Make your current guest a 'raving fan'. Develop a real relationship with each guest. Nurture it. Follow up on it. If you lavish the right kind of attention on the guest, both when they are in your restaurant and when they are away, you create evangelists who sell your story for you.

What is the 'right kind of attention'? If you have employed the Golden Rules of Method Marketing then you understand the guests likes and dislikes and what they expect when they come to you. You know to whom you are compared. You have heightened your menu, décor, service style and created experience details to deliver on your promise. You have eliminated the elements of you operation and concept that detract. You have hired the right actors to perform your story and rewarded them immediately for 'doing things right'. What else can you do inside?

• Identify first timers and cater to them. Over one in ten of your guests today will be coming to you for the first time. Welcome them. Introduce them to the key elements of your concept. Guaranteed, many of these guests are intimidated when they first arrive. You know your concept. They do not.
  
  
• Find out the names of every guest who walks in your restaurant. Look to remember them. This should be seen as a process over time to develop a relationship and not a means to 'become best friends tonight'. A guest knows the difference between phony friendship and a sincere interest to find out about them. Approach it as a long-term commitment and reward your actors for doing it. It will become second nature and natural. It will amaze your guests.
  
  
• Invite current guests to be part of an e-mail-based group of VIPs. Use the permission they give you by signing up to reach out to them on a regular basis. Think beyond frequency programs that depend on discounts to produce action. Think about building relationships. Acknowledge their patronage, give them sneak previews of new items, invite them to 'secret shop' and otherwise engage in ongoing 'conversations' that build trust. The guest will soon be astounded, as they realize this is not another impersonal 'e-mail-Spam-promo' deal.
  
  
• Create a newsletter or other printed piece you can use for promotional purposes and to further your story. Change it frequently. Let it be another way you stay in touch.
  
  
• Work with your credit card companies to reach out to guests who have used you, but may not be part of the club yet. Thank them for their patronage. Invite them to join.

The key to all of this is a commitment to developing an ongoing conversation with your guest that develops, over time, into an intense relationship. Everyone loves to be loved. Understand it. Embrace it. Think of it as if you were cultivating farmland. It takes longer to harvest than to hunt, but oh brother, what a yield!

In the next issue, we will look at ways to take this commitment and apply it to your marketing, advertising and PR budgets. Why not use your money efficiently? Sounds like a plan to me.