As a restaurant owner, you want your business to branch out as fast as possible! Thanks to these services, thousands of restaurants and businesses have gained repeat customers and rapid success. If you’re not involved with one of these websites for your business, you haven’t even seen the possibilities of what is yet to come. Investing in one of these affordable or completely free online tools is a great start to becoming a successful and well known restaurant!

1. Seamless

Customers can uniquely search for a specific food craving. You can also make exclusive offers on their website to draw more attention to your restaurant. Having published over 40,000 menus completely free of charge, Seamless is a trusted website only asking for 12-18% of each transaction made through their website. When someone orders from your restaurant, their recent order will be saved in their history. If they enjoyed your food, chances are you’ll have a repeat customer.

2. Delivery.com

Charging a low 7-12% per transaction, this might be the tool for your business to grow. They even donate 25% of their commissions to charity! Customers get reward points each time they order, giving them good incentive to use this tool again and order from your restaurant repeatedly. With your own delivery driver,  this will definitely draw attention to your business and it’s absolutely free to be listed on their website.

3. Yelp!

Yelp puts together customer’s food photos and reviews, so people looking to order something can see how your food looks and how everyone else like it. Half of all 18-34 year olds look at restaurant reviews to decide on where they will order from. Start building reviews on yelp and grow your business with new and repeat customers. Making a business account is free of charge, and they will publish a link to your restaurant’s website as well.

4. Locu – Get Found Online

Design your menu, easily update daily specials, price changes and anything you need to add whenever you want! This website is a one stop shop, anything you edit using this platform will also be updated in your social media account, restaurant website and mobile app. The website publishes your restaurant’s information on websites like Google, Yelp and FourSquare. Always a low monthly fee, prices varying on your needs.

5. Must Have Menus

Does your menu change often? This website offers over 3,000 menu templates. Build your menu, update it when you want! Pricing plans start at only $15/month.

What tools & strategies are you using to grow your business online?

Where have you found the most success?

Leave your questions & comments in the box below.

Imperial Advance is sponsoring it’s first ever Warrior Dash for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital on Saturday May 21^st 2016.

Imperial Advance is providing the opportunity to sponsor our employees in our first ever Warrior Dash for charity. The Imperial Advance team is open to anyone that wishes to help raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital through competing in the Warrior Dash to be held in New York City.

Use the buttons below to donate directly to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital on behalf of the Imperial Advance Warrior team or to get the details for the 2016 NYC Warrior Dash.

 

Donate/Join the Imperial TeamWarrior Dash NYC 2016 Details

 

When you are a small business owner, time is the last thing you have to spare. To set yourself up for success, focus on staying organized and maximizing your productivity. Lots of apps promise to turn you into a commerce powered superhero, but navigating your app store can be a bit like trekking through the jungle. Here are our 5 favorite apps that every business owner can take advantage of.

(Click on the app names to get more info, signup, or download the apps listed here)

1. SLACK

We are putting our best foot forward with this app, as it’s the best one of this list. Slack is ‘team communication for the 21^st century’. Integrate all the tools you use online to get all your notifications, have access to all your files, emails, and share access with your employees & teammates across all your devices in one place. Did we mention you can search all your content (even within documents) and your chat logs? This app will elevate your management to a new level of organization, and empower your team to collaborate more fluidly. Their free subscription will suffice for smaller teams, but they do offer paid memberships to support large teams.

2. GOOGLE APPS/DRIVE

Google apps offers one of the best alternatives to the Microsoft Office product suite. A free membership gives you 15GB of storage which you can upgrade for a small fee. If you haven’t already checked this suite of apps out, all you need to get started is a free google account.

3. TIMETUNE (Android) / SCHEDULE PLANNER (iOS)

With a bit of planning, these apps will help leverage the most productivity out of every hour of your work day. They go beyond a traditional calendar app by helping you plan your week, then making sure you are on track to hit all of your appointments and complete all of your tasks. You don’t have to be missing meetings to want to manage your time more efficiently.

4. TRELLO

Trello’s website describes this app as ‘the free, flexible, and visual way to organize anything with anyone’. Trello has the unique ability to adapt to any team or project’s workflow by visually representing todo items in lists. If you’re a fan of organization by post-it you should check out a free account.

5. EVERNOTE

Evernote is a virtual workspace that allows you to write, collect, collaborate and share with others. Access your account from any device to pull up your notes and content, make edits and share your ideas. Evernote is one of the most widely recommended productivity app that you can get access to today for free.

What apps are you using to boost productivity and stay organized?

Leave your answers, questions & comments in the box below.

Social media accounts for 27% of all time spent online and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular ways for consumers to discover new brands and for marketers to reach new customers. Potential customers are browsing their friend’s profiles every day and, whether they realize it or not, their perception of products and services is shaped by the social network’s collective attitude & awareness of the represented brands. Whether you are trying to build brand awareness or build rapport with potential customers, social media marketing is one of the most effective tools at your disposal. These 5 tips & tactics will help you to begin creating a successful social media strategy that will increase your market share and validate your products & services.

Feel free to download and print the social media infographic at the bottom of this post for an ongoing reminder of how to setup your social media campagins!

1. ESTABLISH CLEAR & MEASURABLE CAMPAIGN GOALS

Following the mantras ‘Work smarter, not harder’ and ‘Select the best tool for the job’, this is possibly the most important step in creating any successful marketing campaign. It’s important to understand that while social media is a fantastic way to engage your customers on many different levels, it’s not always the right tool for the job. If your business goals are in line with driving more traffic to your website, increasing brand awareness, or increasing brand loyalty, then you are on the right track to creating a successful campaign. If your goals are to generate highly targeted leads that ‘convert’ into paying customers, you will probably find greater success using other lead generation tactics.

Depending on what goals you have defined, you will need to understand how you will measure the effectiveness of your social media campaign. For campaigns focused on generating qualified leads, it may be as simple as measuring your ROI (return on investment), but measuring metrics like brand awareness are not as cut and dry. This article by Social Media Examiner goes into detail about a few of the methods you can use to build an effective social media campaign measurement strategy that is in line with various brand awareness goals.

2. WRITE DOWN YOUR GAMEPLAN

As you go through each of these steps create a reference document that outlines all the tactics you are going to utilize, which social media platform they belong to, and who is responsible for each component of your campaign. This will help to consolidate any overlapping efforts & keep you focused on the execution of your campaign.

3. TARGET KEY PLATFORMS

Understanding your target demographic & audience is crucial at this stage. Do some research into which social media platform best engages your target audience, and focus on those platforms first. It’s also important to understand the capabilities of your selected social media platforms and whether or not they will support how you plan to measure your campaign’s effectiveness.

4. VISUALLY EXPRESS YOUR MESSAGE

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is the best way to summarize this tactic. Using visual aids is a great way to grab your targeted audience’s attention and at the same time convey the message you want to communicate. You can use videos, infographics, or promotional materials that summarize the message you want to get across in a portion of the time. Not to mention, adding some stylish graphics makes your marketing materials look that much more professional.

5. MEASURE & OPTIMIZE FOR SUCCESS

Once you have your social media campaign collecting data, it’s important to regularly check it’s performance and optimize it for better ROI. You want to take a look at industry average response rates (click through rates, likes, shares, etc…) and see where your strengths and opportunities are. Once you have evaluated areas of opportunity, you can alter your campaign to try new headlines, graphics, or overall message to achieve better results.

At first you may want to measure the effectiveness of your new social media campaign on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, but as you tweak & optimize your campaigns it makes more sense to move to monthly reporting. Track your increases & decreases month over month using spreadsheets and other social media campaign tools. By measuring the impact of your social media campaigns, you ensure that you are devoting your time & effort to the areas that produce the most success and ROI for your business.

What tools & strategies are you using to measure your social media campaigns?

Where have you found the most success?

Leave your questions & comments in the box below.