It’s no secret that running a restaurant is no simple task. And with inflation and labor costs on the rise, it is more important than ever to save money and be more efficient.
According to the BLS, hourly wages in food service in July 2022 approached $18.50 an hour. More restaurant chains like Chipotle and Starbucks are raising wages to attract workers, but the consistent increase in these wages over the last year is putting pressure on restaurant operators.
In June of 2022, personal disposable income, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, while increasing slightly month-over-month, was well below the same period in 2012. And according to Aaron Allen & Associates, the number one thing that consumers will cut back on in 2022 when faced with a financial crisis is dining out.
Add the rising costs of inventory and operations, and it’s clear that restaurant operators are in a pinch to save money and be more efficient in any way possible.
Fortunately, there is a low-cost way to increase revenue and decrease costs. All while saving time for you to concentrate on running an effective service.
Your Restaurant Marketing Secret Weapon
When it comes to marketing, there is no more important asset to have in your arsenal than clean, comprehensive guest data. With solid guest data, you can optimize and shape your marketing strategies for maximum ROI.
A restaurant marketing customer data platform (CDP) can be the tool that can boost your revenue and turn you into a marketing rock star. It aggregates data from multiple sources and pulls guest data into a single, easy-to-use platform.
A CDP can pull in data from multiple sources, including:
- Physical location WiFi logins
- Websites
- social media
- POS systems
- review sites
- reservation systems
- online ordering platforms, and more.
By pulling data from all these sources, you can begin to get a full 360-degree view of your guests, including their demographics and behavior/purchasing data. Doing so will allow you to begin crafting personalized marketing messages to send to your guests using automated marketing triggers. And you can do it from a single, easy-to-use platform.
This will save you both time and money since there is no need to learn and train on multiple software tools. There is no need to spend time and money on unfocused tasks when it can all be centralized into a restaurant CDP.
CDP Marketing Automation
With a quality restaurant CDP, you can trigger marketing messages to be sent automatically when specific behavioral or demographic criteria are met – another time and money saver.
For instance, when a guest orders online, the data will be sent to the CDP in real time, then a message can be sent automatically with a simple thank you message, a survey asking how their experience was. It can be configured to be sent immediately, or after a certain amount of time.
Best yet, once the campaign is configured, it will be automated and sent to every guest who orders online.
Here are a few more examples of triggered campaigns you can implement immediately:
- Birthday – When you know a customer’s birthday, you can send an offer or promotion a few days prior. Of course, you should still consider all of the other data points in their profile, such as age, gender, and personal interests. The goal is to bring that person back to your physical location, redeem your offer, spend more money, and become more loyal.
- Come Back Soon – Another tactic is to send a marketing message to a customer after they have left your place of business. When they leave your store, the tool waits a pre-configured time period (minutes, hours, days) and sends them a thank you message and offers them an incentive to come back.
- Give us a Rating – Using the same trigger as the ‘Come Back Soon’ example, you could send a message to a customer who has recently visited your place of business and ask them to rate their experience. If you are aware of the customer demographic and purchase decisions, and their rating is better than average, you can offer a compelling offer to get them to write a review on Yelp, Google, or any other ratings website.
You can also send triggered messages based on things like milestones, loyalty, registration, at-risk potential, good or bad customer ratings, and more. You may also send one-off messages and regularly scheduled messages to any or all of your guest segments.
The Value of CDP Guest Segmentation
Guest segmentation is a marketing strategy of “segmenting” your current and potential guests into distinct groups (market segments) and then marketing your business to them using focused, group-specific methods.
Guests are split into groups based on their demographic data–age, location, etc.–and their behavioral and psychographic data–what online content they interact with, how they behave at your place of business, and their perceived interests.
These groups are called guest segments, and each segment has its own persona. Different personae should receive different messaging.
Based on marketing research, when you engage with clients with unique, individualized methods, you’re more likely to garner interest and ultimately draw leads to your website.
Marketers can successfully collect segmentation data, then optimize their marketing campaigns based on which “segments” they’re addressing with a given advertisement, social media post, etc.
CMO.com states that on average, advertisements targeted to unique guest segments are twice as effective as broad-audience, non-targeted ads. And, in fact, the Federal Trade Commission reports that almost 70% of polled consumers actually prefer marketing that tailors to their interests.
By segmenting your guests into groups and sending messaging that relates to them, you can improve guest loyalty and lifetime values.
Make Better Operations Decisions
With Bloom’s restaurant marketing and customer data platform, you will have accurate statistics about visitor behavior at your physical locations.
Even if your guests do not log into your WiFi, Bloom can sense that a unique visitor’s device is within range of your WiFi access points. You’ll see things like guest dwell times, dwell times by hour, and popular visit dates and times.
This will help you make solid, data-driven decisions about labor staffing and purchasing of goods, avoiding overstaffing and over-purchasing.
Bloom Intelligence Customer Data Platform
If you are ready to start building your own powerful restaurant customer data platform, take a look at Bloom Intelligence. By building your own restaurant customer data platform you will take control of your own guest data, and unlock guest insights that will improve the success of your business.
Then, combine this with our unified WiFi marketing automation and reputation management to save time with automation, and money with the consolidation of services into one unified platform and increase your guest lifetime values.
In today’s competitive environment, we can give you the competitive edge for success!
If you’d like to see the Bloom restaurant marketing platform in action, and discover how you can grow your business through guest intelligence and marketing automation, schedule a free demo or call 727-877-8181.
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