Lyric Restaurant is located on old Route 6A in Yarmouth Port on Cape Cod, MA. The restaurant operates in an old Cape Cod cottage and features American cuisine. Lyric is known for their friendly wait staff and it’s reported by the review sites that the owner personally greets all her guests at the door.  Lyric features dinner and a Jazz Brunch on Sunday afternoons and provides a perfect combination of ambiance and food.

Lyric’s mobile website makes it easy to view the restaurant’s details on your smartphone. With one-click precision you can view the menu, get directions or view their hours. You can even use their reservation button to make an online reservation right from your smartphone.

If you are fortunate to visit Cape Cod this summer, be sure to stop by and visit the Lyric Restaurant in Yarmouth Port. Click here to view the mobile version of their website.

Contact us at 877-825-5282, or email us at thriveinfo@thrivespot.com to get started on creating your mobile website today!

Visit our Facebook page to see examples of other restaurants that have created mobile websites with ThriveSpot.

Google

According to Sterling Brands and SmithGeiger, “if a website isn’t mobile-friendly, 61percent [of consumers] said they’ll take their attentions—and their wallets—elsewhere.”

• If you don’t currently have a mobile website for your restaurant, why not?
• You can’t help but notice that more and more people are carrying smart phones.
• It’s easy to see now more than ever people are on the go and that they demand instant access to information while they are on the move.
• With over 50% of people in the U.S. now owning Smartphones, it’s critical to business success to have a mobile website.

Watch this short video to see how easy it is to create a mobile website for your restaurant using the ThriveSpot platform in five easy steps.

ThriveSpot provides free mobile websites to all restaurants, bars and nightclubs with no ads and free hosting.

It’s hard to believe the first cellphone call was made this week 40 years ago. Remember the scene in the movie Wall Street where Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, calls Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) from the beach on a Motorola DynaTAC, which was essentially a brick with an antenna attached to it? These early cell phones cost several thousand dollars and the airtime charges were typically $0.45 per minute plus $0.25 for long distance. If you were outside your metro area, there were additional charges for roaming on another carrier’s cell tower. In the early 80s, cellphones were clearly for business use only. It’s taken less than 40 years for the cellphone to evolve from clunky bag style phones that people plugged into their car cigarette lighter receptacle back in the 80s to the colorful NOKIA 5110 series, the cool Motorola RAZR and finally the feature rich Apple iPhone, Android and Blackberry smartphones on the market today. These days, people primary use their smartphones to text, send email, access social media or browse the Internet. One need only look at the number of declining voice minutes used monthly over the past several years and compare it to their burgeoning data usage to validate these statistics.

With smartphone adoption rates at over 50% in the US, businesses need a mobile version of their website. According to Pew Internet, nearly half of all smartphone owners say they have used their phone in the past 30 days to decide whether to visit a business, such as a restaurant. Sterling Brands and SmithGeiger did a study which concluded that 61 percent of consumers said they’ll take their attentions—and their wallets—elsewhere if a business website isn’t mobile friendly.

 As a business owner, specifically a restaurant, why wouldn’t want to provide your customers with the ability to locate information quickly? Next time you have some free time, checkout your restaurants website on your smartphone to see how quickly you can find information. If it takes more than 20-30 sec. to locate and view key information you’ve probably lost the sale to another competing restaurant!

If you are a restaurant, bar or nightclub, ThriveSpot provides free mobile websites and hosting. Visit our website to sign up or send us an email to thriveinfo@thrivespot.com and we will help you get setup with a mobile website and mobile version of your menus.

Google

We’ve written a couple of blogs about Instagram before because we think it’s a great marketing tool for restaurants;  check out Restaurants and the Instagram Buzz and Clever Restaurant Marketing: Instagram Visual Menu.  MomentFeed recently released a social media report on Instagram restaurant front runners for 2013.  This particular study is based on data captured by the MomentFeed social marketing platform for 30 top restaurant brands.  The report breaks down Instagram performance by total number of photos, average number of photos per location, and photos as a percentage of check-ins.  Below are some highlights of the study.

Although the big chains in the industry rose to the top of this study because of sheer number of units, we are excited to share this study with our audience because you don’t have to be one of the big guys to jump on or benefit from the Instagram bandwagon.  Why do we like Instagram (for restaurants in particular) so much?  The two main reasons are that it is free and your customers do the work for you!  And if that isn’t appealing enough, it also gives you a direct line of communication to your customers. You see who they are, what they like (or don’t like) and you can directly engage with them.  Isn’t that a beautiful thing?

This kind of real-time visual story-telling by your customers does what no other kind of advertising or promotion can do.  And it’s free!  Read the full Instagram study for tips on how to maximize Instagram for your restaurant.

Do you have any Instagram tips to share?

Busiest Day of the Year?

According to the National Restaurant Association, the most popular day of the year for dining out is Mother’s Day, when 38% of survey respondents eating out.  But for upscale restaurants and those known for their romantic atmosphere, an even busier day is Valentine’s Day.  Overall the National Restaurant Association classifies this as the second most popular day for dining out.

Most Talked About?

Interestingly, as reported by Urbanspoon, they see more people using their site on Valentine’s Day than on any other.  They surmise that the reason behind this are that while Mother’s Day is more popular overall, the demographics for Valentine’s Day dining skew younger, with 18-34 year-olds much more likely to dine out than older groups. These are the same segment of the population using online review sites.  The take-away for restaurants…people are going to talk about their Valentine’s Day experience online and that will affect your business throughout the year.  And it is likely to heavily influence the choice of your restaurant for next year’s most romantic dinner.

What Matters Most?

Another validation of this point comes from a recent survey that OpenTable undertook with its customers on their choice of a restaurant for Valentine’s Day.  The bottom line is that positive reviews and ambience matter most.

 “Respondents indicated that the top three factors in selecting a restaurant for Valentine’s Day are positive reviews (34%), romantic ambience (27 %), and service (16%).”

A few weeks back we wrote a blog with tips on optimizing online reviews…we can’t stress how critical they are to attracting diners in today’s online world.

Most Desirable Menu?

Another interesting takeaway from Open Table’s survey is their customer’s choice for traditional menus.  Keep this in mind as you plan for one of the busiest days of the year, if not the busiest, for your restaurant.

“ When presented with menu options, diners said they prefer a la carte (67%) over prix fixe (33%) menus. Traditional menus came out on top, with the majority of diners (56%) saying they would select a classic three-course meal (starter, entrée, and dessert).”

Full text of Open Table’s survey.

There is no question that a phone isn’t just a phone anymore.  If someone told you 5 years ago that we would have mainstream capabilities from our phones to be able to do things like video conference, watch movies and videos, surf the internet fast and furiously and all the other cool things we can do with slick web-enabled devices, how many of us believed what would be possible today?  It’s phenomenal!  It’s also no secret that people are abandoning phone-only devices in droves in favor of smartphones that handle all sorts of nifty, useful apps and web-enabled features.   So the question is, how do these smartphone usage trends warrant swift action from restaurant operators?  For insight, let’s take a look at this informative infographic by Pew Internet.

The infographic has some great statistics about smartphone usage overall, but the tidbits for a restaurant operator to hone in on are in the third and last data nuggets in the image.  The third factoid states that over half of all adults use their smartphone to go online and that 17% of cell phone users ONLY access the internet from their phones!   The last point made by the infographic shows how people have used their phone over the last 30 days and “Decide whether to visit a business, such as a restaurant” was one of the top 3.   Wow!  What more could be more compelling as an immediate call to action to restaurant operators to go mobile?  Don’t let those mobille users pass over your business because you aren’t in their arena!

What do you suspect keeps a restaurant from going mobile, especially when there are free options?

Happy New Year from all of us at ThriveSpot!

Google released its Zeitgeist report at the end of 2012.  Google analyzed over one trillion queries to provide an interesting view into what the world was searching for last year.  Unfortunately it does not have a food category…that would be a good addition…but it is fun nonetheless.  Enjoy!

What do you think the food trends were in 2012?