Ivan Cerquera of Delocus
Ivan Cerquera of Delocus
When you look at the web sites of Latino restaurants, you see a wide variety – some are loaded with beautiful photos and special offers, but many feature just an amateurish photo or two and an address.
“A good web site – with quality photos and inviting copy – attracts way more customers than an unattractive site,” says Ivan Cerquera, founder of Delocus, an online marketing company for Latino restaurants. “And the most successful restaurants combine a great web site with email marketing, online coupons and daily specials.”
Managing a web site and related digital promotions can be a lot of work for a small restaurant. That’s where Cerquera’s company steps in. Delocus, which Cerquera founded in 2016, currently works with 90 Latino restaurant locations, and he hopes to top 100 by the end of 2018. The company creates web sites, runs email promotional campaigns, and provides online coupons and daily specials for its clients.
Delocus is focused solely on Latino restaurants and Cerquera, who is a native of Colombia, takes a hands-on approach to each client.
“I’m involved in the design of every site,” he says. “I put a lot of emphasis on the photos. Each site contains photos of at least 40 dishes. Because ethnic food is different from what many customers normally eat, we have to showcase the food. Also, when people go to the restaurant, they like to feel connected to the owners and staff. So I always include photos of the managers and servers on the site. That connects the customers to the restaurant.”
Cerquera also typically includes a video of the restaurant and key people at work, and links to services such as catering and gift cards.
Once a site is built, Cerquera drives traffic with customized email marketing campaigns. The campaigns typically include information about the restaurant’s specials, photos, and services such as catering and party rooms. But they all touch with the restaurant’s ethnic culture.
“I bring the Latino culture to their customers in the emails,” Cerquera says. “We already know that the customer likes the food and the music of the restaurant, so why not bring them the history, culture, places to visit, and information about the authentic food and drinks of the country?”
The emails go out every other week. Delocus builds the list of emails by inviting customers to sign up via table tents in the restaurants. When customers text the name of the restaurant to the number on the table tent, the company texts back a sign-up link for the newsletter.
The final step in the digital marketing program is coupons and daily specials. Delocus connects each restaurant’s web site and emails to a related site that includes coupons and daily specials for that restaurant. For example, a potential customer who clicks on the “Coupons and Daily Specials Tab” on the site of Don Patron Latino Restaurant in Beavercreek, Ohio, is transported to a site that includes digital coupons for a $5 Jumbo Margarita and a Buy One Entree, Get Second at Half Off.
Since Delocus handles all of the details of the entire campaign, the restaurants can focus on their strengths rather than digital marketing. The sites and emails are usually in English, but Cerquera can create them in Spanish – or both languages -- as well. Cerquera says it takes only about two days to create a restaurant’s site and another three days for the digital campaign, since Latino restaurants are his sole focus.
“When you focus on something, you get better and better all the time,” he says.
For more information about Delocus, click here https://delocus.com/services/
To visit some of his the sites the company has designed, check these out:
https://pueblorealjefferson.com