 Restaurants of Hauai on Think Tech Hauai. I am your host today, Siobhan Garcia, the Executive Assistant for the Hauai Restaurant Association. Today I am filling in for the Executive Director, Cheryl Matsuoka. As usual, this is a twice a month show that we discuss important and timely topics that are centered around our Hauai food service industry. And today we are talking about how digital helped the radio star. Before we get into more detail, I wanted to welcome today's guest, Gina Crabtree. Gina is the media strategist for Salem Media of Hauai. Welcome, Gina. And thank you again for joining us. Aloha. Thank you for having me. I'm honored. Well, we're honored as well. So, Gina, I wanted to give you a second to introduce yourself and give our viewers a little more information on yourself and Salem media. Absolutely. So, I joined Salem Media Group almost five years ago. It doesn't feel like it because radio is super fun. I actually did get to go to college to be in broadcast communications. So, it's not every day you actually go into the field you went to school for. So, I do enjoy helping a lot of different business owners in a bunch of different vertical markets earn additional profits, grow their business, become entrepreneurs and make their dreams come true. And I've certainly been able to do that here with the cluster of radio stations that we do have. Salem Media Group is actually part of a larger national conglomerate. We're part of a Christian and conservative broadcast group that actually exists nationwide. We have 100 radio stations and 3,000 affiliates. So, it's not just here in Hawaii, right? We actually have seven radio stations here and you may recognize some of them. At least I hope you do. We have Decades 1079. We have 95.5 The Fish. Country 97.5. AM FM The Answer. 99.5 The Word. And then we have two LMA stations are what's considered a limited marketing agreement where we actually have sold off to different groups. And that is our Korean Christian Teach Talk station, KZU. And we have a new sports station in the market that is taking ESPN by storm, or we like to think so. Hawaii Sports Radio Network, KGUAM. Wow, that's a lot. And I'm proud of you for remembering all of this. It takes a lot of practice, yeah. So, you know, with that said, we're talking about how digital has helped the radio star. And it sounds like there's so many different ways that you guys can help. And you have so many different stations, right, to really reach that audience. You know, can you talk a little bit about what is digital media or what is digital radio and how can this help our restaurants? Yep, absolutely. So a lot of times a client will come to me and say, oh my gosh, you have seven stations. How on earth do I pick the right one? Especially if the restaurant may be just opening or, you know, they were coming out of the pandemic and now it's a little weary, right? They're making possibly a large investment after a few years of being closed. They're still short staffed. They don't want to be rushed by traffic, right? So, how do we use their investment as wisely as we possibly can? Well, we've actually found a way to use digital data to create a strategic radio schedule. Okay, so I'm not talking about digital like social media or, you know, geofencing or all those fancy terms like SEO you've heard of, we're actually utilizing website, like website traffic. And we're taking that information from other restaurants on the mainland that have done radio. We're using Scarborough and Nielsen research data from journals and households that may have eaten at a fast food restaurant in the past 30 days. Which one did you go to? When do you listen to decades? And we put all of it together and we make a really great radio schedule that will then return an ROI for that precious investment for that restaurant owner. So, it's very, very important to pick the right station, but not only that pick the right day and time and days of the week to run that radio schedule. So, they see foot traffic and online orders and things come through their website where they get diners and seats, right? Right, most important. And most important, you want people to enjoy your food, which I do often. But basically we kind of start with which station is right. So, each of our stations targets a different demographic. So, decades 1079 plays classic hits from the 70s, 80s, 90s, right? We like to consider the greatest music ever made. So, I just stacked my phone up on a bunch of CDs, right, to do our recording. So, yeah, greatest music ever made is sitting right underneath me right now. Typically adult 35 plus, they tend to be homeowners. They have discretionary income. You're talking about the aunties and uncles and the multi-generational homes we have here in Hawaii. Great demographic, especially for eating out, ordering in pizza nights, big families, right? Then we have the fish, 95.5, the fish, that is your female, 2554. They like to say soccer mom, but then I get offended. So, there's lots of other sports other than soccer, but you're looking at an upper income female, she runs the household, always trying to figure out what's for lunch, what's for dinner, what are we going to do this weekend, and what are we bringing for the potluck for the first birthday, right? Yes, exactly. I mean, it's always busy, right? We're always busy. On the go. Country 97.5 is a mixture of our military audiences and our local young families. So, I don't know of any restaurant who doesn't want to tap into that market specifically. They're constantly moving, constantly churning, and they always want to know where the best place is to go at night to have fun, to have a couple of drinks with their friends, meet people because they're new. That's a great station to reach that adult 18 to 34, okay? The AMF and the answer station is our conservative news talk station. That is one that predominantly, it's a business to business network. You would meet other restaurant owners on that station. You may find someone who cleans restaurants, who, you know, sanitizes. We had a lot of sanitization companies on there. Basically, it's a way for other entrepreneurs and business owners to kind of collaborate and gain motivation from the programming. And then of course, the word is our Christian teach shock station where we have our influencers and our pastors and our church groups. I mean, who wouldn't want a youth group stopping in after church for lunch one day, right? But sometimes you have to dig deeper than just age and gender and just the basic interest level, right? So, and actually, this is where you start getting into, before you purchase a schedule, how would you think about purchasing something, Siobhan? Like when you hear a radio, do you remember the phone number? Not unless it's a really catchy phone number. No, not normally, I don't. Right? And God forbid when you're driving, you pick up the phone and you try to dial something. I mean, they're so quick these days. You don't want to use a phone number. You're probably going to wind up researching what you're looking for on the internet, right? Exactly. So we're able to track traffic with that trackable traffic. You can find out who is coming to your website, how old they are, what gender they are, where they may have been visiting from, what types of interests they have, because they stumbled upon your website from a home and garden website. All these Google analytics come into play, right? I would never be on that website. I'm just, but all of that data is important, right? When you're trying to build a schedule. So we're predispositioned to think the fish is my audience. I absolutely need those females 25, 54. I absolutely need those moms. Well, what about the dads on the answer? Right? You have a whole group of people you might be missing where if you just looked at the website traffic, you might see that you've got a lot of people coming from a sports type of a web search, because they're also running their kids back and forth to practice when the moms are busy. I see. So we want to take a look at how we purchase ourselves. We're researching on Google. We're going on social media. We're looking at websites. And if it's a bad website, we are bouncing right back out again, right? So we want thing like you're trying to figure out how even yourself, right? How you would go about these things is exactly how your audience is going to. Yes. Those are their same tendencies, right? We all kind of have the same places that we learn, you know, we go to or feel most comfortable to find that kind of information. So that really sounds like this is tailored to what any one of us would do on a daily basis. Have you ever chosen a place to eat based on Yelp reviews? Oh, absolutely. Oh, see? But you know, talk to a restaurant owner. They say, oh, Yelp is junk. No. You know how many people actually do trust and care about what Yelp has to say? Taking care of your reputation is very important. Social media is very important. It does come down to how the consumer goes through their journey of selecting where they just might want to have lunch that day, right? Right. So we've actually been able to figure out your who with two different tools. Okay. We have something called analytic owl. And then we have our Nielsen Scarborough data. So I wanted to start out today with finding a who with analytic owl. So he's a very cute little owl head shape for the logo. I nicknamed him Ollie. Okay. Basically what this does is it merges our radio commercial logs with your website traffic. Okay. So, Siobhan, you now own a restaurant. This is the best way to explain this. All right. And you purchase a radio schedule through one of our stations. You would get a log of your days and times that it's going to run. Okay. And I tell you, Siobhan, don't use your phone number because we all know you're not going to pick up the phone. Use your website. That's your call to action. So Siobhan's restaurant.com visit to order today. Okay. So as soon as people hear this, this commercial, they're going to Google, they're going to go on, on the website and they're going to start ordering online from you. As long as they do that within an eight minute radius of when your commercial played, we ping them. Oh. So we say, oh, hey, they came from radio. Oh, hey, they heard that commercial and they came from radio. Why eight minutes? Because it's a nice round number. They've done a lot of research, but it tends not to mesh with if they're doing TV, if they're doing other, you know, social media boosting, it's a nice tight radius around that commercial time. So it doesn't affect other campaigns. So we can really say, yes, that customer was from your radio schedule. Okay. So I dug up some information about the actual restaurant industry. I wanted to see what analytic owl had to say about restaurants in general, when were the most popular days, popular day parts. So restaurant owners, listen up, Siobhan, you too, you have a restaurant. Okay. So the most popular days, according to the Honolulu market, now you can look on the mainland, you can look internationally, anyone who's run a radio schedule in the past six months, who's invested in radio, we found this information from all their trial and error. So now we can learn from it. Most popular days are Saturdays and Fridays in that order. Why would you run on the days you're already busy? Don't you want to knock out your competition who isn't running? Interesting. Good idea. It seems logical, but you're like, oh, yes, I do. Right? Then the most popular day parts, 10am to 3pm, lunchtime, and then 3pm to 7pm, dinner time. Not a shocker, but just something to kind of remind yourself, oh, yeah. So Saturdays, Fridays, pick those day parts. Now you don't have to spend your life savings to do a very successful radio campaign. Okay. So then we have a bunch of different ways you can run commercials based on timeframe. We have 15s, we have 30s, we have 60s. Now me and you're going to talk for about a half hour so we don't have those. But what do you think the most popular length is for a restaurant? 15, 30, or 60? I'm going to quiz you. Oh, wow. I'm just going to go with 15. I don't know why, but that was the first number. It is, but you know, all of our attention spans are like this, right? So 15s are the most popular for restaurants. We don't need to hear the whole menu. Right. We just want to know there's free parking. Right. You got some kind of special going on, or that you're open. That's all I care about. You're open, right? Exactly. Maybe cakey eat free on a certain day. That's always a good one. Yeah, I'm sure. Always a good one. But now you have the duration of commercial you make, the days of the, the times of the day you're going to run it, and the days you're going to run your schedule. That's not going to cost an arm and a leg, but then now it's which station you're going to pick, right? So then you can dig even deeper, believe it or not. And this is all coming from website data. Okay. Can you believe that? Like, I couldn't believe this 20 years ago when I got into radio, when people asked, does radio work, they're buying air. You didn't really know how to answer them, right? Right. Now we can actually look and see. Yes, we had website traffic come within an eight minute radius. We're going to take credit for that as your radio group because we ran your commercial. And here's when they showed up. So now there's analytics on these types of things. You're not just buying, like you said, the airtime, right? Exactly. It's really, it's a big challenge to people when they buy radio because TV you can see. You're buying something you can visualize. You see yourself, you see your business logo. It makes sense, right? Right. When you can't hear your commercial or you're trying to listen, but you're busy. It just doesn't have the same pizzazz sometimes as if you see your social ad come up on your feed, right? Yes, exactly. So then I wanted to say, okay, Honolulu market, I want quick service restaurants. We don't call them fast food. We're very fancy here. We call them quick service, right? And I wanted any listener from the past 30 days who had said, yes, I used a quick service restaurant, okay? Can you believe on decades over 60,000 listeners said they had in the past 30 days, country had over 50,000, the fish had over 40,000, all of which were over market average. We have people who like to eat out. Could be higher income. Could be their families, right? We are a very family centric station group. Depends on the programming, I guess. But when you look at the economy coming back, thank goodness. So then I moved to sit down restaurants. And I was like, okay, all right, my fine dining people because that's where I would love to go back to. So the numbers came down slightly, but decades had over 42,000, okay, 10% over market average. So we're still doing good. I was like, oh, that's still, you know, I don't care. I can't fit 42,000 people in one restaurant. That's about the Blaisdale a few times over. So we're doing okay. Countries still had 36,000 listeners, 10% over. But where the fish really shined, even though they have 31,000 listeners. So out of the three, they were the lowest in the amount of listeners. They were 24% over market average. They were the highest, most likely station to go out to sit down restaurant and enjoy a meal. That is probably a little fancier, higher ticket, better profit margin, better tipping. See what you did there. I see. So that way, I would say to a quick service restaurant, quantity over quality, guaranteed. Let's choose decades. Let's run Saturdays and Fridays. Let's run that, that midday and that evening shift using 15s. Oh my goodness, mind blown, right. And this is all proven information where we can track it. Okay. But if you are a fancy restaurant and you're a sit down restaurant, right, that's where I would say, I think we should try the fish. I think we should reach the date night women who maybe need a little bit of a break. Yeah. Right. Who maybe need a baby sitter who have the money to spend, who are more likely than any of the other stations combined to be at your restaurant in the next 30 days. Even if it's a smaller group, they're more likely it's quality over quantity and sometimes that does matter to our clients. Right. You know, I mean, I love hearing all this information because we hear so much about social media, right? And there's so many other avenues that people can take. And I love that there's this type of information for the restaurants. Maybe they say, hey, I have social media going and I'm still missing, you know, or there's a lack in the types of people coming into my restaurant. I really have this demographic, but I want to reach this one, right? There's so many other avenues. And I mean, to have somebody like you guys who is so knowledgeable, you know, really, I think helps and you're making it kind of fun, right? To say like, hey. I mean, it's I'm a numbers girl, right? Numbers don't lie. I came from a medical field where I was a medical rep for five years and it's very strict on what you can say and what's been proven and scientifically medically stated. And if you go against that statement, then there does tend to be repercussions. Well, I've always found a way to put that type of science or that type of reasoning into everything I do. So statistics are big for me. But I do think that when someone is giving an investment to someone else to say, please help me, right? Like I really need to keep my doors open. And at this point, there are some owners that are in that situation. Oh yeah, we hear about it all the time still. Yeah, I know. So I think at this point, it's utilize whatever budget they have to the best of your ability and make it a trustworthy source so that you can present to them, here are your options. Here's my recommendation. Here is why. And I think it makes you more of a consultant than just a standard media rep at that point. But it is fun when it's when you can connect Ollie the owl, right? Yes. To the back of their website and you can see it working. You can see the traffic, you can see the web visits and maybe just maybe, I'm not often wrong, right? Maybe you can tweak it. Maybe you see, hey, maybe your demographic, Mr. Thai food restaurant is different than Chinese food or Japanese fine dining steakhouse. Obviously, all locations are going to be different, all hours are going to be different. So you do have to take that into consideration. Okay. And so there's so much information that I feel like you've already given a lot of our listeners and viewers. So what happens when they say, okay, I'm interested. I love what Gina just said. I would like to find out how do I measure a radio campaign? What is the cost of something like this? Oh, good question. So it's a million dollars. No, I'm kidding. So actually, all of these items are free. These platforms are free to our clients. We invest as a corporation. So remember when I started, it's been a while, when we started our conversation, I feel like I've been talking for two hours, that Salem is part of a larger corporate entity, right? Because of that, we can have subscriptions to these types of programs, these types of software, you know, backings. So that helps from a standpoint of passing down the savings to the client. We want to make sure our client is successful. That ROI helps us maintain them. Attrition is the worst thing ever. We don't necessarily need diners in seats, but we do need clients on our airwaves to keep our lights on. So our success is their success. Oh, that's amazing, you know, and I think you hit the target word free. We don't get to hear that word very often. Free. It is. It comes with the service. We write all of the messaging. We handle everything from a standpoint of, you know, production and script writing. Picking up the bed music, please, no royalties necessary. We need to make sure we have it in our lives. That stays free, right? But it is important for us to make sure that everyone is happy with the final product. And we try to be as professional as possible. People join Salem because of our morals, our values, the mission behind the company. So we just try to definitely stand true to that as much as we can. That's great, you know, and we were kind of running out of time and just a little bit, but something that I do want to touch on is, and we've said it multiple times, that is website traffic. What happens if a business does not have a website set up? Okay, well, we can help with that too. I promised I wasn't going to go into too much of the digital side of things, but we don't want to bring thousands of people to a website where they're just going to bounce out. They're not going to order from you. They're just going to go to your competition, right? We want to make sure that the end game, that the goal is something you're proud of from a business owner standpoint. So we actually have something to offer just the HRA members, which is kind of exciting, because I am now working with another partner of mine, Salem Surround, where we can offer something specifically for restaurant owners, okay? So it's a five page web design or refresh. So that's the beginning. That's like the foundation, okay? Then we're going to do a POS integration for online ordering. So if they got into any kind of online ordering system where it just goes to DoorDash or some kind of a third party, this may be able to integrate into their POS system where it prints a ticket in their kitchen. It automatically goes into their payment system. It's more of an integrated approach for their bookkeeping services, okay? We would just do a consultation and see what you're using currently and see if we have that widget to be able to make it a little easier and more streamlined for you in the back of the house. Then what restaurant owner doesn't want a t-shirt with a fun phrase in the back? With a cool logo, maybe a mug or a hat or something. I mean, all the employees with the fun stuff on their uniforms, so you can buy it in the merch store. Yes. We have the ability to do a merch store as well. So this whole package with the five page website, the merch store. So now you've got a profit center with the merch. You got a profit center with online ordering and you're not going to have bounce outs from a poorly designed website or something that was made 20 years ago when you opened. Maybe you're just opening. We want to be proud of what we're presenting to all of this radio traffic, all these listeners. It's actually a $5,500 value. We're going to knock it down 30% for HRE members. Wow, 30%. That's amazing. We want to make sure that everybody knows that they have other options and a discount. Who doesn't love a discount? We said free earlier. I can't go that far. I can't go that far. But I mean, this is pretty good. Yeah. And you said so many words that are going to hit everybody free and discount. There you go. It's almost like a bogo. I was almost there. This is amazing. I'm sure all of our members will love to hear about this amazing discount. You said how long is the discount good for? Good point. So we're not offering it forever. No discount lasts forever unless it's Macy's friends and family. Basically, we're going to be doing through the holiday season. So this will end at the end of the year. So it is a nice gift to give yourself if you've been working really hard as a business owner. Gift yourself a new website. I think it sounds like a great idea. Be thankful you're open. Be thankful that you're still going to work every day and you're enjoying making food and taking care of your customers. And it's a great way to start the new year. Oh, yes. New year, new website. Does that work? Yeah, exactly. Better town. Thank you so much, Gina. You've been so helpful, very knowledgeable. As we've said, I hope everybody comes and sees you to take advantage of this amazing offer that you guys are offering through the holidays. We will make sure that if anybody has any questions that we give them your information and we also will have a landing page, if I'm correct, that they can go through on our website so they can always visit us. If you do have any questions, please visit us at infoatpoirestaurant.org. And as always, the HRA is the voice of Hoy's Restaurants and Food Service Industry. Again, if you would like to reach out to learn more, please email us infoatpoirestaurant.org. Thank you again, Gina. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.