With the battle for market share expected to get even tougher next year, restaurant operators will have to be smarter in how they target “influencers” — people others turn to for restaurant advice — to drive traffic.
So says Carin Galletta Oliver, president of the San Francisco-based world-of-mouth marketing agency Ink Foundry, who predicts six restaurant marketing trends for 2012 — plus one trend she contends restaurant operators should rethink in the new year. Ink Foundry has worked with restaurant brands such as Bonefish Grill, Fogo de Chao, California Pizza Kitchen, Rubio’s Fresh Mexican Grill and Carl’s Jr.
Consumers are growing ever more selective about restaurant choices as they cut back on dining out occasions, Oliver said.
“They’re going to want to feel they’re making a safe choice,” she said. “And that puts more pressure on restaurant operators to make a connection.”
Oliver predicts five key tactics restaurant operators will use next year:
Data. The number of tools that allow restaurant operators to collect information about social media, public relations, e-mail marketing and advertising is growing. Savvy restaurant operators are also collecting data on their customers in various ways.
The key, however, will be how well restaurant operators integrate that data and develop a more holistic analysis across all platforms.
Most restaurants keep data in separate silos, Oliver said, thinking of marketing, public relations and influencer relations as separate departments.
“You need to break down those walls,” she said, and merge that information to more effectively mine insights.
Identifying and activating influencers. Restaurant operators tend to define their customers in demographic terms, but today’s restaurant influencer is likely to defy or transcend more traditional demographic characteristics, like income level, gender or age.
A powerful restaurant influencer today, for example, might be a young woman who traveled through Europe, living in bargain-rate hotels so she could spend more money on high-end restaurants.
“If you looked at her on paper, she probably wouldn’t be on your list” based on demographics, said Oliver. “But if you listen to her conversations, you’d realize she’s in your restaurant five times a month and spends more money” than the average diner.
Those are the people who are driving restaurant recommendations these days, Oliver said, and restaurants next year will be developing tools to encourage those people to spread the word about their brands.
Comments
Post a CommentHopefully they hear!
Lisa,
I agree, you did a very nice job here. The question is, will they listen? So many times it seems that coupon is used as both a strategy and tactic, but then never tracked back to the individual - and that individual is never loaded to a central marketing database to watch their interaction with the brand over time.
Old demographics have to be thrown out the window, and a new set of measurements has to be brought to bear here - engagement. Not just the engagement for how often they come, but why they come, how many they bring, how much do they spend, on what, and when! Are they Wednesday Happy Hour All Day only customers (like a lot of folks at GrillSmith are here in Clearwater) or does that just bring them in mid week when they are normally weekend only customers? Are they doing apps in the bar or full meals? Do they only come in when they have a coupon, thus promoting what I like to call the Bed Bath & Beyond effect - you won't go unless you get your 20% off.
It is even more critical with shrinking disposable dollars and increasing competitive positioning - they are going after your customers! - to pull all this customer engagement information together into a central database and then dig deep into it for insights and holes where you are missing the data you need.
And I will not be shy when I say this is what I do for a living - creating centrallized marketing databases that enable companies to see a complete view of their customers, and then act upon it. Too many times restaurants leave valuable information on the table about their customers that would enable them to sell them more, and more importantly - find more like them! The power in the database is that it provides the framework and the insights to apply in your propecting to drive more people in that look like your best customers - not just continue to market to your existing ones.
Use the database for insights to incent specific behaviors and reward good customer engagement. Then drive more people in based on those profiles.
It's basic but it's suprising how many don't even keep all their customer data in one place - if that is your case, call me, I'll be happy to help you consolidate your customers into a single, actionable database - and find ways to catpure more data as well.
Social media is great, coupons are wonderful, mobile is good, but what are you gonna do if you don't have a central database to keep it all in??? Silo's suck.
Onward to a strong 2012 - I'm doing my part spending my restaurant $$ frequently - hey, it's cheaper than Publix!
Predictions are hard in this day & age of innovations!
Lisa, great work! We quite agree.
Your article talks about how restaurants need to merge their customer data so it all works together to form a single view of the customer instead of working in separate silos. This is exactly what our ProfitStreams Closed-Loop Marketing platform does. Your description of what is needed is eerily familiar—it’s almost like you work in our marketing department!
Just as you proposed, we take the information from different applications, such as gift cards, loyalty programs, and mobile marketing, and combine it with data gathered from the POS to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences. We call this “fueling the loop.” But most important, we make these insights actionable! Now the restaurant can use the information to segment their customers and create automated, targeted marketing so the restaurant stays top of mind with their customers.
We agree social media is quite powerful and allows customers to pass information about the restaurant to family and friends. This is why we have also tied our Social Media Manager into our Closed-Loop Marketing platform so restaurants can engage with their customers and influencers on a regular basis.
We also agree that while coupons can be a tactic, it should not be a strategy. When a restaurant does choose to use a coupon, they need to have control and have measurable results, which is again something our platform provides.
I realize this sounds a bit like a marketing pitch for our platform, but it was exciting to see someone predicting trends for 2012 match our vision so closely! I certainly would love to offer you or anyone else interested in learning more about our product to visit ProfitStreams.com. The product is deployed with early adopters now and we’re working closely with the POS channel to provide our web-based platform to restaurants so they can stay competitive especially in an economy where the fight for every consumer counts. Our goal: help restaurants get butts in seats, more often and spending more!
Thanks again for sharing your insights Lisa. The new year promises to be very exciting!
http://www.ProfitStreams.com
Back to basics
I agree to all of this, and these are great things to keep in mind. But I can't help but come back to the fact that a lot of restaurants don't even have the basic low-cost, highly effective marketing campaigns that every restaurant should have in place to fill down times, bring in traffic and keep people coming back. We see that by the fantastic reaction to our regular restaurant marketing telephone seminar series. The attendees are thrilled to find easy to implement strategies and done for you templates to help them do SIMPLE and easy restaurant marketing. What a lot of restaurant owners are missing out on are those simple activities that just cost a bit of the hostess' time during down times but that really work in achieving growth, such as referral programs and leveraging special occasions. For some ideas on this, have a look at our free restaurant marketing tips at http://amyfoxwell.com/win-win-restaurant-marketing.