My name is Liz Parker, and my husband and I, Steve, own The Tulsa Rib Company. We started the catering side of it in the late seventies, and we needed a restaurant to cook our catering. And so we opened the restaurant in 1981. The decision was made to have California cuisine ribs, which are a little sweeter, the quality of the ribs are higher, and the ribs are cooked slower.
Yelp revolutionized our advertising program, and let me explain. When you’re in business as long as we have, the shift in where people see and view your business has been enormous. We started, [and] it was pretty exclusive to newspapers, radio, and restaurant reviews. Suddenly this whole new media came out. People were very personal, and they were online. So Yelp truly revolutionized how we now reach customers.
When we made the decision to do advertising, you have to remember, that was a really tough time in the hospitality industry. We were losing business fast. Everybody felt like they were going off the cliff. People who used to come in three times a week were coming in once a month, so we were in need of finding a new resource. So it was worth the risk to try Yelp. And like I said, it surpassed our expectations.
I’m a numbers person, so what I love about the Yelp weekly report, it summarizes everything I need to understand what type of customer came in, how did they come in, where did they go on our website? How many check-ins were there? What day of the week were the check-ins? So I can really understand the value of the advertising in under five minutes.
