When all you want to do is book a table, a restaurant website that won’t download or that plays music while you scroll through page after page looking for the info you need can be frustrating enough to drive you elsewhere. Noel Tock founded Happytables in 2012 to help restaurateurs serve up what customers want online as well as at the table. “I was working on a website for a friend of mine who owns an Irish pub – he knew what he wanted and he had a reasonable budget, but his budget just didn’t align with his requirements,” Tock recalls. “He wasn’t asking for anything ridiculous, he just needed to provide accurate online information at all times, and I realised there was a gap from a website consultancy perspective.” Tock met his Happytables partners, Tom Willmott and Joe Hoyle, pitched the idea of marketing websites direct to restaurateurs – and since then, these three young guys have dished out hundreds of thousands of web pages, for restaurants, cafés and pubs across Europe.
So, how do you hook hungry customers online and pull them through your doors?
Remember the essential difference your own website can make
“I often use Foursquare to find restaurants when I’m travelling. Once a restaurant has a rating of nine or above, OK, you don’t have to convince me any further. But in the six or seven ratings, where most restaurants lie, that restaurant’s own website certainly makes a big difference. And if you have a recurring clientele, if you’re a pub or bar that needs to post events, for example, or if you have a business crowd for lunch and have to post your daily menus – a good website that you can update yourself brings people back. And it’s important for any business, in any sector, to control their own content and own their own online presence. Suppose, for example, Foursquare or Yelp were to get sold, or your Facebook page was to go down for a ToS violation – what do you fall back on if you don’t have your own online presence?”
Some basics are key
“A lot of our restaurant owner customers have very little computer experience and very little web application experience. Using a package like WordPress can be intimidating as you have to build from a blank canvas: our product is a lot less intimidating. We’ve already made a lot of the decisions for the restaurants, such as automatically putting a one-press button for calling from mobiles, automatic inclusion on Google Maps – for restaurant owners who don’t have that knowledge, or who, equally importantly, don’t have a lot of time, we’ve kept it simple. Perhaps the biggest difference is that the restaurants don’t need a web designer – there can be an element of pot luck in choosing one. And if an update is needed, the restaurant owner might need to wait three weeks – and then they’ll get another invoice to pay. I’m hoping that, from an IT perspective, we’re the nice guys.”
The most common pitfall to avoid
“The mistake we see most often is restaurant owners expecting to represent the ambience and look of their restaurant on their website in every possible way: flash animations, music, focusing on a very visual experience, but hiding basic information like opening times. And this kind of site may not work on some mobile devices. If the menu you’re downloading is 5MB or 10MB, because it looks exactly like the menu in the restaurant, the cost of downloading it to your mobile if you’re visiting a different country can be more than the cost of your dinner! Some restaurant owners just see their website as a placeholder, a bit like an old-fashioned billboard. It’s a lot more than that.”
Engage your users…
“There are two sides to a successful web presence. The first is your own site and what you do on it: where you place the buttons and how much you engage users. If you’re very passive, if you don’t try to move visitors to action – well, you won’t get action! We include a big button saying ‘book now’ or ‘book a table’ and 12% of visitors will hit those buttons – that’s a really encouraging number, and it’s across all devices, including mobile.”
… and promote your site
“The other side is how much you are promoting your website. If you don’t list it, no-one will find it. If you register with, for example, Google Places for Business, you’re verified as a real business. And then, from a local perspective, you’re in the mix: you can be found by someone who isn’t just searching for your restaurant, but searching for a restaurant in your town. If I have a pizzeria in Oxford and I’ve registered as a verifiable place, when someone searches for pizza in Oxford, my restaurant will come up. That’s something we try to get all restaurants to do. We also look at all their incoming traffic and deduce where it’s coming from, so we can say ‘Hey, you’re missing out on traffic from Yelp or Tripadvisor. Register!’ Our big goal at Happytables is to help the little guy: chains and corporate restaurants can flood the net with their branding, which makes it hard for the little guy to shine.”
Look out for effective support
“We have support systems built into our products and full-time support staff – and the developers will also jump in to have an idea of what’s going on with customers. Everyone who works for us is part of the company and shares our vision, not a hired gun. We try to reach out to every new person that signs up, try to understand where they’re coming from, and, if they’re having a really tough time with the tech, help them build their site.”
Maximise traffic from customers on the go – make it easy for them to find you wherever they are
“Traffic from mobiles will soon be the most important. We’re at a point where 46% of our traffic is mobile – that’s a big jump from 22% to 23% when we started and it can only be a short time before it reaches 50%. Mobile is more important than access to a fancy site from a desktop. You even have to think whether people are using a touchscreen or a mouse. There are three pillars that drive us to make an excellent product. Number one is information – opening hours, phone numbers. Number two is accessibility. And number three is engagement. Once a visitor hits your website, do something with them! Get them to sign up for your newsletter, get them to click on ‘reserve now’ – they might be looking for a restaurant right there and then. If they’re out on the town on a Friday at 7pm, trying to load your website on their mobile and they find they can’t zoom in, they’ll simply click back to find the next website. It’s not even just about mobile – we have so many devices now. The internet is everywhere, it’s part of our watches, our phones and we need to be able to create structures and websites that function on all of those. It’s a much larger conversation and challenge than people expect.”
