Sponsored by Yext
For the restaurant that’s just opened up its newest location, how much time was spent promoting that grand opening? Was marketing actually the focus or was it more so on back-of-house management, ensuring the new staff is cooking the chicken to the right temperature?
Opening a new restaurant can cost more than $550,000 and most brands end up overspending on marketing.
As a marketer, how do you measure the success of your grand opening? Did your efforts drive traffic and capture the predicted attention? Beyond financial resources, how many people resources were utilized to manage the event? And most importantly, will customers keep coming back?
Events, including limited-time offers, are foundational to a restaurant’s branding and marketing, but it can be hard to know how to drive awareness and make sure those events have an impact. Meeting consumers where, when, and how they want to engage with a restaurant brand is imperative to winning high-intent traffic — especially when 73% of that traffic is happening off of a restaurant’s owned website.
The public facts about a restaurant brand should appear everywhere customers are searching.
Digital knowledge is all of the public facts about a restaurant brand and its locations. This includes location-specific information, like name, address, and phone number, along with more complex information like menus, hours of operation, events, and unique restaurant attributes (e.g. wifi, outdoor seating, delivery, reservations, and online ordering availability).
This digital knowledge lives on hundreds of services that consumers are using to decide where they’ll eat next — and it has drastically changed how they choose a restaurant. It used to be that when a hungry consumer searched for anything online, whether it was “best pizza in San Francisco” or “live music in Chicago,” Google, Bing, and Yahoo would list ten blue links on the results page. Today, the breadth of places consumers can search has expanded and is made up, not only of search engines, but also of maps, apps, directories, discovery sites, and now voice assistants — which provide searchers with a single, direct answer. Fun Fact: According to a consumer study Yext conducted in July 2018, 1 in 4 consumers will visit a restaurant suggested by their voice assistant, without completing any further research.
“Free Cone Day” is a breeze for Ben & Jerry’s.
Ben & Jerry’s, an ice cream shop with 586 locations around the world, encountered this same multi-location marketing challenge year after year as they prepared for Free Cone Day — an annual tradition that started back in 1979 at their first shop. They needed a better way to manage their digital knowledge, including their restaurants’ location information, menus, and of course, all the local digital marketing efforts around Free Cone Day. By investing in a Digital Knowledge Management solution, they were able to generate 6 million event impressions and 128,000 “Interested” or “Going” engagements on Facebook… contributing to 1.3 million scoops served. What Ben & Jerry’s was able to accomplish in two hours this year originally took them more than 200 hours to do manually.
“[We now] have the ability to control all our information in one place and an easy and seamless way to increase our reach,” Jay Kasparian, Associate Brand Manager at Ben & Jerry’s said. “By smoothing operations for an event that is core to the Ben & Jerry’s brand, we are able to focus on scooping ice cream and making our customers happy.”
Structured data is key.
Search engines, maps, apps, voice assistants, and other discovery sites are now able to provide direct answers to consumers. They can do this because they’re consuming more structured information than they ever have before. When a consumer asks Google Home for “events near me,” Google has the ability to respond because it has structured data relevant to the unbranded query, and it will list out three events (in order of date and time) with information that a consumer needs to make a decision.
Restaurants can take advantage of this capability and showcase their events in search results with help from structured data. With almost 70% of consumers searching by food item or cuisine type, and more than 80% of consumers using their voice device to search for a restaurant by attribute, as opposed to by brand name, there is a lot of opportunity.
By managing a brand’s digital knowledge for each restaurant location) restaurants will not only ease an operational burden, but be able to drive more incremental revenue — from grand openings to limited-time offers — with each store.
