The competition in today’s restaurant industry is overwhelming. Each of your competitors is desperately seeking ways to seize their share of consumer dollars.
Due to rising labor costs, increasing food and drink prices, and operations costs that continue to rise, restaurateurs are feeling the pressure to save money, find new guests, and keep them coming back.
That’s why it’s so important to stand out from the crowd when it comes to your marketing and advertising campaigns. And it’s why you need to save on costs wherever possible.
It’s time to start saving time and working smarter, not necessarily harder. And to do so you will need one very important marketing component – accurate, comprehensive, and clean guest data from a large sample size of your customer base. This is also known as customer intelligence.
Restaurant customer intelligence refers to the process of collecting guest data and analyzing it to identify guest personas, pain points, behavior, and purchasing habits. Then you can individually target your marketing efforts to each of the personas, increasing guest engagement and marketing ROI.
The data can also be used to lower operations costs as you make intelligent, data-driven purchasing and staffing decisions. It can also be used to make decisions about new products, or updates to existing ones.
Better yet, the data you collect is your own first-party data, allowing you to remarket to your guests and create lookalike campaigns on advertising platforms like Google or Facebook Ads.
Collecting Restaurant Customer Intelligence Data
As mentioned above, to execute an effective restaurant marketing campaign, you need solid guest data from a large sample size of your actual customer base.
Traditionally, this data has difficult for restaurateurs to collect on their own – and very expensive when collected by a third-party company. Plus, the data was typically from a small sample size of the customer base. Likewise, if they wanted updated data, they had to continue paying for it.
Fortunately, Bloom Intelligence has developed a world-class customer data platform that passively collects data from multiple sources – online ordering platforms, guest WiFi engagement, reservation systems, company websites, social media, and more.
Then, it stores the data in an easy-to-use database allowing you to garner deep guest insights and easily create engaging, targeted, and automated marketing campaigns to increase customer lifetime values,
This can alleviate the roadblocks and get you on your way to using restaurant customer intelligence to rapidly grow your business and leave the competition behind.
Since the advent of the internet and the countless tools available to collect customer data online, e-commerce companies have had an advantage over brick-and-mortar businesses for decades.
Bloom levels this playing field for restaurants and brick-and-mortar businesses, allowing offline companies to collect guest data easily and without breaking the bank.
By collecting data from multiple sources, restaurateurs can quickly realize the full 360-degree view of their guests, also known as a single customer view. By having a single customer view, businesses can more easily identify marketing opportunities and trends, and better serve their guests.
From online engagement, to online ordering, to on-site dining and more, data is collected that will show how guests are interacting with your brand. You’ll be able to make data-driven intelligent marketing and operations decisions and automate marketing messaging to save time while increasing guest lifetime values, improving your restaurant reputation, identifying and bringing back lost guests, and more.
What Type of Data can be Collected for Restaurants?
- Guest Behavior Data – This type of data can range from actual visit behavior such as dwell times, visit days, and popular visit times, to things like purchase frequency and how each guest interacts with your brand (online order, WiFi login, location visit behavior, offers redeemed, etc.).
- Transactional Data – this type of data is typically tied to each guest through an integration with a POS system. It can also include which offers the guest has redeemed and the
- Demographic Data – this includes data such as age, gender, and postal code. It could also include contact information such as email address and phone number.
- Social Media Data – this data is gathered when a guest logs into your location’s WiFi using a social media account like Facebook. Data is collected only if the guest has allowed sharing on that account. It can also include demographic data included in the list above.
- Reputation Management Data – Bloom Intelligence integrates with Facebook and Google to allow restaurants to see ratings and reviews in real-time. Each rating and review is stored in each guest’s customer profile. The data is also aggregated to see a real-time view and trending data about how your overall ratings are given.
Using the Data – The Goal of Restaurant Customer Intelligence
As we discussed above, restaurant customer intelligence involves collecting and then using guest data to help with operational costs, marketing, and advertising.
Once you grow your list of guest profiles and you have a baseline of data about the overall behavior of your customers, you can begin using the data to improve and measure various parts of your business.
For instance, now that you have an accurate visualization of your customer visit times, dwell times and repeat rates, you can more accurately predict future footfall metrics. It also allows you to shape future marketing campaigns to further improve these metrics.
This gives you the ability to make data-driven decisions on how much staff to schedule on any given day, and at what times to have them clock in and out. Rising labor costs are an issue with many restaurants and chains today, and this will help you save on those costs.
Likewise, by analyzing your guest data, you can make more intelligent purchasing decisions. Knowing when your busiest days and times are can help avoid over-purchasing resulting in waste, or under-purchasing and 86’ing crucial products.
Improve Restaurant Marketing ROI
On the marketing side, you’ll be able to analyze the demographic and behavioral data of your guests and begin forming ideal customer personas, such as women under 30 who visit on weekdays during lunch hours. Or, men over 40 who visit on Sundays during football season.
It’s easy to see that having separate marketing campaigns targeted to each of these personas would be much more effective and engaging than sending a single message to all of them hoping that the message resonates with some of them.
Bloom makes it very simple and easy to configure, execute and measure these types of segmented marketing campaigns. And all metrics are updated in real-time, so there’s no waiting to see how well your campaigns are performing.
There are many other triggers that can be used, such as:
- Birthday
- Upon Exit
- Upon (online) ordering
- Upon Registration
- Customer loyalty and milestones
- Ratings upon exit
- Churning Customers
- Anniversary and more
You can also send out one-off messages to individual guests or customer segments, or you can schedule recurring messages, as well.
To find out more about Bloom’s restaurant customer intelligence platform, and how it can grow your business, schedule your free demo below.
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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