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The pandemic has been both a boon and a bust for restaurants. For those that had already leaned into restaurant tech, it was easy to transition over to a model that prioritized the online ordering and carry-out that consumers preferred. For those that weren’t, it has been a painful time of empty dining rooms and scrambling to transition to an off-premise sales model, often using third-party platforms.
99.77% — the year-over-year decline of seated diners in restaurants in the U.K., compared to 2019
If your experience was, unfortunately, as one of the restaurants struggling to connect with consumers during the pandemic, we can help you get started on implementing a marketing strategy that encourages repeat visits from customers — inspiring them to visit before they even know they want to. We lay out a straightforward strategy in our digital marketing guide for restaurant brands, but we’ll also touch on a few important aspects below.
Striving for that single source of truth
Any restaurant brand that wants to deliver truly excellent experiences, not just from the kitchen, needs access to all guest data. Wherever it’s collected from, to be effective, it must be seamlessly integrated into a single, 360° view of the guest that identifies and matches them with their dining behaviors.
Despite the clear dysfunction created by having fragmented views of customer data, we continue to see restaurant chains, particularly those with multiple brands, struggling with data silos and competing versions of the truth. The list of endless tools, from CRMs to marketing automation, email to analytics, CMS to social reporting, all aid marketers in improving results — but how well do they harmonize?
To cut the marketing buzzwords, the single source of truth is a unified guest profile, which includes identifying information about the guest, the channels they use to interact with the organization, their dining transactions, most recent interaction with the brand, and which offers they reacted to positively. If a guest interacts with your restaurant brand through an app, then switches to interacting mostly through the website, the system underpinning the unified data would notice this change and update its data accordingly.
Gathering data through a next-gen loyalty program
Fully-formed loyalty programs are crucial for restaurants because they’re the entry point into your digital ecosystem — and the most frictionless medium in which most guests join your loyalty program is by downloading your app. This opens up the digital ordering and digital communication channels and presents you with the opportunity of not only enrolling them into your loyalty program, but building a more meaningful digital relationship.
Loyalty is about more than undercutting the restaurant next door or a free bucket of wings on your guest’s tenth visit. Diners expect comprehensive loyalty programs that go beyond generic points-win-prizes incentives and discounts. The core of loyalty is not merely the cheapest price point, but a restaurant brand that can foster community, recognize the guest as an individual, and deliver the content and bespoke deals that reflect this.
Many in the restaurant space still invest far more resources in acquisition strategies than retention. For restaurant marketers, there should be no greater achievement than locking in a loyal customer — one who not only has an affinity for your menu and brand’s promises, but will also pay a little bit extra, or travel a little further to you if required.
Delivering the right message, on the right channel, when it’s most effective
In today’s digital and interconnected world, the importance of tailoring marketing efforts so they are mobile-first, rather than merely mobile-responsive cannot be overstated either. To put into context, a staggering eight out of every 10 digital minutes reside on a smartphone; it’s clear that a fully-fledged mobile strategy is no longer a nice-to-have for restaurant chains, but a cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy.
Guests interact with an average of six digital touchpoints when engaging with a restaurant. Whether that be content on social media, payment through wallet, offers from SMS or email, all of these touchpoints can be directly accessed through mobile. And the upside to this is that restaurant brands can gather vast amounts of guest data, opt-ins, preference insights, and behavioral data to no longer infer, but anticipate what its guest is likely to do next.
As guest behaviors have modified during the COVID-19 pandemic, and more time has been spent on additional screens and different channels, powering cross-channel messaging from unified data empowers a restaurant marketer to more closely align with guest expectations, improve the relevancy of messaging, and make that all-important connection, on the right channel, at the right time.
Want to upgrade your restaurant’s digital marketing strategy in the new year? Download our ebook and start the year off right.
