Some Restaurants Aren't Getting The Online Thing

Michael Cage writes on Entrepreneurslife.com

"I live in Fairfax County, Virginia, smack dab in the middle of the Virginia "Dulles Tech Corridor" made up of Reston, Herndon and a few other towns. It is a very Internet-friendly place.

How is it possible that a restaurant with a significant delivery business in an Internet-friendly area does not have a web site with their menu and contact information?

It flat-out boggles my mind.

Let's do some simple math.

I order out 4-5 times per week, average about $40 per order. That works out to about $200 per week, or $800 per month.

Because I am not the greatest at recovering from interuptions, I have most of my meals delivered. When I get hungry, I don't dig through drawers for outdated, food-stained menus. Instead, I hop over to my del.icio.us bookmarks, pull up restaurants that deliver, and choose from the menus online.

It's important to note that NONE of the restaurants I regularly get delivery meals from are my favorites. There are restaurants that a) deliver and b) I like better all around me ... but because of the extra hassle of finding and holding onto the menu, my money goes to their competition instead of them..."

Similarly I was treated to a great pizza by a friend of our family and the pie was so good I could not believe it. I thought I had found the pizza not tasted since our early days of marriage when we lived in Santa Cruz 20 years ago. I searched for the parlor online to see how well they were represented. He's not there, only one mention on a local aggregater site with no direct link, no menu, no directions, nothing!

I visited the owner to see if he wanted to make a push online. He was semi-old-school Italian, middle aged and very suspicious of the whole Internet thing. He cast his eyes down as I attempted to give him my one minute pitch. I lost him before I started. His business will never be seen by pizza lovers using the Internet. What a shame. Competition is intense in the pizza market in my immediate neighborhood. I'm sure he would argue word of mouth is the best and I would agree but I follow the line of thinking the more that try your pizza the more people get a chance to spread the word!

In fairness to the proprietor he's a pizza maker not a marketer and his experiences with marketers over the years has likely been negative including the Yellow Pages guy who has convinced him he needed that 1/4 page ad for a few thousand a year.
Mike mentions $1,500 to $2,000 to get a website up. He could get a very nice site online for under $600 in my city and for another few hundred could be listed on all the local search directories and major search engines including Yahoo! Local and Google Maps/Local. He could have a locally targeted Google AdWords or YSM PPC campaign running today even without a website.
As it stand NO pizza restaurant in my city uses PPC. Amazing!