Category: Uncategorized

The more your customers hear from you, the more they’ll think of you.

But you don’t want to annoy them with boring, pointless content.

You want to send them emails that they see value in, so then they’ll look out for your next one.

In addition to that, sending valuable emails at the right time resonates more with customers at the right stage.

Here are some ideas for email content based on each stage of your customer’s decision-making process.

Holidays

You can be sure that your competitors are creating a unique offer for an upcoming holiday such as a pre-fixe course for 2 for Valentine’s Day, or a full family course for Christmas.

This is your chance to show off what you want to do for the upcoming holiday.

Did you know that there are holidays for most food ingredients and dishes?

You can replace the date with any date you’d like to see what holiday it is.

The full list will certainly help you expand your ideas for content and unique offerings that no one else is doing!

Events

Do you have an upcoming event? Events can range from anything between Trivia Tuesdays or Fish-O-Filet Fridays. They can also be once a year events that you hold for your best customers only! Talk about VIP service!

In addition to your own events, you can announce what events are happening in the local area. In addition incredibly huge events like 626 Night Market or Coachella, you can let customers know about more low key events that they would have never heard about.

I mostly use Facebook to find local events. You can also type “[City Name] Events” into Google and you will get local publications and event sites to show you what is upcoming and going on nearby.

These announcements are the best when you have an affiliation with the event such as sponsoring the event or having a booth at the event. Let customers know to support the community just like you did!

Birthday/Anniversary

If you have your customer’s birthdate, go ahead and wish them a Happy Birthday! It’s certainly better than not saying Happy Birthday at all.

If you’d like to add even more value to the email, give them a little birthday gift. Birthday gifts can range from a dollar amount, percentage off, or free birthday dessert!

Offers like that usually entice them to come in and bring their friends for a meal. Talk about referrals!

Sports

Is there going to be a big game? Or do you want to track local sports fans to watch their favorite team? Let customers know that you’ll be putting it on your big screen.

If you don’t have a TV, let customers know you have WiFi so they can watch it on their devices while they enjoy your food, drinks, or discounts.

New Dishes & Menu Changes

Thinking about refreshing your menu? Is your chef thinking about some new recipes. Let your customers know that something new is coming!

You can also send follow up emails letting them know about the progress of new menu items and dishes.

Want to get really engaging? Ask them to vote on which dish they want on the menu more. This ensures that your new dish will be a valuable addition to your menu.

You can use this voting software or even a free Google forms.

Staff Spotlight

Have a new hire? Let your email subscribers know about them! The next time they come in, they’ll be wondering if the person is there.

Want to get creative? You can do a “where’s waldo” campaign where if the customer spots the new hire, they can get a free something.

You can also include in this email applications for people looking for jobs, and even ask your current email subs to refer you people who are looking for jobs!

Delivery Discounts

Do you partner with any delivery companies like UberEATS, DoorDash, ChowNow, or Eat24? Some of them offer their own discounts. You can promote their first time delivery discounts that most of them do.

For example, UberEATS usually has a $10 first time discount.

Credit Card Discounts

Credit cards usually have great rewards systems. You can feature some of their rewards systems, especially the ones that pay back real good.

Chase Freedom usually has a 5% cash back that rotates on categories every month. One of those categories happens to be restaurants. Woohoo!

Another one of the categories happens to be gas stations. You can get creative with your messaging saying that your customers should take advantage of the cash back by driving further to you!

Reviews/Press

Show off what the most influential people say about you. Did an review from a Yelp Elite come in? Share it! Did a popular publication feature your restaurant? Share it! Sharing these will slowly let your customer know that other people like your restaurant, so they’re more likely to visit.

At the end of these emails, you can link your customers to the actual review site so they can check out other reviews, or even write their own review!

Loyalty program

People joined your loyalty program so that they can get perks from your restaurant. You should send them updates on what offers they have currently available.

If they don’t have any offers available, tell them how close they are to the next offer.

Do they have some offers expiring? Send them that information too and create some urgency for them to come in soon.

Franchise Leads

Are your thinking about or currently franchising? A bulk of franchise partners come from happy customers who are also big spenders.

Social

Do you have any of this content already on your social media? You should send a short email out letting people know about your social content. This will help you get more activity on social networks.

Celebrity visits

Did a celebrity visit your restaurant? You must let your customers know that celebrities hear about your restaurant and choose to go! If they happen to love that celebrity, they’re bound to make their way back.

Your Own Discounts & Coupons

You may have noticed that I kept discounts as the last thing you should email customers about, and I did it for good reason. You do not want to get your customers into the habit of experiencing your restaurant at a discounted price. Then, they will only go to your restaurant when you are offering discounts.

The only way this will work is if you overprice your menu and put the real prices on an All Day Happy Hour, which will always make the customer feel like they are getting a good Happy Hour deal.

Now that you have more ideas for your email content, what do you think is stopping you from sending out your next email?

People are more and more cautious about giving their email away. If you ask them for it, they always ask back: “What are you going to send me?”

They don’t want spam and they don’t want irrelevant emails.

The restaurants that are able to acquire their customers’ emails are the ones that get the most return customers.

And it’s those restaurants that are able to stay in business because those customers just keep coming back.

So how do those restaurants get their customers to be comfortable giving out their email addresses?

I’ll be going through every way a restaurant can collect emails from their customers.

Beware of surprise: some of these e-mail collecting tactics are right in front of you and you could have emails in databases that you aren’t even using!

Methods of Collecting Emails

Being a foodie and all, I’ve been to a lot of restaurants in my life. Most restaurants don’t make any effort to collect email addresses from customers. Big mistake. But the ones that do, they think of these ways. These are the most common ways I’ve seen restaurants collect emails:

1. Clipboard
2. Bowl/Fishbowl
3. Tablet/Device
4. Text Message Signup
5. Website

How To Let Customers Know

1. Posters/Signs
2. Table Tent
3. Servers/Staff
4. Survey
5. Partnering with other businesses or community members
6. Search engines
7. Social media
8. Events

Increasing Conversion Rate w/ an offer

1. Sweepstakes
2. Photo contest
3. Giveaway
4. Birthday Club
5. Anniversary Club

Collecting Emails Naturally

1. Mobile app
2. Loyalty program
3. Reservations
4. POS system

Which way will you implement in your restaurant?

The Ultimate Guide To Yelp Marketing: How To Make The Most Out Of Things You Hate (The Yelp Marketing Funnel)

People live and die by ratings and reviews when selecting places to go and products to buy.

You know your product or service serves a specific demographic, but some people outside of that demographic try your product or service, and with different expectations.

It is because of this that people view your business differently online. Only the upset people are reviewing your business while your happiest customers don’t have anything to rant about.

For example, if your business appeals to the baby boomer market (people born between 1946 and 1964), then those people aren’t very likely to review on Yelp.

In addition to that, if someone in the younger generation experiences your business, but isn’t fond of how “old school” the ambiance of your place is, they’ll throw you a review which would totally misrepresent what your typical customers think.

The good news is, even in this case, you can still benefit from Yelp.

This Is What Yelp Was Made For

With over 145 million monthly visitors, the local search giant has definitely made a name for itself amongst consumers.

I have to be quite honest myself, I love using Yelp from a customer standpoint. I’m definitely a foodie and I’m always thinking of what to eat for dinner, when it’s only breakfast time.

But I often find myself not even knowing what I’m craving. That is when I use Yelp: to help inspire my stomach.

When using Yelp, I’m very sensitive to ratings. Anything that is 4.5 stars or above automatically attracts my attention. It gets to the point where, when I search for restaurants in my area, I scroll through the whole list looking for 4.5 star rated restaurants before even considering any of the 4 stars.

I keep those 4.5 star rated restaurants in mind, then I restart the same exact search to look at other restaurants I might be interested in.

I also use filters such as “Hot & New” and “Most Reviewed” to see what is new and what is the most popular.

These are the search habits of someone who

1. wants to eat the most delicious food and receive the best service possible when it comes to value for dollar
2. has been on the other side of Yelp reviews – someone that manages Yelp profiles for other businesses.

I wanted to make one more very very important point that I have been disappointed by 4.5 star rated restaurants, and many times have been very impressed by 3-4 star rated restaurants, which I’ve visited purely from recommendations by friends or what I’ve seen on social media.

With that being said, regardless of your rating and how you rank on Yelp, your listing will always get traffic from people checking you out before they visit your business.

What People Do On Your Yelp Profile

If you know me by now, you know my general concept of internet marketing. To refresh your memory, I believe that the purpose of every marketing campaign should be to help move your potential customer forward in their journey towards purchasing from your business. Your campaigns don’t necessarily need to hit home runs.

One big benefit Yelp gives local businesses is their ability to give searchers, with different levels of interests, actions to perform based on said level of interest.

[YELP FUNNEL]

For example, at the customer awareness level, customers can check out pictures and reviews that other Yelpers have uploaded. If they like what they see, they can, at the very least, bookmark your listing to save for the next opportunity they have to visit.

Beyond that, Yelp users have the option of making what I call micro-commitments such as visiting your website to learn more about you, getting directions to your location, sending you a message, and even calling your business directly.

All leading up to the highest commitment levels which are making reservations or buying deals and gift certificates. Instant revenue or revenue forecasts for you!

Here is the full list of customer actions which Yelp allows business owners to measure:

What most business owners don’t realize is that there is only one action you want your customer to take – and what Yelp doesn’t offer customers to do. It has even more value than someone making a reservation or purchasing a deal.

What could be more beneficial than making a sale?

After all, sales are the lifeblood of your business. No sales, no way to pay off loans, pay employee wages, pay yourself, and support your family.

Integrating Yelp Into Your Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy that is PROactive is better that is REactive. Let me explain.

On Yelp, you are relying on people to think “I’m hungry!” or “I’m bored!” before starting their journey towards a visit or purchase.

However, on other marketing platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Email, you are proactively providing ideas to customers. Given that your ideas are personalized and trustworthy ideas, this form of marketing allows you to drive traffic and generate sales on demand.

The missing piece to these marketing platforms is the traffic generation.

Too many times, I’ve seen people posting on their Facebook and Instagram business pages, expecting everyone on Facebook and Instagram to see the post and get customers in their store.

That’s not how it works. You need to build communities on these platforms.

For example, you need Page Likes on Facebook. You need followers on Instagram. You need emails to email people.

The bigger your business’s community is on these platforms, the more people will be aware of your content.

So what is one way to drive traffic and gain community members on these platforms? We can get traffic from Yelp.

There’s a rule on Yelp that you can’t put another social media page as your website link because they are technically competitors. However, there is a way around this rule.

When Yelp asks you to type in your website, what do you think they are asking for?

They could be asking you for the homepage of your website.

However, what I think they are asking me is: What web page do you want the people who find you on Yelp to go to?

So I usually put a landing page that gives the customer to join my email newsletter club, like me on Facebook, or follow me on Instagram.

Here’s an example:

From this page alone without any incentive, I get at 16.76% opt-in rate. That means if you have 100 people clicking on your website per month, you’ll get 16-17 more email subscribers that you can update on new products, services, and promotions whenever you’d like!

Getting More Traffic To Your Yelp Page

ON DEMAND.

Kind of like when you want to watch a TV show, you can turn on your cable box, open your Netflix app, or even search on Youtube.

Imagine having that flexibility and power for your business.

First thing’s first –

[with great power, comes great responsibility]

That’s right. If you use your powers for evil, like spamming, you probably won’t see any results.

They can save your place for future reference by bookmarking and visit your website to learn even more about you.

They can even directly interact with you by sending you a message on Yelp

But you didn’t get into business thinking you could just develop the best product or provide the best service and think it would sell itself.

Yelp has created quite a name for themselves over the years.

Sure, they dominate the space of local search, especially in the restaurant space. However, it’s not secret that restaurant owners can’t stand the existence of Yelp.

When it comes to getting the most out of your marketing messaging, you must first know who the recipient of each marketing message is.

(often times, you want to know who your audience is first, then create a marketing message to move them forward)

The most general answer to the question would be “my customer.” However, you have many different types of customers.

Some customers are younger, some are older.

Some work a 9 to 5, some work graveyard.

Some watch Game of Thrones, some don’t. *gasp emoji

In this guide, I’ll be showing you how to create your ideal customer profile.

ANATOMY OF AN IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE

You’ve seen all the customers that have been in and out of your restaurant. From looking at them, you can gauge their age range and gender. After a couple of months, you will probably get a feel for what dominant age range and gender your business attracts.

But just because you know those two characteristics, doesn’t mean that you should target just those people.

If you want to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing, knowing those two facts aren’t enough.

Beyond demographics, which defines WHO a customer is, there are other profiling areas such as geographics, psychographics, and behaviors.

Some examples, besides the above-mentioned age and gender, of demographics include income level and education level.

Psychographics focus on WHY a customer buys. They are primarily based on a person’s ideas, values or lifestyle.

Some examples of psychographics can be people who live the gaming lifestyle, the fashionista lifestyle, or the foodie lifestyle.

Here are the profiles of each persona.

[GAMER GARY]

[FELICIA FASHIONISTA]

[FOODIE FRANK]

The above examples show just how in-depth customer profiling can be. Not only do we describe each person by their interests, but we also profile their daily schedule, what media they consume, and how they consume media.

Behavioral factors focus on HOW the customer buys. For example, if someone likes to shop, they most likely buy in person. However, if someone is a techie, they probably use their computer and e-commerce to purchase.

BUILDING AN IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE

When building an ideal customer profile, you want to imagine a previous customer who was your perfect customer. A customer that came in and did exactly what you expected him or her to do, such as:

From look:

Age
Gender
Clothes
With someone, relationship?
Rushed or patient?

From conversation:

Accent
Well-spoken or not
What kind of conversation? Small talk? Deep talk?

If you need a refresher on who some of your customers are, you can find them on Instagram using this strategy.

While you are thinking of your ideal customer, fill out this ideal customer template:

[TEMPLATE]

APPLYING YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE

Now that you have built your ideal customer profile, you can now apply it towards your marketing efforts.

Remember that the purpose of each marketing campaign you run is to move your ideal customer forward in their consumer decision-making journey.

You can apply your new ideal customer profile on the following platforms:

Facebook Ads

Facebook Groups

Instagram

Pinterest

What marketing message will you be bestowing upon your new ideal customer?

We can learn a lot from our customers. That is why we like to ask our customers valuable feedback questions like how they found us, where they were coming from, and where they are going after their meal.

 

We like to build relationships with our customers so that the next time they think about dining out…

 

Not only do they think about our delicious food and attentive service, but they also think about us because they know us and like us.

 

But sometimes we can’t have conversations with every single customer due to our schedule-packed, mobile lifestyle.

 

Luckily, there is an alternate way to engage with and find out more about our customers at our leisure and our pace.

 

Enter location data.

 

Most community platforms like Yelp and Facebook have location data involved. However, they either don’t allow unrestricted access to the data or they don’t let you freely engage with the content attached to that location data.

 

The one platform I can think of that lets you do both is…

 

Instagram.

 

We are going to use Instagram as our main source of gathering customer data.

 

Our first order of business is to find the page that contains our restaurant’s location data.

 

First, we have to check if we have a Local Business Page on Facebook.

 

Instagram now uses Facebook Places data for their Instagram location data.

 

Go to Facebook and type your restaurant name in the search bar.

 

Look for your business under the “Places” section.

If your place is there, like Pie Bar (my favorite pie place in Seattle), you are good to go.

 

Now, open your browser and go to Google. Search using this formula:

 

[Your Facebook Place Name] + [Your Restaurant’s City] + “Instagram”

 

So, if you are Pie Bar in Seattle, you would search “Pie Bar Seattle Instagram” without the quotation marks.

When you make that search, you are looking for a URL in this format:

If you don’t see this URL, there could be other sites that will help you find your location page.

 

I will walk you through search results you might see that will help you find your Instagram location page.

 

3rd party Instagram page

 

These pages are websites that use Instagram data and display the data in their own format.

Here are some other 3rd party sites that I’ve noticed:

• imgrum.com
• tagram.com
• pictaram.com
• iconosquare.com
• websta.me

If you find one of these 3rd party sites but you cannot find your Instagram location page, we can still navigate to the Instagram location page.

Go into the 3rd party site. Some may need you to log in in order to use their site. Go ahead and log in.

Once you can see the location data in the site, find the username of someone that posted to that location like in any of the red boxes I’ve highlighted below.

We are going to go into that person’s Instagram profile and look for that same picture. In this example, I’ll use @elykahwaty. To go to their profile, use the URL structure:

 

https://instagram.com/(username).

In this case, it would be https://instagram.com/elykahwaty.

 

Then scroll down until you find the exact same picture as you saw on the 3rd party location page.

Aha. It was on the 3rd row from the top for me, as highlighted in red.

 

Then, go into the post and click on the Instagram location link.

After you think you have found your location page, verify it by checking a couple of things.

 

For those of you that found your location page through the mobile app, follow these instructions to get to your location on a desktop browser.

 

Check the pin on the map at the top of the page. If your restaurant is at that pin, the page is most likely for your restaurant.

Also, check the pictures that people post there. If the pictures look like they are from your restaurant, you are good to go.

 

Now that you have access to your Instagram location page, you can look through all the people that have posted content at your restaurant.

 

You will also see that most of these people are real customers because they are posting pictures of their food, picture of themselves with their friends, and basically anything relevant to their experience at your restaurant.

 

The content on a location page is separated into two sections. The first section consists of the “Most Popular” posts and the second section consists of the “Most Recent” posts.

 

The placement of “Most Popular” posts are determined by an algorithm developed by Instagram. This algorithm, from what I’ve seen, either puts posts that have a large amount of total engagement or a quick amount of engagement soon after its time of post. (Something to keep in mind if you want to make it to the “Most Popular” section of your own or other location pages.)

 

The “Most Recent” posts are sorted in chronological order starting with the most recent.

 

What we want to do here is to look through the “Most Recent” posts.

 

Before we dive deep into each of these posts, let me break down the anatomy of an Instagram post so you can better understand the terms I will be using ahead.

On the left side is the photo/video and on the right side, from top to bottom we have:

• Username
• Location
• Caption
• Comments
• Like/Comment Buttons
• Comment Field

Each piece of content has data that we can analyze, break down, and make data-driven decisions with.

 

For example, we can get a feel for the customer’s intent of posting content by analyzing the photo or video and the caption.

 

In the above content where we explain the anatomy of an Instagram post, we see that the person is describing their “desserted island” pie.

 

If you were Pie Bar, you could use this as a data point. If many people posted a picture of “the deserted island” pie, you know that the pie is popular and you can make more pies using similar flavors.

 

I found another person posting about “the desserted island.”

Looks like it really is a popular pie!

 

Alright, we’re about to get to the fun part!

 

Let’s go even deeper than the one piece of content that the person posted at our location. Click on the customer’s username on the Instagram post.

 

This will take us to their profile where we can learn more about the customer. This is what the above person’s profile looks like.

It looks like she likes to post pictures of a lot of her meals. Got pretty lucky here on our first try. We will probably be able to find other restaurants and nearby places that she has been to.

 

If you like to know where else your customer hangs out, we’re about to find out!

 

Click on the first post.

Hey! There’s location data attached to the post. Let’s click on the location.

 

It’s a nearby restaurant that serves ramen!

 

We are about to accrue a lot of data, so let’s make sure we stay organized with it.

 

I’ve made a Google Sheets template here for you that is prefilled with all the columns that we need.

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L4kBW3zpz6MLaMcMqgbaUf06rEetlGfyNOIiae27ANs/edit#gid=0

 

Let’s go to the next post. You can press the right arrow key on your keyboard to go to the next picture. Every post you see with a location, click on the location and copy the location page link the Google Sheet like so:

Be aware that some people love to tag locations and some don’t. So you might get lots of data from one users but none from another.

 

A good benchmark is to go through at least 3 months’ worth of content for each person.

 

You can see how long ago a piece of content was posted here:

Once you have gone through 3 months of content for a customer, go back to your restaurant’s location page and move on to the next most recent post, click on the person’s profile, and start getting locations from their posts again.

 

Once you have 1,000 locations on your Google Sheet, go ahead and sort the locations by name.

 

In the Google Sheet, I’ve already included a formula to highlight all the duplicate locations in yellow.

 

Now, you will be able to see the most common locations and the least common locations. This will give you a good sense of where your customers frequent the most.

 

If you know where your customers hang out, you should target that location.

From here, you can go into each location and analyze the content.

 

The goal is to engage with each piece of content, whether you are conversing with the person who posted the content, or someone else who comment on that piece of content.

 

Here is what happens with your Instagram community when you start engaging with local content that is found by gathering raw customer data. These numbers are from some restaurants that are already using this strategy:

 

So I encourage you to apply your newfound knowledge. I’ll be following up to ask you about your progress!

For the longest time:

Instagram has had a hidden search network inside its platform.

And I’m not talking about the search function within the mobile app.

I’m talking about the 8,960,000 and counting searches “Instagram” gets on search engines…

Every. Single. Month.

And if you want a piece of that traffic to your Instagram account, then it’s about time you found out how to search Instagram for relevant content and opportunities.

Today I’m going to show you how it’s done.

In this post, I’m going to show you how to target local customers that are active with nearby businesses.

The applications I will be using are:

Yelp for research.
Instagram for first touch.
Wordpress for website traffic.

I will be using the desktop versions of these applications as I find it easier to navigate and organize information on a computer rather than a mobile device.

The first step in target local customers is to visit Yelp.com.

You will be prompted to enter in two fields. The first field says “Find” and the second says “Near.” The “Find” field lets you use a keyword like a business category, service, or product. Leave this field blank.

The “Near” field lets you choose an area to search. In this field, enter your full address. Entering your full address will help you find the businesses that are closest to you by distance.

I’m at the Starbucks on Terry & Republican in Seattle right now so I will enter their address. Click on the red magnifying glass button to start your search.

Once you click search you’ll be brought to a page with search results matching your query. In the area above the search results, you will see a section where you can apply filters to alter your search results.

You can apply these filters to look for businesses with customers that closely match your ideal customer. For example, if you are a cafe and are looking for more sandwich sales, you want to find customers that buy meals at that price range. Say your sandwiches are $10-15. On Yelp, that price range is $ or $$. You can click on these two buttons to apply the filters and the search results will change based on the filters you apply.

These are the most basic filters, but you can apply advanced filters by clicking on All Filters.

When you click on this button, you will a new area with more filters will slide down.

As you can see, there are a lot of options. Some filters that I think are very helpful are in the “Features” section. Click on “More Features” to see all the options.

A pop up window will appear with all the “Features” available.

If you are a restaurant looking for more online orders, you can check on the “Order Delivery” and/or the “Order Takeout” option. If you are a dentist and looking for more patients to book appointments rather than walk in, you can check “Online Booking.”

My favorite filter is the “Hot and New” option on the 2nd column near the bottom. This shows all the new businesses in the area that have just opened and have been gaining popularity. I often use this filter to keep up with the newest, trendiest places not only for my clients, but also because I’m a foodie myself and have to try the newest, Instagrammable plates.

When you are done applying your filters, click “Search” in the “Features” box and your new search results will appear.

Now that we have a list of businesses, we are going to find the locals that are customers of these businesses. We are going to be extracting a lot of data that we will probably reuse in the future, so it’s best to keep the data that we find organized.

You can use this Google Sheet that I made to organize data that I find.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w1fOISBAeQIml_LinU4K8l_ZvRcFN_h3HHB6J95qnug/edit?usp=sharing

Start filling in the data you got from the Yelp search results into the spreadsheet. I will show you my search results below.

And now what my spreadsheet looks like from filling in the business information.

We want to build this database of nearby businesses. However, for time’s sake, let’s only fill in 10 rows of businesses on the Google Sheet so we can get to the learning the fun part – finding local customers.

In Column C of the spreadsheet, you will see a Google search query comprised of the business’s name and location.

Copy and paste this query in your browser. This query will help us find the location page for the business on Instagram. I’m going to copy and paste the Veggie Grill Seattle link into Google search. These are the search results that I get.

The result we are looking for has the URL structure like the ones highlighted in red above. It will have https://www.instagram.com followed by a /explore, /locations, then a /###### which is a number that is uniquely attached to each location in Instagram’s database.

Veggie Grill is a large restaurant chain, which is why I am getting multiple instances of that link. Let’s click into each one of them to explore which location is the one we are looking for.

The first page takes me here. There is a map with a pin on it and some content below it. To confirm that this is the Veggie Grill location I am looking for, I should look at the pin on the map of this page and cross reference it to the map in the Yelp listing.

Click into the Yelp listing, then click on the map area as highlighted below.

A big map will appear. It looks to me like this is the correct location. Since we know that this is the right location, let’s copy the URL and paste it in our Google Sheet so we can come back to it later.

We may have just gotten lucky here, so let’s click into the other two Instagram location links we found and see why those two appeared in our search results as well. The second link takes us here.

The first thing I notice is that the pin on the map is in a different place. This must be a different Veggie Grill in Seattle.

It would be a good idea to keep this link in our database, especially if we find that customers of Veggie Grill are the epitome of our ideal customer.

To keep both links, what I usually do in the Google Sheet is create a new row under the original row. To create a new row, highlight the whole row under the row with Veggie Grill by clicking on the “3.”

Then, right click on the “3” and click on “Insert 1 Above.”

Then, insert the new link in the new row you just created and in the same column as the link you pasted before.

Now, let’s click into the 3rd Instagram location page that we found.
This is what I see:

It looks exactly the same as the first page we found!

What this tells us is that sometimes we will find the same Instagram location but with a different link.

The reason for finding duplicates locations is that Instagram used to piggyback from Foursquare location data. However, since it got bought out by Facebook, it not uses Facebook location data.

For some reason, the pages with Foursquare location data are still active. It doesn’t make a difference to use since both pages show the same information.

Since this 3rd search results is the same as the first, we can leave it alone.

So now, we have the Instagram location page of a business page that is nearby us. We even have the second Veggie Grill location in case we get good results from the first location.

Let’s go back to the first Veggie Grill location we found.

On this page below the map, we see two sections of content.

The first section is labeled “Top Posts” while the second section is labeled “Most Recent.”

“Top Posts” are placed by an algorithm that Instagram uses. Although they haven’t released the specifics of the “Top Posts” algorithm, one very apparent trend within these posts is that they all have high engagement. So, we can assume that posts are generally the more popular posts.

“Most Recent” posts give us the most recent posts in reverse chronological order. We are going to focus on this section because it shows all the content posted at this location.

Let’s click on the first picture in the “Most Recent” section.

When we click the picture, a pop up box appears with a bigger version of the pictures and some more information.

I’ve highlighted the important details of the post. From top to bottom we have:

• Username
• Location
• Caption
• Comments
• Your Actions

The first thing I notice about this person’s username is that it is not a name. In fact, it even has the word sanctuary at the end, so it might be someone posting on behalf of an organization. Let’s check on that by clicking on the username.

This takes us to their profile where we can see more information about the Instagram user.

The part we want to pay most attention to is their bio, which I have highlighted in red. This is the part of the profile where the user gives us a brief rundown about themselves. Here, we see that this account is for a non-profit organization.

Even though this is not a person, there is always a person behind the account. Also, connecting with this organization somehow could be a win-win situation for both parties. We see that, in their picture at Veggie Grill, they brought a crew. If my business were a restaurant, I would definitely want to make friends with the people in this organization so they think of my restaurant to meet up at.

Let’s click on the second picture on the location page.

Let’s click on the username again and see what we can find out about this user.

This time, we can see that this user is a person. Great! We found a local customer!

Let’s try one more picture on the Veggie Grill location page.

Click on the picture, then on the username.

It looks like this person features food in the Western Washington area.

If I were a restaurant, I would definitely want to be featured by this person!

Well, there you have it! We have found 3 local customers. They all visited Veggie Grill which is actually right next door to this Starbucks I am at.

If you want to target local customers, you can use the same strategy that I laid out in this post.

Now that we have found local customers, what should be our next step?