology companies is apis, integrations and all that kind of thing how fast was it?

Speaker 2: 5:15

it's, it's really fast, honestly. There's an onboarding uh process that it's really not much heavy lifting. It's getting the pos key in and then more or less less putting together a one cheater to make sure your staff understands when this guest comes in, when these customers come in. This is the process For us. It's getting a manager's, key manager, swipe to come in to make sure they understand. A manager's taking care of the transaction, manager's doing the table visit, manager's doing that again, pleasing every customer type approach that we have. There's not a ton that we need to do in terms of APIs or anything. It's as simple as showing a phone us typing in the POS. The customer data is shared with us. We're able to try to get them into an onboarding process within our loyalty. We're able to speak to them outside of that, even if they opt not to be part of a loyalty program.

Speaker 1: 6:03

So talk a little bit about that. Once you have the data, what do you do with it? I think restaurants so often are told oh, the data is so important, don't let your data go to the third parties, you need to have the data. But once you get the data, what do you do with it? What do you do with the NIF data once you receive it?

Speaker 2: 6:18

So, again going back to our loyalty program, for us a large part of what we do is funneled through our WAB rewards loyalty, so we try to get them to be a rewards member. That's step one. So there is an onboarding, if you will, nurturing campaign to do that. If it's folks like in the one scenario I mentioned, who chose us but didn't utilize us within the window, there's a separate kind of nurturing campaign to incentivize those folks to come in and maybe get a second bite at the apple to try WAP Barn Kitchen. We haven't, candidly, gotten to that lookalike type scenario yet. I think we're doing a lot of that within our own loyalty subset of users, but ultimately, as we get more of these folks to transition over to our loyalty program, we're able to add them to that lookalike type approach.

Speaker 3: 7:05

Got it. Let's go back in for a moment and talk about the means of measurement on this, James, because there are so many different things you could be doing to propel the brand to try and acquire additional customers. Is it the simplicity of how you're measuring NIFT? That's really something that stands out for you and just take us through that approach.

Speaker 2: 7:28

Well, again, we're not reservation-based. Know a lot of folks I have friends that are melting pot right and so melting pot it's a special occasion type restaurant and they want to drive clicks to make a reservation and that's that makes them feel good, right. They know the spend they put digitally if they got a reservation out of it. They quantify that for a certain value and it works. We're not built like that as a concept. For us it's more about how are we comping right From a traffic standpoint, how are we comping from a sales standpoint? But, most importantly to me, how are we comping from an average check standpoint? Because anytime you add a discount into the equation, you don't have to be a UCF graduate to think that adding a negative you're going to bring home a smaller average check, which again is going to hurt your total sales, et cetera. So having it hit or exceed our normal average check wasn't something I expected. We're comping higher than our normal average check, which is it's a nice surprise. So that is one major metric for me that constantly monitor. Brian Saminas and Preston, with NIF, will constantly bring that top of mind to make sure I understand. That's important. The second is, if you go back to that direct mail ideas. That's 6,500. You write that check, you send it and you just say your Hail Marys and your rosaries and you hope that it works. This, you can do it in a much more palatable pace, right? What's the quickest way to eat an elephant? One piece at a time? You can go market by market. You can onboard franchisees.

Speaker 2: 8:47

We have a newer market in Nashville that our brand awareness, candidly, isn't as high as it is here in Tampa. Our goal there wasn't necessarily to try to get folks to come in against the competitors, just trying to get folks to understand who we are. Wow, we're putting World of Beer Bar and Kitchen in front of you. Wouldn't have thought that the place has World of Beer on the side of the building, has this amazing Cobb salad that's stacked, or has these Cali bowls that are healthy and look quite delightful from a picture and visual. So again, that to me is it's a smarter way to spend, from an ad perspective, money versus, again, even within a Google PMAX campaign.

Speaker 2: 9:25

I can see the traffic. Again, I'm not trying to downplay my wits. If my mom ever watches this, she's going to be like he had a very high IQ, but I'm smart enough to know numbers and figures and graphs and whatnot, but again, end of the day, I just strip it back and look at traffic. Is it impacting the traffic? Is it impacting our sales? If that's not happening, and you've got these hockey stick moves on Google, something is wrong. Right, in my estimation, either the people came in and were just not treated with the experience that I'm hoping that we're delivering from an operational standpoint, or numbers are a little off and I've got to understand why.

Speaker 3: 10:01

Yeah, meredith, you always say the phrase about marketing's role is to bring the customers in and ops is to keep them coming back. And it seems to resonate that you can have as good a marketing campaign as you'd like, but you still want to create that great experience. I guess the whole piece around measurement, james, is especially important given the fact you're a franchise organization, so you don't just have to convince you and your peers about the efficacy of these approaches, but also your franchisees. So I'm curious how have the franchisees reacted to things like NIFT?

Speaker 2: 10:29

So we have one franchise partner in right now. It's our Owings Mills Maryland location. Really bright, A young man, Charles Joins, who is our general manager there. Again, our franchisee at Beak. I hope he likes it. He's opening another location early next year in Annapolis, but for me I'm a proof is in the pudding kind of guy.

Speaker 2: 10:47

I like to show people something that it works before saying, hey, this is part of your new platform. That happens one of two ways. It's either World of Beer as a franchise, spending money on their behalf to try something, or World of Beer helps opt them in early stages and says, hey, you get to be part of the growth of this, you get to help us shape this. You get to tell us are the offers too rich, not rich enough? Timelines too tight, not tight enough? Early on in my time here, the first conference we had, I took our marketing royalties and I said everybody gets their money back. So for three months everybody's going to get their money back that you paid in and we're all going to spend it in your market. And the reason I did that was I wanted to understand who was a willing marketer within each of these locations and what everyone's equation to reach success was. We're not going to be broadcasting during March Madness. We're not going to have 75 commercials during the LSU-Iowa women's Elite Eight game. That's not who we are. But we are going to do things that are going to differentiate our brand and our experience, and I needed to understand who felt they were getting the bang for their buck and who just needed further education as to why we were doing things we were doing. So doing that early on in my time here I think helped lay a foundation for understanding who these folks are who want to play ball and understanding who these folks are who might just need a one-to-one conversation about why we're doing things the way we're doing them.

Speaker 2: 12:13

My six years here I've had nothing but great experiences with our franchise community. We've got a lot of great businessmen and women out there who just all have the same goal, and the goal is they want to be profitable, they want to have fun, they want to feel rewarded at the end of the day and they want folks and partners who are going to help them on that path. So I see myself as a steward to those franchisees out there and helping them create that business for themselves, and I see folks like NIFT as a partner on the way. A gentleman that Brian and I both worked with at Hard Rock, John Galloway, very early on, a mentor of mine, instilled in me that vendors, it's all partners. Everybody's a partner.

Speaker 2: 12:51

Right, You've got partners in your business. You've got people that want to help grow your business because they're going to stay around. You're going to value them more than somebody who's making a transactional experience and it's going to be something that when times are good, you're celebrating with them. When times are bad, they're rallying around you and helping understand how they can make times good again. Meredith, sum that up I was like 45 minutes away from talking.

Speaker 1: 13:14

Good luck to me, sir. We talked a little bit about how folks get in touch with World of Beer if they're interested in franchising. It's been going along that ticker on the bottom, but I think it'd be good for you to say it out loud.

Speaker 2: 13:27

Yeah, so if folks can go to Wob, W-O-B, franchisingcom, that's how you can express your interest to be a franchisee. Some point early on in the process you'll get to speak to me. So I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. I'll let you be the judge. And if you just want to go from a consumer standpoint and see where the nearest location would be, it is worldofbeercom. That's just our footprint. You can see what we have from an offering standpoint, where we're situated. All that good stuff.

Speaker 2: 13:54

I think there's a picture of me on there too.

Speaker 1: 13:57

Sounds amazing.

Speaker 1: 13:58

I hope that Carl and I get to try it soon.

Speaker 1: 14:00

I also want to talk about how to get in touch with NIFT, because we've been talking about them quite a bit here, and first I want to tell a story that I heard from them, because I think in the restaurant industry there's so many startups and restaurants sometimes have the question of do I actually need this thing the startup is trying to convince me of and secondly, are they going to be around next year?

Speaker 1: 14:22

What I learned about NIFT today was not only are they going to be around next year, they've been around for nine years and they started in restaurants, and the reason restaurants haven't really heard of them is because during the pandemic, they ended up working not in the local economy, as they originally thought they would, but much broader, with much bigger companies, and it's only recently that they've come back to restaurants. You are, james, an early customer with them in the restaurant industry, and I just thought that was really cool that they're coming full circle to their roots here. As a result, we've got NIFT also wants to say thank you for listening. Because of that, they're offering two months free on the platform to any restaurant who's interested in talking with them, and you can get in touch with them by visiting goniftcom slash restaurant.

Speaker 3: 15:16

Well, james, you know, I have to say I think it's fantastic to be able to have some time talking with you today. Really appreciate you sharing your story. It sounds like it's a fantastic concept. We'll have to come and visit you over in florida and have maybe not a blue moon or a prony, but whatever your favorite beer of choice is, I'm sure that you'll share it with me privately when we're not recording.

Speaker 2: 15:35

But well, my favorite beers are proprietary beer, secret llama.

Speaker 3: 15:39

I should have said that I have one last question for you, though, and that is how do you get to the top of the leaderboard?

Speaker 2: 15:46

You drink responsibly a lot, so it's based on style and type. You've got to try a lot of beers from a lot of places that you can't pronounce to get to the top of the leaderboard, but Dennis and Mary are probably always going to be one step ahead, so I don't know if you're going to top them.

Speaker 3: 16:02

Well, I'm sure those out there that haven't heard of you will hopefully give you a visit sometime soon. Really appreciate you sharing your time with us today. Thank you for sharing us your experience of using NIFT. It sounds like it has a very appropriate name. It sounds very nifty Is that a word that an Englishman comes up with an American? But it sounds very nifty if you ask me. But thank you for that, james. I'm looking forward to keeping in touch and, for those folks that want to get in touch with you, what's the best way of reaching out to you?

Speaker 2: 16:27

Feel free to email me. It's just my name. You see there on the screen jamesbuell at wobfranchisingcom. Love to hear from you If you've got any questions. If you just want to comment on I don't know brow lines, whatever strikes your fancy, I'd happy to put you in touch with him and get that process started. Great stuff. Thanks for your time today. Thank you.