Navigating the landscape of restaurant marketing can be quite intricate. It demands a deep understanding of both your business and your guests, a challenging feat. However, there's a powerful tool that marketers rely on to bridge this gap, restaurant customer data. This invaluable resource can be obtained through various methods (which we'll explore later) and enables restaurants to precisely target and attract the ideal customers to their establishments.
In this blog, we'll delve into the significance of restaurant customer data, how to effectively utilize it, and most importantly, why it’s essential for your marketing success.
The Importance of Personalization in Restaurant Marketing
Many restaurants are, by their very nature, a personal experience. And, just like service, your marketing should be personal, too. While this can be a bit of a surprise to those who are new to restaurant marketing, the simple truth is that each outreach should be tailored to your customers.
It can be difficult to get to know customers on your own, though, so most restaurateurs turn to restaurant customer data. We’ll dive deeper into that later in this blog, but in the meantime, know that once you collect restaurant customer data, you should be using it to more closely tailor your marketing experience.
Understanding Restaurant Customer Data
Before we can move into the how of using restaurant customer data, it’s important to understand what it is and why we use it. Specifically, we need to know how to get restaurant customer data!
Sources of Customer Data from Restaurants
There are a lot of great sources from which you can gather restaurant customer data, and most of them rely on restaurant technology. Some of the most common sources of restaurant customer data include:
- Purchasing habits: Usually gained from a POS and/or online ordering system, especially when tracked with rewards.
- Customer rewards program(s): Rewards programs give you an insight into who buys what, when, and how much, and are a great way to supplement other forms of customer data.
- Reviews & polls: Especially when used in tandem with social media and email marketing, customer reviews and polls are an excellent way to gather insightful data on what your guests value.
- Social media: This isn’t necessarily a hard-and-fast way to gain data, but using social media (especially comments and likes) to build an idea of how your community views your work is an excellent means to build a reputation with customers while simultaneously gathering useful restaurant customer data.
- Ordering history: This is best applied as a catch-all to all of your customers, rather than to individual ones. Ordering history can help you to spot long-term trends in your sales like an uptick in sales of a specific dish (or a downturn in sales), allowing you to make adjustments as needed.
Benefits of Using Customer Data in Marketing
There’s quite a bit of good to come from using restaurant customer data. It allows you to plan more efficiently, learn how and why guests do what they do, and build a better connection with them in the process.
Enhanced Customer Experience
The most important impact that using restaurant customer data will have is on your guests. By learning what they want (and need), you’re able to cater to them more efficiently. You can learn what sells well, how to upsell guests on items that you already know they’ll like, and even build a relationship with them over time.
Increased Customer Loyalty
This ties into the previous point; by gathering restaurant customer data, you’re able to connect more easily (and more effectively) with customers. This, in turn, leads to an increased level of loyalty and ultimately return customers. By learning how to cater to regulars, you’re able to encourage them to return, bring new friends in, and help naturally grow your business.
Rewards and loyalty programs certainly help with this and, as a nice added bonus, can help you bring in a bit more cash over time when they’re properly implemented.
Higher ROI
At the end of the day, turning profit is extremely important. By reading a bit more into the data and taking steps to grow from what you learn, you can pretty easily turn a higher return on investment. Whether this is by changing your pricing to account for purchasing habits or by simply upselling more, restaurant customer data is an incredibly handy tool for turning a higher profit.
Personalizing Marketing Campaigns Using Customer Data
Now this is where things get interesting. Once you’ve gathered a good bit of restaurant customer data, you can start to use it to its best extent. Namely, you can begin to personalize your marketing campaigns to those that will benefit you the most.
Segmentation
Segmentation is a term that’s used in marketing to describe the simple act of breaking down your target audience into smaller, more approachable groups. You can divide customers by age, spending habits, location, and more, but each time you break them into a smaller group, you have a more specific target to hit for your marketing efforts.
Generally, marketing firms will use segmentation after highlighting a demographic that they think will most easily relate to the content in question. For example, if trying to use restaurant customer data to market to potential new customers, a bar might find that they’re most popular with 20-something college students. After learning this, a (talented) marketer would aim their work toward that demographic.
This would likely revolve around using social media platforms relevant to this demographic, such as Tik Tok or Instagram, to highlight the bar scene, drinks, and activities. More importantly, though, these posts would aim to interact with viewers in the comments. This allows you to build a personal connection over a shared interest, ultimately encouraging potential new customers to visit your business.
Tailored Marketing Messages
On a similar note to segmentation, tailored marketing messaging is crucial to any well executed marketing campaign. When using restaurant customer data, it’s vital that you tailor your messaging (any content that you create) to the customer.
Don’t try to cast a wide net; instead, aim to connect with a specific demographic or group and stick to it. You can always expand your reach once you’ve connected with the first group, but trying to widen your reach tends to result in fewer overall results than a narrow, well-planned approach will yield.
Your approach here can vary pretty widely, as every group of people will be different. Sometimes, all that you need to tailor is your language; the way that you post on social media will naturally draw varied groups based on your language and imagery. Other times, changing platforms (i.e., email vs. social media vs. physical) can be the difference between finding your target audience and finding nobody; it really all depends on how you establish yourself.
Multichannel Marketing
Generally, this will look like an email campaign in tandem with social media marketing and in-person efforts like giveaways, events, and merch. By spreading your reach across multiple channels, you’re able to tailor messaging to multiple groups (hitting on our first two points again) while simultaneously keeping things neat and organized.
It’s not easy to do for the first time, but once you get the swing of things, multichannel marketing is an incredibly effective means to reach all of the target demographics on your list. You can get the attention of in-person only regulars, social media followers, and (if you’re lucky) new customers — all with a single campaign.
Best Practices for Using Restaurant Customer Data for Marketing Campaigns
As a little disclaimer at the end, we need to touch on privacy. Restaurant customer data is an incredibly valuable resource, and as such, it needs to be treated with respect. We’ve all heard of companies losing customer data, leading to compromising the emails and personal information of their customers. This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, very bad.
All of this goes to say that when collecting and using restaurant customer data, it’s crucial that you keep it close and secure. Do not sell customer information without their consent, keep it in secure (preferably encrypted) storage, and do not gather restaurant customer data without first becoming familiar with your local laws and regulations. Some countries and states require consent from customers to gather. In short, be careful, treat your customers’ data like you would your own, and stay smart about it.
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