Embrace Technology, Grow Your Business

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Pragya Gupta

At PayrollHero, we are always pushing for a tech enabled world for our clients. There are plenty of good things that come out of automating processes in your restaurant or retail business.

To name a few: it’s more efficient and saves time, which means there is a higher turnover of customers; there is less room for error; business owners spend less on manpower so overall costs go down.

All around the world we see a preference towards adopting technology. On one hand, it is because minimum wages are expected to rise (like in the US) while on the other hand, a shortage of labour supply is forcing business owners to adopt technology (like in Japan or Singapore).

All in all, the shift towards automation is inevitable. We thought it would be helpful to give you some tips on how to stay ahead of the curve.

Apps, apps, apps

We can’t stress on this enough. There is an app for everything today. Here is a non-exhaustive list on everything that you can safely outsource to an app:

Point of Sale Systems: Square is the most famous POS system. It works worldwide, which makes it easier for you to monitor sales if you run businesses in multiple countries
Loyalty apps: We’ve talked about Perx before. Loyalty apps help in bringing in more customers and increase foot traffic in your store.
Reservations: Chope is the rockstar of reservations in Southeast Asia. The Asian version of OpenTable runs in Hong Kong, Singapore and other countries in the regions, making it the perfect vendor for booking reservations in your restaurant.
Inventory Management: Another Southeast Asian favourite, Trade Gecko is your go-to app for managing inventory. With a clean and user-friendly interface, it takes very little for a business owner to realize that inventory management is a nightmare that is solved deftly by Trade Gecko.
Food Delivery: FoodPanda takes care of delivering food to your customers, while Slurp is another POS system that helps customers order food remotely. Slurp helps you take orders but doesn’t deliver food itself.

We have a whole other blogpost devoted towards these apps. You can check it out here.

Revamping the menu

Laminated menu cards are a thing of the past. Restaurants like Fish and Co. use tablets for their menus. With a few taps, your customer’s order goes straight to the kitchen. Tablet menus prevent errors in ordering. It is also much easier to change menus on a tablet than to print new menus each time you want to add a dish or change prices.

Feedback systems

Does that little device look familiar to you? You have probably seen that at airports all over the world. For a feedback system, this one is pretty elementary but it does the trick. One look at it, and your immediate response would be to click on the button that reflects what you feel. It’s an instantaneous feedback loop that can be used by almost any business.

Food bloggers

This one is more of a marketing idea. While it is not really about automating your restaurant, it is about using technology to get your business out there. Tourist destinations, like Singapore, are big on food blogs for suggestions to restaurants.

Some of the famous bloggers have a huge following on Facebook and Instagram. The idea is to get these food bloggers to write a review on your restaurant and let social media take care of the rest. Of course, you need to be confident about getting a solid review!

We hope these ideas encourage you to embrace technology. There is no downside to adopting tech while the upside will result in cost minimization and big returns for your business. Let us know if you have any more suggestions!

How to Grow Your Business in 2016 with Social Media Marketing

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Nix Eniego

Growing your business in 2016 won’t be a walk in the park. After all, more and more businesses are popping out literally every second. Make that 3 startups born every second!

Competition will surely be stiffer this year. You’re going to have to exert a lot more effort just to get noticed by potential customers.

It’s going to be an uphill climb just to increase foot traffic to your restaurant. After all, what’s stopping your target customer from checking out your competitor’s profile on Zomato (for restaurants) and choosing them instead?

But today, we’ll do our best to help you learn how you can beat out your competition and drive more sales with ZERO marketing budget.

Yes, you read that right! We’ll be teaching you tips and tricks to boost your sales this 2016 without having to spend a dime on ads.

Let’s begin!

Social Media Marketing

What You Need:

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Account
Time
Canva account (it’s free!)

How it Works:

Assuming you already have an account on these social media platforms, (if not, go ahead and make one now!), the first thing you have to do is optimize your profile.

Fill in the important details such as company info, a short bio, Operating Hours (for Facebook), and a link to your website.

Here’s a look at well-optimized Social Media pages of restaurants in the Philippines:

Niner Ichi Nana’s Facebook page has everything filled up right: Profile Picture, Cover Photo, Contact Number, and official website.

Consumers nowadays want to know EVERYTHING about what you offer before they buy, so it’s best to have a link to your website so your potential customer can view your menu beforehand and get a better feel of what you have to offer.

It also helps that they know your operating hours and contact details.

Here’s a look at Chili’s Philippines Instagram Account:

Nice looking posts, and as you can see up top, they have a link back to their website.

On Instagram, the Bio / Profile Description is the only place where you can place a link, so it’s a must to have a link back to your website in that section.

Once you’ve fixed up your Social Media Accounts, you can now post updates, and engage with your followers.

It doesn’t matter if you have 30 followers or 30,000; answering questions and providing valuable updates to your followers will go a long way.

Make sure you are posting good quality content on your Social Media pages. Invest on creating nice visuals as it has been proven that posts with images convert higher on Social Media than ones without. Humans are naturally visual creatures, so take advantage of that.

But of course, we did tell you at the start of this post that this guide will allow you to grow your business in 2016 without having to spend. Yet producing great social media posts with nice visuals will require hiring a Graphic Designer…

Not quite!

Thanks to Canva, you don’t need elite photoshop skills or a Graphic Designer on your payroll to produce high quality and visually appealing images.

Canva in action.

As you can see in the image above, there are lots of free templates to choose from. You can also upload your own image, and add your own caption with tons of fonts to choose from.

Here’s me adding a caption to an image I uploaded. It’s simple and easy, you can do it in less than 5 minutes!

And the best part is that all of that is 100% FREE. Canva does offer a paid business version if you want to take things up a notch, so do check out their website for more details.

Now that you have your Social Media Accounts ready, and an awesome tool to do your visuals, now what?

Next step would be to post consistently, and keep growing your following. A good way to do this is to cross-promote your other Social Media profiles.

Here’s how Philippine fashion retail giant Penshoppe does it:

On Facebook:

and Twitter:

The brand is consistently cross-promoting their Social Media profiles which allows them to target and market to different kind of consumers. Do the same and you will be able to grow your fanbase faster.

Pro-Tip: Eventually, as you continue to post, you’ll be able to see when your customers are most active on Social Media. By using Facebook and Twitter’s in-house analytics system and your own experiments and tests, you’ll be able to maximize the reach of your posts even without spending on Social Media ads!

What’s the ROI?

So what’s the ROI of Social Media Marketing?

While there’s no concrete answer to that, it’s not a secret that consumers love to do background checks before they even spend a single peso on your product.

This means that interested customers will be checking your website, Facebook, Instagram, and maybe even your Twitter account. And whatever impression they get from your online presence will dictate whether they want to buy from you.

So you may not be able to circle in a concrete number in terms of ROI, but social media marketing is crucial to growing your business.

You can literally gain customers or lose them just because of your online / social media presence.

By taking these important measures, you can grow your restaurant or retail business in the Philippines this 2016 easily. Now start opening your accounts and get to work! 🙂

P.S. Watch out for our upcoming post on how you can use Zomato to market and drive customers to your restaurant in the Philippines.

9 Ways to Promote Your Restaurant in the Philippines 2016 Edition

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Nix Eniego

Promoting and growing a restaurant business is easier said than done.

On top of the day-to-day operations of running a restaurant, the actual marketing and getting the word out is also a crucial part of growing the business.

PayrollHero understands the challenges and pain points of restaurant owners. Managing an entire restaurant and keeping not just customers, but also employees, is a lot of work to do. So we’re doing our best to help out and give something back for restaurant owners in the Philippines.

We’ve prepared an infographic on how to promote your restaurant in the Philippines. It’s easy to do, and most importantly, you can take action today!

9 Ways to Promote Your Restaurant in the Philippines

These tips may be just what you need to put your restaurant over the top this 2016.

If you’re a restaurant owner in the Philippines, you can share this with your marketing team or do the dirty work yourself. Eventually, your marketing efforts will pay off and you’ll see an increase in foot traffic to your restaurant.

BONUS: Here’s one restaurant in the Philippines who is nailing it on Social Media. Try and implement the same things to your business and sooner or later you’ll see results.

Keep it locked in on our blog as we offer more and more business tips for your growing your restaurant in 2016. So if you still haven’t, sign up below to be part of our weekly newsletter to get awesome updates delivered straight to your inbox!

If you want to chat about how else you can improve your restaurant processes, such as your HR and payroll, feel free to get in touch with us here: www.payrollhero.ph.

5 Tips to Resuscitate Your Restaurant’s Dying Social Media Strategy

Posted on October 15, 2015 by

Does this sound familiar? Your restaurant’s Facebook page has nearly 1K likes. You tweet whenever you feel like it. People even post awesome photos of your bestselling desserts on Instagram. Yet for the past year, signs of revenue growth are nowhere in sight.

What exactly is going on?!

Asking people to like or follow your diner’s social media pages won’t give you the boost in sales that you’ve been hoping for. As a restaurateur, you have to be always a step ahead of the game in terms of social media marketing.

After all, dining out is a social experience in itself. After asking recommendations from family and peers, 8 out of 10 respondents will look for more information about a restaurant online. And oh, when Twitter recently struck a deal with Google and gave away their data to the search engine giant, your restaurant’s real-time tweets is now all over the search results’ front page.

The good news is you’re about to learn how to specifically leverage social media platforms to create a groundwork for your restaurant’s success. We outline the following road-tested social media tips for restaurant owners below!

1. Step back and reevaluate your existing goals for your restaurant.

What are you using social media for? Would you like to build a solid following? Or announce a change in the menu? Perhaps, you’re keen on cultivating relationships with existing fans and followers? No matter where you are in the customer journey cycle, a clear social media marketing goal is critical.

2. Establish a clear, distinct brand voice and be consistent with it across all platforms.

In her book Renegades Write the Rules, social media evangelist Amy Jo Martin wrote “People don’t connect with logos and taglines; they connect with other people. So you have a choice: build a business that doesn’t truly connect with its intended audience, or build one that does. The number one branding question today is not, ‘What is your brand?’ but rather, ‘Who is your brand?”

And if millennials make up a huge chunk of your target customers, all the more reason to get your act together and aim for consistent branding across channels. A survey by SDL asked roughly 1800 millennials about their purchases during the first quarter of 2014. The key findings, from the perspective of social media branding, is that these young consumers glide from one channel to another and more than half (60 percent) expect a consistent brand voice in all platforms, whether online or offline.

3. Ask and ye shall receive!

You’ve increased your likes, fans, or followers by 200 percent for the past month! Now what? The next step is to gather insights from these people and gain a better understanding of their needs and preferences.

Fortunately, with social media, you can be creative in your customer surveys! “Would you be interested in (insert new dish here or a possible promo)” is one simple yet effective way to solicit market perception on a campaign or idea you’re considering. The information you’ve gathered will act as your foundation for future marketing campaigns such as running a contest (which we discuss below) or coming up with your target marketing persona.

4. Figure out your restaurant’s target persona.

What’s a target persona? The folks at Buffer did a great job in explaining target personas in marketing. Imagine what it’s like to be your target prospects and customers. Are they young professionals? This is more likely if you have a coffee shop that is a short walk away from the business district. Or if you’re a vegan restaurant, yogis will fit your target persona more than Crossfitters. Often, crafting your target persona involves surveys, interviews, educated guesses, and competitor research.

Generally, a fictional marketing persona should provide a glimpse of your real customer base. Once you have a couple of personas in your toolbox, you can already proceed with your social media campaigns.

5. Run social media contests!

Who doesn’t want a freebie? Everyone does and social media platforms are the perfect venues to hold a contest. If you’re kinda on the fence about social media contests, these statistics from Hubspot prove that contests are a huge boost to customer engagement and carving out a loyal following:

Contests can increase new audiences by 34 percent on average
A third of entrants don’t mind receiving email updates from participating brands
Running your contest on mobile increases the number of entrants by eight times
Sweepstakes (e.g. Instant Win apps) is the most effective way to hold a contest if your goal is to increase fan base (entrants can turn into subscribers) while photo contests work best if you wish to boost customer engagement.

By and large, a social media contest can provide you with these two game-changing benefits:

Whether you get 50 or 500 entries, contests will generate buzz and drive people to your restaurant’s social media page.
Once you have this people’s attention, you can collect valuable data (such as email addresses for future newsletters or mobile phone numbers for weekly special reminders) from the entries. Be careful not ask for too many details though.

The Takeaway

By following the above-mentioned steps, you are more likely to increase fan base and engagement via your restaurant’s social media platforms. Stay posted for more of these tips!

Do you have social media insights to share? Or have you tried the steps we suggested? Let us know in the comments section below!

Here’s One Cebu Restaurant Who Is Nailing It On Social Media

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Stephen Jagger

Editors Note: This post was written by Kyjean Tomboc. She will be contributing to the PayrollHero blog from time to time.

Whether you own a small diner or manage a large chain of restaurants, social media presence these days is the norm rather than an exception. This should not be a surprise, given that recent figures by Forbes reveal that a whopping 81 percent of the people they surveyed indicated that social media posts by family and peers influenced their purchase decisions.

Restaurants who opt not to embrace social media marketing will be surprised to find out that they still have a social media presence after all. Diners will inevitably tweet, post photos on Facebook or Instagram, and talk about their experience on Yelp.

To get ahead of the pack, a restaurant’s marketing team should do more than just create a Facebook account and wait for people to like their page. For social media to work on a restaurant’s favor, these two components are crucial – creating a unique brand voice and using this voice to create a dialogue, rather than a monologue, with your customers.

It’s all about engagement and being consistent with it!

Brique’s Modern Kitchen, a newcomer in Cebu’s dining scene, is one restaurant whose social media presence is a perfect example of what it means to be truly social in social media.

Distinct Brand Voice

Brique’s Modern Kitchen is not difficult to miss if you pass by Salinas Drive in Lahug. The same could be said of its social media presence. On its Instagram, the restaurant describes itself as a:

A Cebu based restaurant offering modern cuisine with a rustic touch. Brique is the perfect place to have good food in a relaxing atmosphere.

See what the folks at Brique’s did? In the first sentence, they identified what Brique aims to offer. Next, they highlighted what diners can expect when they visit the restaurant. This is a brilliant example of using social media as a medium to not just talk about what you do but also showcase what your customers can expect from your restaurant.

Exclusive Offers

Brique’s recently celebrated their first year milestone through a free entree of your choice if you share a photo with the #BriqueTurns1 hashtag on Instagram. Offers that are limited to certain social media platforms is one good way to sustain engagement with your followers.

Responsive to Customer Comments

Did we mention that Brique’s replies to each customer comment on their Facebook page? Whether it’s a positive or negative review from a diner, a quick response from the staff sends the message that a restaurant is genuinely concern of its patrons and the quality of the food they serve.

Kick-Ass Multimedia

Aside from high-quality photographs of items in their menu, real diners (not stock photos), and restaurant interiors, Brique’s has a chock-full of kick-ass videos in their Facebook page.

With storytelling as one of the core principles of digital marketing, Brique’s multimedia content are tools that help the brand show its human side and capture its audience’s attention. Stunning visual content elicits emotions and these emotions, in turn, influence purchasing decisions.

Brique’s Modern Kitchen is just one of the restaurants in Cebu who is optimizing social media for their benefit. What other restaurants are using similar social media strategies? Your opinions matter to us and we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Continue reading →

PayrollHero’s First Twitter Contest!

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Pragya Gupta

As you know, we have been creating some handy guides for opening restaurants in Singapore and the Philippines. We call them the PayrollHero Knowledge Kits.

Since we’re so excited about them and want to share them with the world, we’re hosting our first ever Twitter contest! From now until July 17th (Hari Raya Puasa), all you need to do, is retweet the link below to as many people as you can on your network.

If you can reach out to the most number of restaurants, businesses or people, we will feature you on our own blog!

Why is this a good idea for you? Well, we have been featuring famous actors and basketball players on our blog: celebrities like Rocco Nacino, Shawn Weinstein and Sean Anthony have shared their favorite restaurants with us. How awesome would it be to get in on the action! You know you’re thinking to yourself, “this would be a great PR opportunity…”

Make sure you’re following @PayrollHero so you’re in the loop because in the coming weeks, we will be coming up with some great opportunities like this for you.

.@PayrollHero is hosting a contest! Tweet our NEW #KnowledgeKits at the most #businesses & #people to #WIN an exclusive feature on our blog!

— PayrollHero (@PayrollHero) July 6, 2015

The MUST HAVE #PayrollHeroKnowledgeKits – retweet them to be featured in our #blog! http://t.co/LmjavZ863p (PH) http://t.co/xCkTRy9KFl (SG)

— PayrollHero (@PayrollHero) July 6, 2015

So what are you waiting for? Get tweeting! Your 15 minutes of PayrollHero fame awaits.

Below, you can see an example of a Twitter post that retweets the Knowledge Kits:

What To Do After The 3rd Store Grand Opening

Posted on June 4, 2015 by

Image by decor8blog.com

Success in your business would mean it’s time to expand, but this feat does not come without it’s own set of challenges.

After interviewing 3 different owners for our Retail/ Restaurant Executive Series, I’ve learnt that they all faced similar challenges in management, as soon as they’ve reached their 3rd store opening.

Here are some of the problems and solutions used by our retail/ restaurant executives when managing multiple store locations.

Keep Calm

Managing multiple locations means using technology to cut down on travel expenses

Implementing a different management system is necessary when you have several stores to oversee. Although it is not impossible, but it takes a lot of effort for you to constantly schedule your travel time to supervise different stores at different locations. Travel costs will pile up even more if your stores are located at different countries.

Getting your hands on free, cheap or available SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions will be save your company a chunk of money. While some businesses have their own custom- built software platforms as collaborative platforms, some of the more commonly-used tools are available online and widely used by small business owners. Some of the best cost saving productivity tools are available online- free or at low monthly costs like Google Documents, Skype, PipelineDeals.com.

As mentioned by our retail executive Andrew Masigan, owner of The Advent Manila Hospitality Group in the Philippines, he advice that “the trick is to put the important systems in place… the efficiency your company’s chain-of-command largely determines
how well your stores operate”.

Managing multiple locations means having putting a system in place

“You must have systems in place to be able to standardize the quality of your communications, products and results,” says Bert Martinez, founder of Bert Martinez Communications. Ensuring a strong internal system of operations would mean that you can save costs on training and reduce time required for supervision. Each employee will have a clear understanding of their responsibilities and boundaries.

In our interview with Adrien Desbaillets, President at SaladStop, he says that “a strong infrastructure is required to support the operation. Overheads start to escalate and a strong focus on SOPs, training, technology is required.” The point here is then to make each employee’s responsibility crystal clear through an organised structure and combine that with a system that measures each person. That way, everyone is accountable for delivering their work regardless of which location they are based at.

Managing multiple locations means shifting from micro management to systematized macro management

Before, Eileen Grey– owner of The Picture Company in the Philippines, didn’t need to think about an entire infrastructure when she opened her first store. She recalls it being just “very personal and mom and pop” until her 3rd store opening. Now she has to consider personnel training, back office space, production, logistics and others.

Having systems and technology in place is good for the business, but it wouldn’t help much if there is no focus on communication. Establishing good communication practices within the whole business is key to collaborate with offices at different locations, co-workers and clients.

Good tips to foster good communication between offices at different locations can include using webcams during weekly team meetings or webinars so team members can see each other, establish a daily reporting system online and use a centralized task management software like Asana, Trello and others.

(Read on how PayrollHero stays in sync with our other offices across the globe)

PayrollHero can help you efficiently manage your multiple business locations and cut down on costs. Talk to us about our business or meet us at our next Meetup!

Canada B2B Networking Marketplace: The Post Event Write-up

Posted on June 2, 2015 by

Great turn out at the Canada B2B Networking Marketplace

The energy at the event was amazing as business owners are enthusiastic to share their product stories with others in attendance.

PayrollHero made a presence and shared our story- how we believe we can help businesses function better with our nifty HR and payroll management software in the cloud.

We would like to say a big Thank You to Guy Belanger for letting us take part in this great opportunity.

Thank you Guy!

Event Highlight

This year’s event also marks the 50th anniversary of bilateral ties between Singapore and Canada. In a speech by High Commissioner H.E Heather Grant, she expressed gratitude to be friends with Singapore and played a part during its formative years since 1965. (Read more about Singapore’s 50th anniversary of bilateral relationship with 13 other countries)

This event was a prelude to the main exhibition and networking events: CommunicAsia 2015 and BroadcastAsia 2015 held at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore between 2- 5 June 2015.

If you’ve missed the opportunity to speak with the companies present at last night’s event, you can be sure to speak to them at these events. The Canadian pavilion at MBS Basement 2 (BH3-07) has meeting spaces to be used at your convenience on a first-come first-served basis.

If you’re looking to meet with PayrollHero, we are having a casual meetup at our office on 10th June 2015.

Details and Registration available here >>>

Giving credit to the ‘little guy’ in your company

Posted on May 28, 2015 by

The PayrollHero Way
Giving credit where credit is due is an important task for managers to keep the morale of their employees up. Employees like to be noticed and praised for a job well done.

Why are managers not giving enough praise? Besides the fact that you are busy running around, taking care of daily operations; making sure everything is running as it should, finding out which employee did well for the last 4 weeks will take more effort. Most of the time, this task is not on the top of the priority list and so easily overlooked.

PayrollHero can help you look good to your employees!

Surely there are times where you wish you would have remembered to at least say ‘Good Job’ to Bob the cashier for working 8 hours and being the most helpful. Human errors like this can be avoided by using a simple app, where you can monitor your employees day to day work and track how they are performing accurately.

By using the employee feedback app, Daily Pulse, employees are able to ‘like’ their colleagues that was the most helpful at the end of the shift. Another plus, your customer can give their feedback using the Customer Feedback app too- by voting for the employee that was the most helpful to them.

You, the manager, will receive the data in real time via Xray Insights app. The app will show a clearer view of each employee performance and tracks the employee who is getting the most ‘likes’ on that particular shift. Information is readily available for you at a touch of a button. This makes your job so much easier! It also eliminate subjectivity in your decision as it is based on figures- not hearsay.

Work Place Transparency

At PayrollHero, we want to break the conventional workplace hierarchy by making information more transparent within the company. Using mobile or web apps, all managers can readily access whatever information required anytime, anywhere. We recognize that being on the ball is important when running a business- so time should not be wasted on you waiting for information from other managers.

The Data Might Even Surprise You!

You may be glad to find out that the employee that is actually doing great is the person you least expect. It could very well be the person who is clearing the dishes- that is the most helpful employee among the rest and the most ‘likeable’ to your customers.

The app works by making sure every employee is acknowledged, from the chef to the janitor. You can be the best manager who knows exactly the deserving employees to give credit to at the end of the day.

Read our post on Scheduling Best Practices for Managers.

Want to learn how to be a better manager?

Join our next Meetup on 10th Jun 2015 @ 4pm in Singapore.

We will be focusing on tips and tools you can use to better optimize HR and payroll processes, while cutting costs on time and creating a happier work culture.

To register >>>

5 Sure Wins When You Come To PayrollHero Meetups

Posted on May 27, 2015 by

This meetup is all about HR and payroll management in the cloud for businesses of any size. Today, more companies are getting smarter and are transforming the way they manage their time, attendance, scheduling, payroll and HRIS to a systematized cloud based solution. To make sure your company does not fall behind on this trend, you need to discover why choosing a better management system helps increase your bottomline.

During the meetup, we will be focusing on tips and tools you can use to better optimize HR and payroll processes, while cutting costs on time and creating a happier work culture.

Let’s solve those problems! We want to share our expertise together with you at our next PayrollHero Meetup!

We will have Steve Jagger, co-founder of PayrollHero!

Hello there!

Sure Wins!

Know the tools that can increase productivity in your business by eliminating buddy punching and ghost employees.
Gain new tactics to effectively improve scheduling, time and attendance, HR and payroll management for your employees.
Business Intelligence tools to use for your business to make informed decisions on human resource.
Get to learn about new tools that can help you gain insights and better understand your customer segment.
Our event is free of charge with FREE wine and snacks!

10th June, 2015, 4pm- 5.30pm
Ocean Financial Centre