Get Your Restaurant Noticed Quickly

What's New With You?

A couple of months ago I was approached by a pizza parlor owner who wanted to get some publicity for his store. So I asked some questions about his pizza to see if there was a story that we could use. The conversation went like this:

Me: "What's unique about your pizza?"
Him: "We use fresh ingredients every day."
Me: "That's good, but so does everyone. No restaurant is going to tell their customers "Fresh? Heck no! This fish we're serving must be at least (sniff, sniff) one week old!". So what else is different about you?"
Him: "We make our dough fresh every morning."
Me: "That's great, but so does every other pizza parlor in town. What else?"
Him: "Well...."
Me: "I noticed the business name relates to a city in Italy. Do you have a secret Italian recipe for your sauce?"
Him: "No. The previous owner gave it that name. It doesn't mean anything."
Me: "How about your pizzas? Do you have a specialty, like "All-Arizona Toppings" or "Super-Anti-Oxidant" or anything different and unusual?"
Him: "No."
Me: "Well....is there anything unusual about your employees? For example, are they all left-handed tennis players?"
Him: "Nope. Just local people."

...and on and on. Suffice it to say that we couldn't get any publicity. Why? Because he had nothing new or unusual about his food or his restaurant.

How to Get a Reporters Attention:
Reporters (and editors and producers) think like this:
1. Get a good story.
2. Other stuff.
If you want to get publicity, make sure you have an interesting story. The most interesting story is something that is new and/or unusual. In the world of marketing, we call this the Unique Selling Point: USP. So we need to ask: What's our USP???

Journalists spend four years in school learning how to locate and produce interesting stories, not how to read press releases. When you provide something new, they will be more interested than if you give them the same old stuff.

USP Examples:
New York Times: "99-cent Pizza Catches On": http://nyti.ms/9iZBiR
Chicago Tribune: "Guiness beer Pizza": http://bit.ly/ctUq7D
Sonoran Living, Ch 15: "Tea and Chocolate": http://bit.ly/9Kzk8S

To figure out your USP, think of what you do (or make) that's different. "Hand-crafted", "Fresh daily", and "great service" are all old news. If we look at the three examples above, we have:
1. Cheap pizza in an expensive city (NYC).
2. Pizza made with beer. (BTW: the photo above is the Guiness beer pizza).
3. TEA and chocolate, as opposed to wine and chocolate.

So take a moment and really look hard at your offerings to find that USP. If you can't think of any you can:
1. Review the newspaper food stories for examples of uniqueness.
2. Watch some local TV talk shows that have chefs on and check out their menus.
3. Or, ask someone creative (like a PR/marketing person) to give you some ideas.

Take a moment and do this. Really. It makes a big difference. I've gotten a lot of publicity by looking for that USP and then talking about it exclusively to journalists. For a small investment of time, you can get a huge ROI of publicity.