Contact - Local Marketing Solutions

About Chris Towland

“Chris Towland is a restaurant marketing expert and author who lives in Burton on Trent in Staffordshire, United Kingdom.

Chris has worked (both directly and indirectly) with hundreds of restaurants and small businesses across the UK to help them improve their marketing and boost their profits.

Chris has also had his marketing work praised by former Dragon's Den star Rachel Elnaugh, who called him an "internet marketing expert". He is also the author of a number of popular business books, DVD’s, online courses and audio-books.”

Note: If you wish, you can also see the full story of my online business journey at the bottom of this page.

CHRIS HAS BEEN A HUGE BOOST TO MY RESTAURANT

PASCAL ARNOUX, THE OLD VICARAGE, BURTON on trent

Chris has been invaluable in helping to attract more diners to my restaurant for many years. His help has included building an email list of customers and potential customers so that I can contact them on a regular basis, installing a text message reservation reminder system to reduce no-shows, displaying all of our best reviews on our website and installing an online gift voucher system.

He is also always happy to chat and help with any website or technical issues I may have at any time.

Chris has been a huge boost to my restaurant and so I would highly recommend him to other restaurant owners.

Contact Chris

If you'd like to discuss any of the available marketing options or to chat about what would be the best option for your restaurant or business, you can contact me by any of the following options...

1. Schedule a call with me at a time of your choosing by Clicking Here.

2. Call me now on 01283 515606.

Click here to add my contact info to your phone

3. Send an email by using the form below.

Best regards,

My Business Story

I've been asked by a number of clients why I do what I do and why I help restaurants and other small businesses. So here is my business story so far. It's quite long though so you may like to make yourself a coffee first! :-)

My online marketing journey actually began as far back as 1999 when I realised how my computer and the internet could be used for selling things. At the time I was working full-time as Group Credit Manager for a large industrial rubber company.

The $1 Cheque

In my spare time I'd learned how to build simple websites and also about affiliate marketing (selling other people's products and making a commission), so I decided to set up a website to promote, of all things, a dating website called One & Only. I started promoting my website and the next month received my first ever cheque for internet earnings.

The cheque was for the mighty figure of $1, dated 7th May 1999 from One & Only. Being in the UK it would have cost me far more than $1 to bank the cheque and have it converted to £ so instead I decided to frame the cheque as my first ever internet earnings. It still hangs on my office wall today.

Thankfully, the following month, and over the next few years, the cheque amounts increased nicely in value each month until One & Only were eventually bought out by Match.com and changed their commission structure.

Around the same time I also began two new projects. The first was a website for my home town of Burton on Trent in Staffordshire, UK and the second was my first foray into the world of digital product creation.

Baby Sleep

For the digital product, I'd bought some software that highlighted gaps on the internet where lots of people were searching for a specific subject, but there weren't many products that gave them what they were looking for. One of the subjects it highlighted was baby sleep. So in other words, parents were looking for solutions to baby sleep problems, but weren't finding those solutions on the internet. I decided to see how I could fill that gap.

I noticed that the only option parents had to help with the problem of baby sleep was to buy a book. There were six or seven main players in this market so I bought all of the books and got to work in reading them. I also noticed that each book was between 150 and 300 pages long, but each usually only offered one solution to the baby sleep problem. And each book had a different solution. I decided that a tired parent firstly wouldn't want to plough through 300 pages of a book, and secondly a solution that worked for one baby may not work for another.

So I got to work in creating The Baby Sleep Solution audio program. This gave parents ALL of the methods being offered by the main experts in an easy to listen to, 30 minutes of audio. All of the main baby sleep methods were still there, but without all of the 'fluff' that was needed to give a book enough pages to make it a sellable book. I wrote a script for the audio program, bought a good quality microphone and then recorded all of the audio. I then bought the domain name babysleepsolution.com, created the website and started promoting it.

Since then, The Baby Sleep Solution has sold to thousands of parents around the world. And I have hundreds of testimonials from parents who have finally been able to get their baby to sleep through the night after using the techniques in the audio program. I've had emails from the UK, USA, Japan, Australia and many other countries from people who have finally been able to get a good night's sleep because of my audio. Not bad for someone who hasn't had kids himself and knew nothing about the subject before reading all of the books! I don't do much to promote the website these days as it doesn't interest me greatly - but it still makes sales for me on a regular basis.

Local Marketing

I also mentioned that I created a website for my home town. This is what started me in the direction of helping restaurants and other small businesses with their marketing.

My idea when starting the website was to make it the place to look for things to do and see in the town. I ended up adding hundreds of pages of information about places to visit, restaurants to eat at and a business directory too. I also learnt a lot about SEO (search engine optimization) so that people would find the pages in Google when they searched for anything in the town. I ended up with dozens and dozens of pages that ranked at the very top of Google for relevant searches. When a page was then ranked highly, for say, electricians or Indian restaurants, I could then approach those business types to see if they wanted to advertise on the website.

As well as paying advertisers, that is also when businesses started to approach me to see I if I could help to either to build a new website for them, or to get their own website ranked higher in Google. So these became my first actual marketing clients. I had a lot of success with the SEO for these local business websites, getting them ranked highly for their specific keywords, and in fact, many of these are still my clients today because of their good Google rankings.

It was because of these local SEO successes that I decided to take my next foray into creating an info product.

This time it was a 2 DVD set called Local Business Search Engine Success where I showed any small business owner what they needed to do to get their own website to the top of Google. At one point the DVD's were reviewed by former Dragon's Den star Rachel Elnaugh, who called me an "internet marketing expert".

As I'd now started helping small businesses with their marketing I decided I should learn as much as I could about marketing and this started me on a voyage of discovery that I still continue today. From courses, books and memberships to Facebook groups and the two AI courses I'm currently taking, I constantly want to learn the very best techniques for helping my clients to get more customers.

Self-Employment

In late 2005, the company I worked for as Group Credit Manager were making some redundancies. Although my position wasn't at risk I enquired about the possibility of voluntary redundancy. I'd always wanted to run my own business full-time (instead of just evenings and weekends as I had been doing) and so decided that this was the perfect opportunity. I accepted their offer and the 1st March 2006 was my first day of self-employment.

It was a scary decision to make, having to earn every penny myself, rather than a guaranteed pay cheque arriving in my account on the 28th of every month, but now, over 18 years later I've never regretted it for a minute. I still work fairly long hours, but my time is my own. I can work in the garden if very occasionally the weather is good, I can take my dog for a walk when I want to and I can squeeze in a coffee with friends or family during the day if I fancy it.

Viral Email Marketing

One of the other services I added to my arsenal after becoming self-employed was helping businesses to build an email list. This list of customers and potential customers proved to be very beneficial for the businesses. In fact, quite a few said that it was their most profitable form of marketing. Once someone had joined their email list, they could then contact them on a regular basis to either turn them into a customer or bring them back again and again as a repeat customer.

The only problem with building an email list for a business was that it was often quite a slow process, with a sign up box on the website, or just asking customers to join the list, sometimes adding no more than a few people each week. I decided that there must be a better and quicker way to build a list for a business and so began my search for the solution.

After a while I found some prize draw software that looked like it had potential. The software was rather clunky and adding the people who entered the draw to the email list had to be done manually but I thought it was worth testing properly.

I approached four of my existing clients - two restaurants, a Driving School and a Tanning Salon and each agreed to let me test the software with a prize that they would provide. The restaurants offered a meal for two people, the driving school a number of free lessons and the tanning salon offered a number of sunbed sessions. Each of these was set up as a separate prize draw and I began promoting each on Facebook and on my other websites.

The biggest benefit of the prize draw software was that once someone entered they were given the chance to get extra entries, and so a better chance of winning, by sharing the draw on Facebook and Twitter etc. This gave the draw a viral aspect because as people entered they shared with others who entered, shared with others etc.

In the month that the prize draws ran for, both the tanning salon and driving school built a list of around 100 people, which both businesses owners were pleased with as it was a big increase to what they'd normally get during a month.

A Restaurant Focus

It was the restaurants where there was the biggest surprise though. One of the restaurants added just over 1050 new subscribers to their email list and the other (who prior to the draw only had just over 100 on their list in total), added over 1300 new subscribers in just one month. So these were 1300 people that were a/ local to the restaurant and b/ wanted to hear from them again.

It made sense why the draws worked better for restaurants than the other businesses - only a small percentage of people in the area would want to learn to drive at any one time, and only a limited number would want to use sunbeds - whereas nearly everybody would like the idea of a free meal for two people in a local restaurant, but I was still surprised at just how well the system worked for restaurants.

So this is when I decided to start my full email marketing service for restaurants. For those that already had an email newsletter and the software to run it on, I offered to set up the prize draws for them. And for the restaurants who didn't have an email newsletter, or didn't want to do it themselves, I offered the full service - monthly prize draws set up for them, the software to run their email list and the actual email newsletters created and sent to the growing list each month. This service proved to be very popular as well as extremely effective for the restaurants.

After a few months of me setting up prize draws in the 'clunky' software, some new software called UpViral was launched. This just tied everything together perfectly as it still had the same viral aspects but with far more sharing options as well as being able to connect directly to the email software. So now, when anyone enters a draw, they are automatically added to the restaurant's email list too.

I have quite a few restaurant clients who I have now been using my viral email marketing service for over 9 years and still benefit every month from the emails that can include offers, details of events, highlighting specific dishes, or just keeping the restaurant at the front of customers' minds.

In the current economic climate when customers are being more careful with who and when they spend their money, these regular reminders combined with occasional special offers have made the email service a very effective and profitable one for my restaurant clients.

Udemy Courses

About a year after launching the email marketing service, a friend who had created several courses on the Udemy platform suggested that I create a course showing others how to launch a viral email marketing service. Around 4 months later my first Udemy course, with over 5 hours of over-the-shoulder video, was launched. Since then I've launched a number of other courses covering social media, SEO, web design, productivity and A.I. and I currently have over 18,000 paying students.

Google Reviews

Over the last 12 months, one area that I've noticed becoming more and more important for small local businesses is Google Reviews. This is proving to be important in two different ways. Firstly, for search engine optimization where Google are ranking businesses that have lots of Google Reviews and are getting new Google Reviews on a regular basis, much higher than businesses that don't get regular reviews.

Secondly, it's also proving really important for converting customers. In this day and age, people will accept the word of others in reviews nearly as much as they would take a word of mouth recommendation from their friends. And so, for a business to get regular, new, good quality reviews is becoming more and more important for convincing people to choose their business.

Also proving to be very important is replying to those reviews in Google. So, in other words, a customer visits your restaurant or other business and leaves a review. As the business owner you should then reply to that review with something that is going to not only be a reply to the person who wrote the review but is also there for everyone to see who looks at that review in the future.

Because I've seen increasing importance in these areas, I've added a number of new services that I now offer to my clients. These help in the areas of getting more reviews and replying to reviews as well as using the best reviews as social proof on social media and the business's website.

Alongside helping my clients to benefit from A.I. in their businesses, I fully expect that helping to maximize the benefits of Google reviews will remain my focus with local businesses over the next couple of years.

So that brings you up to date with my business story so far.

And here's just a few facts about me from outside of my business life...

I have played volleyball for Burton-on-Trent, for Derby and for East Staffordshire. I have a black belt in Shotokan Karate. I enjoy being on stage, have performed in over 50 different musicals and I am currently chairman of a musical theatre society. I also love getting out into the countryside and enjoying long walks with my gorgeous girlfriend and our two dogs.