Social Coupons Sites Descend on Restaurant Owners

We’ve written in this space in the past about the idea of giving out coupons in order to attract new clientele. However, what has been happening since then is that every guy and his brother has been busy opening up new social coupons sites, ala Groupon, and they are all pitching their sites to restaurant owners eager for new business. In fact, it’s now not at all unusual for restaurant owners to be assailed for business by dozens of these wannabe Groupon clones, each one of which has its own little twist and explanation as to why their deal really will bring in new business and not just a bunch of freebie seekers.

Separating the Real Deal from the Fakers

Look, we’re all for innovation and competition; however, the fact is that most of these places are tiny and bound to fail. The reality is that when thousands of sites are all competing to build a business in the exact same space, you simply cannot accommodate them all and frankly, you shouldn’t do so either. Therefore, we’ve put together a simple guide to help restaurant owners separate the fact from the fiction and choose which services are the best ones to work with:

Check for Local Bonafides

Unless you are dealing with a nationally known place like Groupon, Living Social or Restaurant.com, the odds are good that all the little wannabes won’t bring you any extra business. Therefore, we recommend that you look first and foremost for a local social coupons site. This will ensure that you are targeting customers who will be in town for the long term as opposed to tourists simply looking for a bargain.

Look for Your Niche

The other thing that’s helpful to check on is the niche. Running a kosher restaurant? Then you obviously want to advertise with a place that caters to kosher consumers. How about a vegan restaurant? Yeah, there are social couponing sites for those as well.

Check on Rank

Finally, before you sign on with any social couponing site, it’s useful to check if they have any bonafides to show for themselves as far as reaching out to consumers. You can do this by visiting Alexa and checking their ranking there (just enter the URL of the company). Another useful tool for this is SEOQuake, which is a free add on for Firefox. What you should look at there is the PR number and the number of links a site has. If the PR is N/A or 0 then it’s a brand new site which may not have any backing. The number of links is also a good indicator of whether the place will actually be able to reach out to customers or not (few links means that they are not going to be noticed in Google and you’re not going to get new customers).

Tags: groupon, living social, restaurant.com, social coupons