evocalize
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
restaurant, people, data, marketing, franchisee, customers, cdp, local, industries, talk, work, pretty, sales, folks, figure, partner, business, real estate, order, drive
SPEAKERS
Matthew (66%), Jeremy (34%), Intro (1%)
I
Intro
0:02
This is the restaurant technology guys podcast, helping you run your restaurant better.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
0:13
Before we move forward with the show, I wanted to share about a product that I came across recently. We’re in the middle of the summertime. And so you’re going through dads and grads and I know the holidays are just as bad. But it’s a product that’s trying to become the OpenTable. for large parties. The name is restaurant rent. Nick and his team have created a online booking solution to allow restaurants to book large parties and do them online in such an easy way. It’s a brilliant solution. And having just gone through graduation for my son, I would have loved to have had a solution like this check out Nick and his solution restaurant. When you get a few minutes after the show to the restaurant technology guys podcast, we think you guys out there in the the internet universe that that tune in and listen to what we got going on. Today, we’re gonna take a pretty cool journey, we’re gonna talk with with a guest a little bit about, about what he’s done in the past, and then kind of where it’s tying into restaurants and how they’re doing it. So before I get too far into it, I guess first and foremost, I know that you guys have got lots of choices. So we appreciate you guys. You guys spending some time with us each and every week. Matthew, from E vocalised, Founder CEO, you want to talk a little bit about yourself a little bit about your history. And then we can talk a little bit about what you guys are trying to do to impact restaurants and and how we even got connected. Because I’m excited to share your story with the rest of the world.
MM
Matthew Marx
1:38
Yeah, thanks, Jeremy. Super excited to be on and and appreciate you having me on to riff about like restaurant, restaurant and restaurant technology and the things folks are facing today. You know, I’ve I’ve done a number of things in my career, I started out as a software engineer and ended up in strategy consulting in in private equity, and then participated in the IPO of our last marketing software technology back cash almost 10 years ago. And now we’ve been busy building our company vocalize I’m the founder and CEO. We vocalize for the past, gosh, about eight years. And yeah, fired up to talk about the problems restaurant tours are facing and and operators are facing in the space today. And yeah, well, hopefully talked about some cool things that will be solutions.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
2:32
I love it. I love it. And I know you didn’t start in restaurants. So why don’t you give a little backstory of kind of where you guys came from? I know it wasn’t, you know, you didn’t set your sights on oh, we’re going to take on the restaurant world. But you do see a problem there. And we can talk a little bit about kind of the history of where you guys came from. And why you thought restaurants was a fantastic vertical that needs a solution like what you guys have?
MM
Matthew Marx
2:52
Yeah, thanks. We write we started in, we actually started in a residential real estate. And so we actually didn’t even set out to start in residential real estate. We just started with the problem, right? And then the problem we set out to solve like today, if you look at if you look at the marketing landscape, local businesses in particular, when they’re talking about generating demand, generating real demand, we’re not talking about social posting, or reviews, or any of that stuff, all valuable pieces of a marketing puzzle. How do you bring people into the restaurant into the store? How do I get people to buy and sell homes, you know, that are that are going on market or on market? Right? And so if you rewind time, a lot of that marketing is done with people hands and on keyboard or pressing buttons in the Facebook’s and Googles and tiktoks and everywhere else, right. And so we set out almost a decade ago after taking your last company public with the goal of like, how do we automate that? Right, so how do we take the massive amounts of data that are being thrown off from businesses and locations, in particular, like point of sale data in lots of other data? And how do we turn that into marketing that actually brings results? So we ended up we took our first venture capital round out of the largest venture capital fund in the Pacific Northwest at a Seattle Madrona venture group. And so we hired a bunch of folks from Amazon and we went to work with one of their portfolio companies at the time Redfin in, in wired in a bunch of data together, worked with their data scientists and data engineers, and basically developed a pretty sophisticated way to take a lot of this moving changing data in the real estate world. So think about a homeless thing. You know, if you’ve served on realtor.com, or Zillow or Redfin or any of the major real estate portals, you see all the data that these folks have crime data and school data, and you know, listing location and imagery Lots of other data underneath the covers sales data, etc. So all that we ingested into our technology every day and started making decisions at a pretty mass scale to in order to match homes with buyers and sellers across the industry, and then fast forward to today, we’re pretty large percentage of marketing in the residential real estate space flows through our technology in one way or the other. But this problem is not one that’s unique to real estate, right? It’s the the corporate partner has kind of central partner has a bunch of data. And they have like a bunch of knowledge on how to market they have, you know, sometimes agencies that are creative agencies and agencies that are feeding lots of great Polish creative, but we know local marketing works better, right? And so, so we set out to basically bridge that gap. And so how do we how do we equip the franchise location or the local office with the ability to run these really data driven, complicated demand generation programs that bring real results without having to know how the heck to do it or have all the data to make it happen? So that little more than I wanted to go. But that’s effectively what we’re doing now is we’re moving and making a big bet in restaurants, because we feel like, there’s such a big opportunity here to free the franchisee from giving them the power to push a button and have people come in when they’re needed, or even automate that thing fully based on their sales data, their inventory data and all the other cool stuff because on application level,
JJ
Jeremy Julian
6:33
on I know, Matt, when we talked previously, like the whole idea of local, like one of the things I mean, and longtime listeners know, I just bought a home, you know, I just moved to Texas couple years ago, I was one of those transplants from from the West Coast came to Texas, I know that you spend part of the time in Texas. And so there’s a lot of business advantages and a lot of personal advantages to living in Texas. And so I moved but you know, the local aspect of it, you know, same thing with restaurants, I’m oftentimes not going to look for a restaurant that’s 40 or 50 or 60 miles away, unless I’m looking for a specific destination, or I’m looking for some type of cuisine that I can’t find locally. So I love when you and I talked previously about tying kind of my needs requirements, where do I like to go and the data that goes along with that with something local, we know whether it’s you know, restaurants, churches, you know, convenience stores, drugstores, grocery stores, the more localized you can get, the more you you can drive that behavior if you’re where the demand needs to be and wants to be. Talk to me a little bit about that, because I think it’s an interesting paradigm where people in restaurants don’t understand how much that data is important to them. Yeah,
MM
Matthew Marx
7:45
I mean, modern, modern digital marketing. You know, ecommerce kind of leads the way here in terms of sophistication are usually the point of the steer in terms of like industries and using data. Because it’s so cutthroat right, and Amazon, Amazon kind of maybe sets up that landscape for everyone, but data data is everything in terms of having an effective, cost effective digital marketing that reaches the target audience, okay, that’s like a broad statement that that I’m sure lots of folks listening will you know, will will say, Yeah, whatever Matt, like everyone knows that, right? True. But when you when you compound that with the events and local information going on at the at the local level, right, you take not only data that you have a store level, so again, I always talk about inventory and sales data, because to me, those two things are fundamental to the local local operation, right? We take that with events that are going on around that particular location, right, like the we have, we have a restaurant partner in the in the mid atlantic that we’re triggering events triggering marketing, specific marketing promotions, when the local team wins football games, right? So so we can take advantage of things like you know, weather data, local event information, right? Sales Trends history point of sale data, inventory data, and that stuff makes just independent of of us like that stuff makes a real difference we see 30% to 50% increases in performance across our client base we have more than a million businesses using our tech now we so it’s it’s like significant 30 to 50% increases in performance adjust by low making your messaging and your creative and your and your your all of your marketing local right and putting the local flair of the local restaurant into because it’s we’re still a neighborhood based society right and so we resonate with the store down the road not always just the corporate branding that’s thrown out in in generic
JJ
Jeremy Julian
9:53
Yeah, and I’m gonna ask you to double click a little bit Matt on the whole idea. You’re talking about ecommerce kind of leading the charge and restaurants, oftentimes their laggards as it relates to, you know, part of even where the show came from was trying to get people to be aware of people like you guys, because they talked to people in restaurants and we’re like, Nah, that’s that’s not for real. And then, and then I’m like, no, no, I like have people that are doing this kind of stuff all the time. But e Commerce has been leading the charge because they oftentimes known who the customer was, because you logged in, when I was searching for homes on Zillow. I still I bought my home to two years ago this week. And when at the time of this recording, and I’m still getting advertised for homes from Zillow, that are in the neighborhoods that I was looking in, when I bought, you know, oh, this house became available on the market. So they knew who I was, they know what my price point was, they knew what I was looking for, I gave them much of that data, to allow them the opportunity to do that. Restaurants struggle there, they don’t have the opportunity often to do that talk to me a little bit about I mean, I understand why ecommerce is there, and why they’ve gotten there. And I think for our audience, help educate them on how brands like yourself and others are capturing that data, because so much of it’s becoming more readily available, as tech is starting to converge, where I actually know who Jeremy is, and that he’s in this demographic with this many kids and eats pizza every Friday night, and I need to go move him from this pizza place to that pizza place. Oftentimes, our restaurant tourists go, you’re full of crap, they don’t really have that data to be able to talk to these people. So I’m gonna let you riff on that for just a few minutes. Because I think it’s, it’s informative for people to understand how much is out there, and how much the data can actually move the needle?
MM
Matthew Marx
11:34
Yeah, I mean,
JJ
Jeremy Julian
11:36
sorry, I know, I know, I went off on a little bit of a tangent there. But I think it’s important for people to understand.
MM
Matthew Marx
11:41
No, it’s fantastic. I mean, I think, you know, just figuring out where to start that, that the platforms themselves have an astounding amount of data. And I think, you know, sometimes so much that the, you know, the governmental entities get get nervous about them, right. And people get get anxious about it. But they, they know a tremendous amount about folks. So what we we try to do, we think about the world, let me put it this way, in marketing in two halves, we split the universe of like, audience, known customers, and unknown customers, right. And so, when you go to Zillow, you’re kind of existing in the middle ground, but we treat you as a known customer, because you’re poking around Zillow, and you’re searching for homes. And so we start to pick up and we can we do begin to work with a lot of the real estate portals, driving their marketing start to pick up signals about what you’re interested in where so what Bed Bath you’re interested in what and that’s called remarketing is a remarketing signals where we’re picking up and learning about you based on your activities on on the first party website, the website that you’re on, in that moment. So so that’s that’s one group of data. The other group of data is unknown customers is your CRM database, your loyalty database, the folks who have expressly said, hey, you know, I’m a fan of, of your location, right? I’m a fan of your of your business, right? I’m signing up expressly to give you my information, right. And so those people are known customers by identity, right? So we know people here just because we know their attributes and what they’re looking for. We know people here because they’re in a database. Those two are known customers, we can market to them, right? So we want them to come back in, we want them to be influencers, those are both pretty easy, right? We set up automated programs, and we can trigger promotions to them. But we can, the more important part to me about those groups of people is that and this is true in every industry, and ecommerce just figured it out sooner, right? We can use those people to build models of ideal customers that are dynamic, that we then go and try and find those users based on everything that Google and, and meta and Tiktok. And all the other platforms know about you, right? So we can go find people based on lookalike modeling, from your existing customers, your best customers, new customers, and then we can work on incrementality. So how in your restaurant location? Do we run programs and promotions to just the incremental new customer want to bring you in for the first time? We’re paying for you through a promotion? If we offer a promotion, right? Yep. So we don’t, we don’t necessarily want to just give that to our existing customers. Maybe you want to just do the incremental customers to bring them in. And then so those two become kind of a ying and yang of digital marketing, the known customer sets and the unknown customer sets or prospects that we’re trying to pull in. And again, both of them the platform’s know who’s in your family, they know what your well you’ve searched for recently. They know traveling to where are you traveling? Who? Yes, yes. So they look like models last time I checked had 1000s of attributes in them, and they’re incredibly predictive. So even if you aren’t, and this is what It prompts people to sometimes say, Hey, I know one of these platforms is listening to my phone, you know? And it’s like, well, actually, they’re not. In order to get certified as partners, we actually had to set sign an affidavit, David with some of them saying, we’re not doing that, right. So they’re not, but they’re so predicted, it feels like they are, right.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
15:22
We give it to him, I was just watching him. And this came up this morning, and I’ll say it for the for the benefit of our audience. We’re, we’re considering taking on another line of business. Somebody sent me a YouTube video about that line of business. And it was an internal education video, not publicly listed on YouTube, I mean, Sensatori leadership team and said, watch this for 45 minutes and see, if this is something that we want to do like this partner, we’re not going to compete with them, they’re in a different state. And within two days, people had in their Instagram feed and in their, in their, in their Facebook feed stuff that was related to that, because we’ve given them that data. It’s not that they’re listening. They’re watching the web activity. I tell people a funny story. And I’m, you’ll probably chuckle about this, because you live in this world. I went away with my kid do a college visit. And he forgot to turn on homework assignment recognizing, but he didn’t bring his laptop and latest phone. So is that can I jump on your laptop real quick, I’m gonna go on Google, go submit my, my paper to my teacher, you know, whatever. And you get logged out of my profile, and then get you know, and logged into his and then I got my laptop back. And I’m like, What did you do to my laptop? What happened? Everything is different because my Chrome windows weren’t anywhere close to what I wanted. We don’t like it when they don’t give it to us when when I accidentally log into my wife’s Amazon and I get a bunch of her crap. Like it bugs me, even though we’re on the same account. I want all of this stuff, I don’t need dresses, I need the stuff that’s relevant to me. And at the same time, like people, oh, the government’s always spying on us, I’m looking at these things this at the end of the day, you’re you’re signaling to them that that you’re gonna be doing this. And so how do brands take advantage of that, to help drive incrementation and or discovery of brands that they, you know, my family loves Indian food, we’re moved to Texas, not the same kind of Indian food as we have in California, trying to find a good Indian restaurant, if the Indian restaurants are out there. And they know that I’m looking for Indian food, why not figure out how to get to me. So I guess talk to me a little bit about how brands are using that data in a ethical way to drive discovery and to drive behavior from from guests and potential guests that they didn’t have before.
MM
Matthew Marx
17:26
Yeah, you’re so right, Jeremy. I mean, just like I mentioned, businesses throw off data, you know, and that those are the signals we pick up and use, you know, through technology for for kind of automatic marketing, but people throw off data too, right? Like, like you’re throwing off signals all day long, every day, right, and the people around you are throwing off signals. And so So those things are being picked up by by all the channels and frankly, it can be that can be scary and there are privacy controls, you can go in and adjust a bunch of those things in the platforms they’ve been mandated. So they’re there, they’re really hidden. So you have to dig for him a little bit. But for, for, for from a personal perspective. I don’t personally mind it a whole lot, as long as I have the control because to your point, I have goods and services that discover me. Yep. That that that I want, right. And so I’m an avid backpacker, I love backpacking and going through like 50 100 mile, you know, backpacking trips, you know, through the PCT and other areas, right and in I’m like, spend way too much money on, you know, cottage gear and backpacks and trying to shave off in another
JJ
Jeremy Julian
18:38
ultralight ultralight tents, I get it, I will have to rip after the show. And I can talk to you about my John Muir Trail, you know, six days on the JMT, about seven years ago, so we can talk.
MM
Matthew Marx
18:49
But I love to talk about it. So like so so but I love it when new gear finds me. And so when my interests are known, and there are things that I can control, if I don’t want to be known for this, I can turn it off. For a business that’s super valuable, right? Because not only can you we want to be places where folks have high intent, right? Meaning they want I want to go to I want to go to dinner right now or, you know, next week or to your point, like, Man, I’m hungry for Indian food, like, what can I find around me? So that’s Google Maps, Google search, you know, some of this specific restaurant spots, like, you know, Uber Eats and, and others right there. So we want to be there. Right? So that’s, that’s an important place to be. But how do you place the intent? How do you create the intent? Well, it’s through this serendipity that I talked about where you’re using the right data telling instructing the platform’s to match it against the people that are likely to want to come in, you know, in the next day or week or month, right, and to pull them in when they otherwise wouldn’t have come and so it’s kind of like Inception. I think about it, you know, like the movie Inception, like, like we’re planting the seed that sparks the desire to come in. into the restaurant. And, by the way, it takes multiple touches in multiple channels. You know, there’s a bunch of research in the E commerce space that it takes, you know, 15 to 18 touches across platforms for a given customer in order to get them to buy a product, right? And so, so So you have to be kind of we talked about locally omnipresent, and it doesn’t have to cost a ton of money. If you’re doing it the right way. It can be really efficient, cost wise, but, but but it can can really drive your business.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
20:29
Well talk to me a little bit about. So there’s a couple, there’s a whole bunch of thoughts I have on them. The first thing is, is you’re in the real estate space, real estate is a once every seven tenure activity. Restaurants are not. They are weekly, they are daily for a lot of people, they’re multiple times a day for a lot of people, I guess how was the paradigm had to shift for you, your team, going from real estate where I might be buying a new home every seven years to buying pizza from this brand or that brand? Tuesday? Talk to me a little bit about how you guys normalize that. And I guess just even the different frame of mind because it sounds like it. To me, it seems like they’re just different. They’re different ways to have to go skin, the skin the same onion.
MM
Matthew Marx
21:12
Yeah, I mean, I think that cost per purchases is is pretty different, right? So so you know what you spend. So the economics of the of the consumer are different. When you know when you’re making $20 versus you’re making, you know, $200,000 $20,000, right, so, so the economics are different, but at it at a unit level, really the marketing and at a tactical level, the marketing is very much the same. The real estate companies are all trying to trying to transition and transitioning into a lifecycle life style lifecycle marketing mode. And that may be why you continue to get marketing from Zillow, after you had sold, there’s some delay in the home industry of like there was actually a transaction and that there’s some footing of that that has to take place. But But frankly, a lot of the a lot of the the brokerages and agents out there hours are starting to lifecycle market because they don’t want to want to done they want to maintain the best teams and real estate agents in real estate maintain a relationship with customers, and they’re digitally present. So
JJ
Jeremy Julian
22:17
first reasons that I bought I bought from the same person in California,
MM
Matthew Marx
22:20
you’re rare, you’re super rare, right? Because I think it’s like the stats say it’s 9010 rule, or 90 90% of the folks do not buy more than once from the same
JJ
Jeremy Julian
22:31
realtor region. Right. Interesting. That’s I bought from a different agent here in Texas, because they you know, they weren’t licensed. I tried to get my loan from the same person. You know, but they weren’t licensed in Texas. So you know, the person that was that was servicing my home loan and Southern California. And fortunately, he you know, he gave us he gave me somebody that was good here and, and they got a service. But that’s ironic. I didn’t even I wouldn’t have considered that because of my own personal experience.
MM
Matthew Marx
22:54
Yeah. And he and that’s loyalty. Right? And so that’s what we strive for across industries, right? It’s independent of industry across industries, right, whether, you know, we have lots of mortgage, mortgage partners and insurance partners and, and, you know, of course, real estate firms and in some restaurants. As we’re spinning up in the restaurant industry, loyalty is the same across these industries. It’s just, you know, in some cases like real estate, it’s more difficult because you’re you have to create a reason to interact. Probably everyone on this call has gotten local market statistics emails right for your local home or your home or the door
JJ
Jeremy Julian
23:30
hangers, you know, all these homes sold in these these neighborhoods, that’s that’s super local, you know, rightly
MM
Matthew Marx
23:36
totally, I mean, that’s the example or the parallel to your local restaurant your location sending out marketing on a on a on an you know, every week basis, right, always having something running and then always having the the promotion the digital promotion and pulling people in. That’s the That’s the equivalent because the cycles are much shorter in restaurants, but the concept is the same right? You want to maintain a connection with the customer, so they don’t go to the next competitive restaurant around the corner they think of me first. My kids think of the subway when they drive down the street every time because subways in front of them with local marketing in Tik Tok. Right and they’re my daughter orders has ordered from our partner Smoothie King out of Tik Tok online ordering so that Tik Tok came the tiktoks from the local Smoothie King restaurant came to her and she was 15 at the time and click the button and they delivered the smoothies to the house right? Oh, wow. So that the whole world is changing around us. And we have to be digitally present at our local level. So that folks are always thinking about us all the time. It’s more important in restaurants even with the shorter cycle times than it is in in real estate. Well, and
JJ
Jeremy Julian
24:47
the amount of competition that’s there is greater than it ever has been. And unfortunately and one of the things I often say on this is if you’re not doing it, I promise you, your competitors are figuring out a way to do it. And so before we talk a little bit about the franchise more cuz I love that you guys are getting down to not just, oh, I’m solid Smoothie King and they, you know they do you know, they’re 2000 stores or whatever they are, or 800 stores, whatever that number is you’re going to the local guy and helping with that. Talk to me a little bit about attribution. And even this whole idea, like the big buzzword in restaurants right now is CDP. And there’s a lot of misnomer about CDP and you being from, you know, the E commerce world. And even you know, previously, you probably chuckled, because you’re like, yeah, that we’ve been doing this forever on that side. But restaurants are finally getting around to it. Historically, restaurants marketing was, I’m gonna place an ad, I’m gonna hope somebody comes in. And I’m only going to look at it and say to traffic go up, or traffic go down, and sales go up, or sales go down. I would do these Alexios two or three times a year and hope that I got the MC rib sold enough to make up for the campaigns that I did, and they didn’t really have any idea. So talk to me a little bit about your vision on CDP for restaurants because again, tying ecommerce to brick and mortar sales is getting easier and easier. But it’s not there completely.
MM
Matthew Marx
26:00
Yeah. Well it by the way that continue your like, you know, kind of riff on on the way things have been in restaurants, right? Like, we’re targeting DMA level and, and you know, like broad messaging and like, Great your brand mark is in front of it. Meanwhile, me as a franchisee I’m paying market development funds, like I’m funding that and I’m saying like, what did it do for me? What is that? What does that actually doing? Right? Like?
JJ
Jeremy Julian
26:27
Are they marketed a smart strawberry smoothie to me and I’m allergic to strawberries, and I’ve never ordered a strawberry smoothie ever. But that’s the new thing that that corporate came up with? Sorry, I don’t mean to cut you off. But
MM
Matthew Marx
26:39
yeah, no, I’m totally with you. Right. And like, that’s what we can get away with. I’ll talk talk about cdbs a minute because they’re really important, right? But like, the, that’s what we’re trying to get away from right, which is given that the local franchisee, who who depends on it’s their livelihood, who depends on the business to come in every day to the store, they’re paying for staff, they’re paying for ingredients, they have spoilage concerns, right? When we have access kale, we need to liquidate, we need to run kale smoothie promotions and get people to come in the store and walk out with the kale smoothie. Otherwise, that kills gonna spoil. That’s a real world concern at the franchise level. And no amount of DNA level marketing and brand marketing through my market development funds are going to do anything for that. Right. So so I’m, I get on it. Like,
JJ
Jeremy Julian
27:27
I love it. Because I think it’s I think it’s it’s something that people look to every day, back in the old days before there was chains, the fish special got written on the chalkboard at the front of the dining restaurant, because you knew that you had you had to kill the salmon off, or it was gonna go bad in the next two days. Yeah, you know, and so you’re doing that, but broadcasting it to an audience of 10,000 people to hope to get 100 people to come in and order that, you know, order the cable to get rid of the kill for that, that period or whatever that whatever the timeframe is.
MM
Matthew Marx
27:56
Yeah, totally. I mean, again, that’s, that’s, that’s what franchisees have told us, they want, right? Stop spending my money. There’s some amount of brand national marketing, that works as a part of a full funnel strategy, but like, give me the visibility to know where my dollars are working and where they’re not and what to do with them right and make it easy. So I don’t spend too much time trying to figure out how to become a marketing expert. Like, that’s what the franchisees tell us. And that’s what we’re hearing same thing we heard in, in the other industries, right. So CPS, CPS had been a pretty big thing for the last five, you know, five, six years, as you mentioned in any common in, you know, we we’ve worked in the the airlines and travel industry, some and so they’ve been pretty widely deployed, their venture capitalist has an investment in some CDP technology. And so, so we’re pretty close to it all. We also integrate pretty tightly in a lot of industries with CDP’s. So if you think about like, again, we’re the activation of your data. Yep. CDP’s are the collection of your data? So CDP’s? are, how do I take this data? That’s kind of hard to work with before and siloed in different systems? And how do I pull it together in one place? So it’s actionable CDP’s are merged in in EECOM, and travel and some other industries, for the use in the first use cases or email marketing, right? So it’s like, okay, great. Now I pulled all my customers together, and I can segregate them into different slices. And now I can email them in different ways. Great, right, like email has a different place in the puzzle. But so does reaching people in platforms where they’re spending the most of their time. Because if you’re trying to reach a demographic that’s younger than 30 they’re not spending a whole lot of time in their email every day.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
29:35
Right? Believe me? Yeah, I’ve got I’ve got teenage kids as Do you. And it’s like, I’m like, dude, yeah. Have you seen the last four emails I’ve sent you? And they look at me and go dead. Just send me a text or send me a Snapchat. I’m like, I want to put you in your head. So sorry. But we know and, and unfortunately, brands are not thinking about that because they’re run by people that are our age and older. So
MM
Matthew Marx
29:55
I know man, I have the gray hair. So I’m a part of the club. But I tried to um, Try not to be a part of the problem. So the so email has its place, but CDP’s are bigger than that. Really, it’s like it’s a, it’s a clearing ground. It’s a nice starting point for like, I think about it like the, this is a super non, like, environmentally friendly example. But I think about the like, they’re the oil, right? And so you’re, you’re like refining the oil and getting it set up and tanks and right. And it’s like, okay, but that doesn’t make me any money yet. Right? So it’s good. It’s a necessary but not sufficient part of my marketing strategy, then it’s okay, what do I do with it, email is one activation. And we take in structure, we take part of our data streams, part of our data streams are from point of sale as part of the data streams or from loyalty, whatever data streams are from inventory systems, part of your data streams can be from CDP’s, to go and find new people that actually make you money at the end of the day, because, but CDP’s are definitely I mean, they were foundational bit to your to your core infrastructure, there are three or four of them, the technology bits that you have to kind of have, and you want to choose the right partners that have an open ecosystem, or they have API’s, and they have ways to integrate. So it’s easy, they’re either pre integrated, or they have ways to integrate your data to them and get your data out.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
31:12
So that you can have a campaign that goes out and drives the kale smoothie, to drive that behavior. I love it. But I’m going to ask you to riff a little bit, I’m going to ask you to boast a little bit about what you guys are doing. Because I think the whole local concept and giving the tools to the franchisee to both build campaigns that are automated, because I think there’s some that you guys do that, that makes their life easier. Because if it’s if it’s really a tool and I’ve heard this too many times that they have to go into the office or they have to go create this whole thing and they go get the the LTO from corporate and they put it into this tool and and it just doesn’t end up happening. And then they’re pissed because it didn’t work or they’re spending all this money on their market, MDF funds and, and the market marketing development funds and it’s gone. 2% of their sales have gone off the corporate, they don’t know where it’s going. Talk to me a little bit about how you’re making restaurant tours, life’s easier to drive the traffic that they want and need in order to continue to thrive and continue to grow and continue to support their family and such.
MM
Matthew Marx
32:13
Yeah, totally. So again, I feel I love the way the way you ended that with support support their family and like that’s really what it is at the local level. Right and so, so again, that’s why I get back to the where I get all fired up earlier on transparency and like where are the dollars going because I actually think it’s a it’s a pretty big franchise development opportunity for franchisors to be able to give visibility and coordinate marketing with their franchisees a transparent so you can see where the dollars are going could see how they’re working to see how you compare to the next location up the road in Plano, right or down here in Austin right from where you are and so so I think like to me that the opportunity is not just not just for the franchisee it’s also for the franchise or the corporate to have a differentiator that like, Hey, I’m gonna treat my franchisee as a partner in this thing. And I’m not going to black box their marketing dollars, I’m going to work with them together and be super transparent with them. So so to get to your point about the personal nature of of this and its impact on on the franchisee I mean, to me, franchisees, they want control, but they don’t want to spend hours and hours a week they can’t they don’t have the time, right and they don’t want to become marketing PhD experts. Right? They don’t even understand what the hell of CTP is like at a franchise, franchise level. My Store Location, I’m so busy, like staffing up and recruiting and, you know, trying to get my restaurant order and writing
JJ
Jeremy Julian
33:42
scheduled ordering product. Yeah, producing food, all of it. Yeah. And the leak in the roof, all of it.
MM
Matthew Marx
33:49
Totally. So. So I think you know, the key is to any product, not just not just not just ours, right is how do you make things, either fully automated 100% or so easy that you can push a button and then and then just look at it look at a report glance at a dashboard once in a while and say like, Okay, what’s it doing for me or just watch the turnstile coming in and in what’s happening kind of, you know, in the front of the restaurant. And so, so so to me, that’s kind of the principle we’ve been told very distinctly from franchisees and frankly, practitioners at the local level across industries we want easy and we want effective programs that are transparent. That’s what we want, right? And so you can’t as a franchisee really do that on your own. Right? There are there are a few options that franchisees have when they’re looking at these problems on their own. Right. So one, this is a little bit of a quick shameless plug, and then I’ll get back to like problem solving.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
34:43
Honestly, at the end of the day there. There’s people that do what you guys do, but I think you guys are you guys have some stuff that’s pretty unique, that truly take some of the friction out of what people are doing. Part of why I was excited to talk with you guys, is you guys have created some level of automation. There’s tools that do what you guys do, but it require you to build campaigns. do a whole bunch of work and upload a bunch of photos and, and all of that you guys have like taken some of that friction out. And I want you to shameless. I want you to plug what you guys are doing, because I think it’s it’s really worthwhile for people to understand what’s possible today. Yeah, well, we found in the
MM
Matthew Marx
35:13
business because the the local business again, I talked about the founding story a little bit, but that local business operator, they they do one of three things today, they do nothing digitally, right. Or they’re doing doing simplistic things that really, they’re just checking the box like organic social posting, again, it’s fine to do, but you don’t really count on it to drive a bunch of business, right? At the end of the day, you’re not using it as an economic engine, you’re using it as kind of being active in the in the space, an increase in increasingly fewer people. It’s a misnomer. But fewer and fewer people are seeing those posts because the platform’s are trying to make money. So they don’t let organic propagation you just showed you the last thing I saw from businesses was 1% of people that even follow your page, let alone other people see those organic posts. So So that’s the second thing they do. Or the third, they hire an expensive kind of local agency, digital agency that’s trying to figure out what to do for them. And so those are kind of the, you know, three of the main options that folks go through and so for, for us, and those local agencies don’t really have access to data, right, because they’re doing pretty pictures. And they’re trying to figure out like using, you know, channel audiences and things like that. But what we’re trying to do is a little different, right, which is we’ve spent, you know, more than $30,000,000.07 years building this automation ecosystem and infrastructure that wires directly into these the most performant digital marketing channels. So there’s not a human in the middle, right that like, like the franchisee can press a button, we have safeguards around it data is all wired in already, in in a program can launch because some of these programs are time sensitive, you can’t wait for it to submit to some, you know, human desk in the Philippines, which is what most folks do in the space, and then wait for someone to like, type it into Facebook, like it doesn’t business moves faster than that, right? Especially if you have to update pricing if every imagery, your customers changing or inventories changing, like you have to has to be automated. So that’s one, two, you don’t you don’t want to figure out how to go from one channel to the next you need to be an all channels is the answer. And that’s not easy to hear. If you’re trying to do things manually, right? How long does it take me to go in Facebook and in run marketing, and then go in Google Search, and then Google discovery ads and Google Display. And then let me go over to tick tock and create a tick tock real tick tock video and create an Instagram real and then maybe I’m running something on Uber Eats or you know, Amazon, right, and so like, it’s just too much. So what we do is the franchisor sets up, ready made programs that can be fully automated, or they can be you know, some press button, make some decisions at the local level. And then the franchisee gets those in a little dashboard and can just make a few simple choices. We use machine learning. I don’t want to reuse that because people get too much. Yeah, yeah, so but we use machine learning to figure out what channel to reach people on. So you don’t have to think about that. Because frankly, the audience is different in LA than it is, you know, in Kansas City, right than it is in Austin. The channels you reach the consumer is different based on the type of food you have the price of the food that you have. And so it’s just really hard to make this decision at a corporate group, let alone at a local operator. So we’re just take a do it for you approach and make it like why are all this stuff in for you. And those are things that location just can’t do on their own. Like even if you had the 30 or 40 or 50 hours to spend on trying to figure out how to do that every week. It’s just like, it’s not the not the right use of your time, and you don’t don’t really have the data to make it happen.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
38:51
Yep, ya know, same argument that we have about point of sale, yes, go make cheeseburgers will solve your point of sale problems, you guys are getting problems. And you know, I’m not going to come in and tell you how to make a cheeseburger don’t tell me how to want to sell company, you know. So one thing that I always worry about with demand gen is too much. Restaurants are finite, physical space is finite kitchens are finite. Inventory is finite, you know, you know, labor is hard to come by and we run an ad and we drive these kale smoothies and then and then we don’t people to produce them now that you get to bed guest experience. And oftentimes on the show, we talk a lot about guests experience in delivering good guest experience because at the end of the day, good guest experience brings people coming back. And when they come back, they tell their friends and and such and such and such and so talk to me a little bit about about that problem. And I guess have you guys even overcome it? Have you guys dealt with it? Talk to me a little bit about that, you know, even in third party, you know, UberEATS and Grubhub and DoorDash and such, they struggle with it from time to time to where it’s too much demand and then it’s binary. It’s like we either turn off or turn it on and it’s just you know, again, not Delivering other guests experience if you guys had to overcome this ship. Yeah, I
MM
Matthew Marx
40:03
mean, this is kind of a lot of what we’re all about. Because, you know, in order to do that, and I talk a lot about data, and you mentioned CDP’s. But like, we think about inventory systems, we think about Point of Sale data, too, right? So if you’re, if you don’t have access to point of sale data, to orient yourself and historical point of sale data to understand, you know, times a day, days a week and trends and throughput, right, then then you can automate that you have to have your people or you right at the local franchise level go, I need some more people are like, you know, pullback on marketing. So we’re trying to do we give those options to folks. So if they want to press demand, they can click a button, it spawns the band, but we really more and more are doing, you know, the franchisor will lay out a series of automations, where they they’ve already wired in inventory data, they’ve already wired and demand data, they’ve already wired in for every location, like what is what are the sales data look like day a week? And then And then so the system just automatically adapts to that and looks at, you know, when do we need to push them in? And when do we not push demand and promotions can be triggered based on again, other things like inventory levels? And, you know, one of the things but if you don’t have a connection, that’s what talking about these agencies are fine, right? Like, I don’t want to bash agencies are good for like creative development, some of these things, but they don’t if you don’t have they don’t have connection to your data, they can’t do what you’re talking about. You have to be connected to the pause. Right? You have to because otherwise, you don’t know what’s going on. And you’re just relying on the operator again, and they don’t have time to do it.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
41:38
And even if they do they Yeah, yeah, again, even if they do, they don’t quite understand what all of that means. And oftentimes, they’re even, you know, your your absentee owner, you’re on vacation, you’re at the lake, and now you’re now your manager is sitting there on their hands, not driving the volume that you might need to so man, I’m gonna ask you one last piece, and then we’re gonna wrap up, because we’re getting close to time. What is the engagement look like with your team? What’s a brand that you know, what’s a brand that I’m gonna call your team? I’m gonna start working with your team to figure out what this looks like. What’s the onboarding look like? How long does it take to get the setup? Am I you know, is it like signing up for a rental car, and I’m just going online and putting my name in and put my data in? You know, I’m sure there’s some level of engagement. Talk to me a little bit about about what that might look like for a brand. That’s that’s sitting there listening, going, you know what? I have to have this? Where do I go figure out how to get my kale smoothies out the door? Let me get on the phone with these guys. What can they expect when they engage with your team?
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Matthew Marx
42:34
First of all, if you have to have it tomorrow, you can email us at sales at e vocalised.com. Hit us up in LinkedIn hit me up at Matt Eddie vocalised.com ma TT. So just,
JJ
Jeremy Julian
42:46
you know, you should send me a check. And I’ll make your problem go away. But
MM
Matthew Marx
42:50
we loved it. We’d love to partner with great with with great brands, obviously. It’s what we’re here to do. And but in terms of engagements, it can be like super turnkey, or it can be it can be super customized. So the way and I hate it depends answers. So what we have, we have a client success team that that works with you and an onboarding process and team that will work with you to look at when we do this, frankly, from the conversations up front in the sales process, all the way through the process, we look at like a queue, which of these we have some best practices, we call them blueprints, but programs that can be driven by your data, and that and we have some benchmarking data around them. So we’ll come with an opinion. We’re not saying hey, tell us what to do. And we’ll go do it right, we’re coming with an opinion, which I feel very strongly about, as a software solution provider, right? Like come with an opinion. So we come with an opinion. And then you kind of can choose from menu or you can decide, hey, I want something different, right. For instance, we have some restaurant partners that we’ve talked a lot about sales and a lot about demand generation, we have some restaurant partners that said we want to we want to recruit, we want to recruit through through your tool, and we want to let the local franchisees have a button that allows them to go and solicit recruiting and staffing needs. And so we we built blueprints, we built programs that again, are driven by data, and that that allow recruiting and so we have some some kind of things that you can get up off the shelf best practices, and then we have a very, one of the strengths of our technology is the ability to very quickly modify things because what we want to do is not have this is not a one size fits all deal. Your data is different than everyone else’s data, your brand is different than everyone else’s brand. And so we want to have the system at the end of the day that your franchisees are using or that you’re using at corporate to drive local marketing, be unique to your brand. And so we’ve designed our whole technology that so not that not to forget about this. You know, the implementations are as quick as about a week, week and a half for pretty turnkey solutions, wiring in a bunch of specific data that you have as a as a as a Restaurant Group that that isn’t already integrated into our system that could take as much as you know, 456 weeks. We’re not talking about
JJ
Jeremy Julian
45:06
easily accessible it is and all of that. Yeah. And again, more so than anything people are like. I heard that guy, Matt, and he’s awesome. Now what? And I’m like, okay, you know, get on the phone talk to them, they’ll start to understand what your needs are. And I guess I would encourage you guys all to consider rewinding by about two minutes to to listen to Matt talk about even recruiting. Because one of the biggest challenges I continue to hear from restaurants is staffing, staffing, staffing. I’ve been at four different restaurants in the last two weeks for different corporate offices in the last few weeks. And I like staffing is our biggest challenge. And I’m thinking myself, you guys are marketing, I see a bunch of marketing about that. But you’re not marketing your jobs and your availability of those jobs. It’s the same problem. It’s the same getting enough traffic enough eyeballs to see that that’s available to say yes, I want to click the link to go connect to it, versus going in and ordering the kale smoothie and having it delivered to your house for your daughter. So
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Matthew Marx
45:56
my 16 year old daughter who I just mentioned is looking for jobs right and so she wants Tiktok like you come to her Tiktok and say you know cheese but pretty good student like she’d be a good employee for someone right and so but she doesn’t know where to start, right? She doesn’t she doesn’t go to read a sign on the side of a restaurant. She’s She’s She’s that’s not where she looks. She’s living in tick tock. Right. And so. So anyway, yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And that’s actually frontier stuff. Like that’s we do a lot of that and other industries, but restaurants just getting started on that.
JJ
Jeremy Julian
46:27
Yeah, I heard it at RLC restaurant Leadership Conference in, you know, earlier this year, people were talking about it, they were saying, Have you turned your marketing engine away from consumers, and straight to staffing, because you guys keep talking about this, but you’ve got some pent up talent in your office that has not done a good job of, you know, they’ll talk about building the brand and making it sexy that people want to apply but go do your CTA that says apply today to come work here. Go figure out what your demographic is and go after those people.
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Matthew Marx
46:56
Yeah, 100% 100% a lot. So
JJ
Jeremy Julian
46:59
I’m, I truly am fascinated. I feel like I get the catbird seat to learn about all of the newest cool things that are going on. And so I’m oftentimes a student and so thank you for for sharing. I know our audience is going to just love and many of them are gonna eat this stuff up. So I would expect that you guys would get some phone calls because there’s some people that are that are excited to do this. To our audience, guys. We know that you guys have got lots of choices. As I said, if you haven’t already done so. subscribe to the newsletter. Subscribe to the YouTube channels, subscribe to the podcast, whatever your consumption method of choices. Matt, thank you so much for your time. I’m looking forward to connecting in person to our audience. Make it a great day. Thanks, Jeremy.
I
Intro
47:41
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