Measuring Marketing Strategy Efficiency
How do you assure that your marketing initiatives are headed in the right direction? What are some strategies that help improve your restaurant business? Perhaps you offer coupons or special promotions to a select group or target audience. Maybe you create a social media campaign or an email blast with offers. And once you implement initiatives, how do you measure their success to assure increased profitability? Perhaps you generate reports afterward to look at the success rate. Are you getting positive results that show growth and a solid ROI?
The competition in the restaurant industry is fierce. Your goal is to make your brand stand out and succeed. The battle of bringing in consistent revenue is real. What steps do you take in your restaurant marketing strategy to assure you stay ahead of the game?
The First Steps
You're probably looking at consumer patterns. What are they ordering? What are some popular combinations? What are the demographics of your consumers? What are the percentages of customers that dine-in, take-out or have their meals delivered? The questions keep piling up....
Gone are the days when the marketing piece of the pie was regarded as an immeasurable portion of your restaurant business. Marketing has shifted to a completely data-propelled business, guided by raw facts that can move your business in the right direction. Nowadays you actually have tools that can help make sense of it all.
But how do you organize all of this information in a way that makes sense to your restaurant business?
All the Information Under One Roof
Let’s have a look at the information collected by your restaurants. In just about every case, this information (ie Guest Loyalty data, promo data, etc. is contained in a separate transactional system or spreadsheet. If you want to look at different pieces of the puzzle and find a correlation you will likely be looking at pages and pages of spreadsheets. That’s enough to make you go cross-eyed! (And it doesn't guarantee that you will find all the pertinent information).
The answer is to integrate all of this data in a way that not only provides reliable answers but can also produce smarter restaurant marketing campaigns. To save precious time, not to mention assure that your strategies are paying off, you need to be able to aggregate all of your marketing data in one place, giving you verified insight into exactly what is working and what efforts are fruitless. It's important to see all of the metrics, the robust data, to get a clear vision of the success or failure of specific initiatives.
Armed With The Right Tools
When you learn the answers to the questions above you can further increase business by creating promos and packages that will appeal to your customers and keep them coming back for more.
You will probably look at segments such as:
- Sales Patterns
- Guest loyalty
- Customer service and retention of loyal customers
- Special promotions and coupons
- Social media initiatives
Moving forward, the savvy restaurant CMO can create a marketing dashboard and track specific KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). The KPIs must provide a clear image of the critical numbers to the restaurant business.
Marketing metrics are crucial because they measure production. Equipped with metrics data, you can measure trends, customer segmentation, preferences, reviews and all of the afore mentioned slices of the pie.
Bon Appetit!
Thoughts?
Are you experiencing a noticeable surge in traffic?
Do you think there could be an uptick in your restaurant traffic but it may not be noticeable yet?
About Mirus:
Mirus is a multi-unit restaurant reporting software used by operations, finance, IT, and marketing.
For more information, please visit: www.mirus.com
Watch Mirus reporting demonstrations and client insight on our YouTube Channel
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