Restaurant Marketing - 16 Marketing Strategies For Growth

Learn What Restaurant Marketing is and How to Create Demand for Your Restaurant

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What is Restaurant Marketing?

Restaurant marketing is the process of getting people to visit your restaurants. Restaurant marketing creates loyalty, provides data to research, analytics, and allows restaurants to gain a better understanding of their ideal customer profile. It utilizes all customer channels: guest WiFi, website, social, ratings sites, mobile apps, email, text, and advertising.

Here are several strategies you can employ right now in your restaurant marketing plan to help improve your marketing campaigns, build more customer loyalty, and boost your bottom line.

 

1. Use Location Analytics for Intelligent Restaurant Marketing

Without accurate, reliable customer data, restaurant marketing becomes next to impossible.

But restaurants have traditionally been at a disadvantage when it comes to collecting reliable customer data.

Fortunately, WiFi technology and restaurant marketing companies like Bloom Intelligence have made this entirely possible, and at pennies-on-the-dollar compared to traditional data collection methods.

Using your WiFi access points, you can gather behavior data from your actual customers. Even if they do not log into your WiFi, you can have access to the following data in real-time:

  • Dwell Time
  • First Time Visitors
  • First Time Visitor Return Rate
  • Customer Churn Likelihood
  • Popular Visit Times
  • Much More

To create a customer profile, customers must first log into your WiFi. If the customers do log into your WiFi, a customer will send an individual customer profile. It will include contact information, such as cell phone or email address, and all of their behavior data, past, present, and future.

You can then use the data to create targeted marketing campaigns that are proven much more useful than non-targeted messaging.

With Bloom, you can create any number of campaigns, surveys, ratings requests – even smart coupons and restaurant comment cards.

This process is known as WiFi marketing for restaurants.

These campaigns can be simple messages, they can include redeemable digital coupons, or a configuration can ask customers to rate a recent experience.

You can manually schedule campaigns, create a recurring/timed basis, or send messaging based upon specific customer behavior.

Moreover, you can send these emails to specific customers who have met certain behavioral or demographic criteria. And you can execute these campaigns knowing you had the most reliable and comprehensive customer data through location analytics.

To learn about WiFi marketing in the restaurant industry, download our free whitepaper here – Bloom Intelligence WiFi Marketing Guide.

Restaurant Marketing - WiFi Marketing for Restaurants


2. Build a Customer Database

It is imperative to understand who your customers are and how they behave while at your place of business, individually and as a whole.

By building a database of customer information, you can use the information within each customer profile to market to them much more effectively.

The database is also a CRM (customer relationship management) database.

Building a CRM database is the first step to personalizing your customers’ experiences and maximizing your revenue per customer. You can then use it to make intelligent, data-driven marketing and operations decisions.

It’s important to understand that building customer databases will allow you to re-market to your customers much cheaper than you can via and any traditional restaurant advertising channel.

Once you collect and verify your customer’s emails and or phone numbers, you can market to your restaurant customers for the lifetime of a person having the same email or phone number for pennies on the dollar compared to traditional restaurant advertising.

 

Build Your Restaurant Marketing Database Easily

Many restaurant owners are put off by the idea of building this type of database because of the resources required to make it.

Fortunately, WiFi technology eliminates that problem.

Now owners and operators can build customer databases of tens or even hundreds of thousands of customers. And it can be done passively, allowing you to concentrate on running your business.

As you’ll see elsewhere on this page, once you begin building your new customer database, you can use it in many different ways to increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and improve operations.

Moreover, you can track ROI on these campaigns and end up saving on marketing and advertising costs.

Bloom Intelligence customer databases can include the following data:

  • Customer name and email
  • Gender and age/birthday
  • Customer phone number and postal code
  • First and Last visit dates and dwell time
  • Typical visit days, times and duration
  • Which locations they visited, and dwell times per location
  • Likelihood of churning
  • Offers received or redeemed

The marketing potential when you have this kind of customer information is exponential.

However, if your data is not accurate, it lowers the potential. Bloom provides clean, verified data.

Build customer profiles for improved restaurant marketing


3. Validate and Clean Your Customer Data

There are many WiFi marketing and analytics platforms, customer data collection methods, or manual processes to collect customer data that will allow customers to enter fake data.

When this happens, marketing statistics are skewed, messaging doesn’t reach customers, and costs rise as a result.

This is because your systems are not using clean, normalized data.

Look for solutions, like Bloom Intelligence that will validate and clean your customer data for you.

When you can rest assured that your customer contact information is valid, then you can execute data-driven, intelligent behavior triggered marketing campaigns.

Bloom Intelligence verifies all emails in real-time. Also, the system will check zip codes and phone numbers for accuracy. And if a customer enters a birth date that appears false, Bloom will ask for the correct information.

It is crucial to keep in mind that having complete, clean customer data will allow your marketing campaigns to run at their highest levels of effectiveness.

Restaurant marketing requires clean customer data


4. Develop Customer Personas to Personalize Your Customers Experience

Now that you have automatically built large clean customer databases, you should develop accurate customer personas, sometimes called buyer personas, which is critical for a successful marketing strategy.

Accurate and comprehensive customer data should always be at the center of persona development.

Basing personas on personal opinions or intuition can be devastating for your campaigns.

A buyer’s persona is a grouping of customers with similar characteristics that represent your different customer segments.

Of course, this will allow you to take the first step to create a highly personalized customer experience and personalized messaging, which drives brand loyalty, engagement, and, ultimately, higher profits.

 

How to Get Started

Once you have begun building your customer database of clean, verified data, this step is invaluable.

Begin by taking some time to look through individual customer profiles. You will start to see broad groups of customer segments based upon things like age, visit times, gender, and other demographic and behavioral data.

Then, create a list of these various segments. This list will then create more specific customer personas.

Once you have developed these personas, you can then begin to execute separate marketing campaigns aimed at each persona.

As you can see, this will allow you to create personalized marketing messages in a tone and scope that the customers within the personas will relate to and engage with easily.

  • An article from CMO.com stated that targeted advertisements are, on average, almost twice as effective as non-targeted ads.
  • eConsultancy.com reported that 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement.
  • In a study by The Direct Marketing Association, segmented and targeted emails generated 58% of all marketing revenue.
  • And 77% of ROI comes from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns.

A quality WiFi marketing for restaurants platform like Bloom can give you quality data within a quantity required to develop accurate customer personas in a brick-and-mortar environment.

Using customer profiles to create restaurant marketing personas


5. Boost Restaurant Marketing Results with Customer Segmentation

It’s simple. In today’s crowded marketplace, consumers expect targeted, engaging messaging that speaks to their individual needs and preferences to win their business.

An article from CMO.com stated that targeted advertisements are, on average, almost twice as effective as non-targeted ads.

Bloom gives you the ability to sort, filter, and save your customer profiles into various customer lists, or buyer personas. Of course, this is invaluable data when learning how to market a restaurant.

Additionally, if you choose a smart list, it will automatically update as a new person that meets this criterion enters your customer database.  As a result, this allows you to begin creating much more effective and profitable offline targeted marketing campaigns.

By using restaurant marketing segmentation, you can send different messages to different groups, instead of sending a single mass-message to your entire customer database.

Segmented, targeted content marketing for restaurants is much more useful for customer engagement and overall marketing ROI.

Using customer segmentation, you can execute well-thought-out targeted marketing campaigns. Your customers will notice that you are communicating with them on a more personal level.

So, stop guessing who your customers are and how they behave.

Instead, discover your most profitable and loyal customers! Target personalized campaigns to your various customer groups for better ROI and more satisfied, loyal customers.

Discover the ease in which you can segment your customer base with a WiFi marketing platform – Improving Restaurant Marketing with Customer Segmentation

Restaurant Marketing with Customer Segmentation


6. Automate Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing continues to be one of the most potent marketing channels for marketing professionals, both online and offline.

With active email accounts reaching 5.6 billion last year, this is a marketing strategy that you simply cannot overlook.

In the 2020 HubSpot State of Email Marketing report, they found that 73% of millennial’s prefer communications from businesses to come via email.

At the same time, more than 50% of U.S. respondents check their email account more than ten times a day, and it is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands.

Without an email address, email marketing is impossible.

In an offline environment, restaurant marketers have traditionally had difficulty collecting customer contact information. They either built their database too slowly or lacked the resources to see it through.

For example, think of how much time and effort restaurants go through to collect customer emails manually.

They use techniques such as collecting business cards, restaurant comment cards, or asking customers for their emails.

Not only is this time-intensive costing you labor costs, but also think of how many incorrect emails you receive through human error (writing the email) or manually entering into your customer relationship database.

 

Collect Email Addresses Passively

Fortunately, there is now a way to passively collect and clean email addresses from your customers quickly and easily.

Using your guest WiFi, you simply create a WiFi landing page. The page will require your customer to enter their email address to gain access to the internet.

The Bloom platform will automatically verify these emails in real-time.

You’ll quickly build a vast, clean customer database of your actual customers. And you can then use it for your restaurant marketing.

However, many restaurants do not have the resources to update their database, create, and send emails continuously. And it is difficult to track any type of tangible ROI by using a spreadsheet.

 

Email Marketing Automation

Now you know why it is crucial in today’s competitive marketplace to automate your email marketing campaigns.

With a WiFi marketing and restaurant analytics platform like Bloom Intelligence, you can build detailed customer profiles and send specific targeted emails to those who meet the criteria that you define.

You create a message once, and anytime a customer matches the criteria, an email will send to them.

Not only will you see who opened and clicked on the email, but you’ll also be able to see who has returned to your place of business after doing so.

And based on your per-person average, a substantial dollar amount can then be placed on each campaign. Plus, if you added a redeemable coupon to your email, you can see who has returned and redeemed the offer.

You see, this makes restaurant marketing attribution entirely possible in an offline, brick-and-mortar environment.

Email Marketing for Restaurants


7. Measure Restaurant Marketing Attribution

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” – John Wanamaker (1838-1922) Pioneer in Marketing.

This quote still resounds true today. Finding out what marketing avenues are working, and which ones are not, is a difficult task for offline marketers.

Marketing attribution is an essential piece of the marketing puzzle.

It can tell you how your campaigns are performing, and it can help make them even better. And this will give you a considerable advantage over the marketers who do not have a way to attribute ROI to specific campaigns.

When spending money on a restaurant marketing campaign, it is a dire necessity to measure the monetary value of the campaign to generate significant revenue.

But again, in an offline environment, this can become a very challenging thing to do.

Without Bloom, how would you know that a customer returned to your place of business because of a marketing campaign? How would you track if they simply revisited without interacting with your campaign at all?

WiFi Marketing and Analytics

As mentioned in the email marketing section above, your guest WiFi, and a WiFi marketing and analytics platform allow you to know when a customer has returned to your business.

Likewise, you’ll know if they interacted with your email marketing campaign.

Also, when they logged into WiFi the very first time, we can place a tracking cookie on their device.

Now you can send specifically targeted ads to your customers on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

You’ll be able to see who interacted with those ads, as well, and how many returned to your physical locations.

As you can see, this is information that restaurant marketing professionals have simply never had access to before. And it allows for much more focused attribution.

Not only will you see tangible ROI from individual campaigns, but you’ll also see how unique and overall customer behavior (such as dwell time or repeat visits) is affected.

restaurant marketing attribution


8. Build A Strong, Positive Online Reputation

In today’s tech-savvy marketplace, customer ratings and reviews have a significant impact on your restaurant reputation management.

More and more, diners are seeking out online restaurant ratings and reviews online when deciding where they are going to spend their money.

So, this opens up an enormous opportunity for restaurant marketing professionals.

Whether good or bad, these reviews provide priceless feedback you can use to produce new marketing tactics and improve your overall customer experience.

They allow you to recognize specific things that customers love and those that need improvement.

Online reputation is as crucial as it ever has been for restaurants. Study after study has shown that customer ratings correlate directly with overall revenue.

Marketing wouldn’t be complete without paying attention to online reputation and working to improve online ratings and reviews.

So, you see, this is why it is vital to use first-party restaurant rating platforms such as Bloom’s.  Bloom Intelligence allows you to stay ahead of customer sentiment and stay proactive about your reputation by measuring your customer behavior in real-time.

You can stop poor ratings before they reach popular rating sites like TripAdvisor and Google and encourage satisfied customers to post their experience online.

Rating management will allow you to build positive online reviews on autopilot without lifting a finger.

Over time, your online reputation will improve, creating higher revenue, and more loyal customers.

Automate the Process

Bloom gives you the ability to send rating requests to customers about their recent visit automatically.

If they respond with a good rating, you can reply with a “thank you” and links to your pages on the online ratings sites or your social media pages.

Should they reply with a negative review, you can respond with an apology and a way to resolve the issue or incentivize your customer with an offer to come back.

Then you can remeasure their sentiment after they leave. Imagine having the opportunity to stop a negative online rating before it even happens.

Also, with Bloom, you’ll receive real-time notifications when a customer leaves a bad rating.

These notifications provide you with the opportunity to contact the customer and resolve the issue immediately – perhaps even before they leave your place of business. The system will also remember the customer and ask for another rating after their next visit to make sure there is a resolution.

If you’re not paying close attention to your online ratings and reviews, you are missing out on vital information that can help grow your business.

And if you’re not actively pushing those rating higher, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Learn how to proactively improve your online ratings and reviews in our free guide – Rocket Your Restaurant Ratings and Reviews

Restaurant Marketing for Higher Ratings


9. Target and Save At-Risk Customers

It’s no secret that your loyal customers are the lifeblood of your business.

So, when a customer changes their habit of visiting your establishment, do you have a way of knowing?  Can you entice them to come back?

There is an enormous amount of competition in the restaurant industry, and it doesn’t take much to shift a customer’s routine.

And when it comes down to fundamentals, if your customer isn’t dining at your establishment, they are dining somewhere else.

Customer churn, also known as customer attrition, is going to happen with any business. Even if you have the best food, drink, and environment, loyal customers will eventually stop visiting your place of business.

Sometimes it is due to a negative experience that they never reported. Sometimes customers move away, or guest habits and tastes simply change.

Whatever the cause, it’s important to monitor customer churn closely.

Why Is This Important?

When it comes to restaurant marketing, rescuing churned customers, or those who are at risk of churning, should be a consistent strategy.

  • Acquiring new customers can be as much as 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
  • A mere increase of 5% in customer retention equates to more than a 25% increase in profit.

The financial and business sense of retaining loyal customers is evident.

Done effectively, you will foster relationships, promote trust, and benefit both your business and your customers.

With Bloom Intelligence, you’ll have the ability to monitor your overall churn rate in real-time.

Moreover, you will be able to identify individual customers who are at risk of churning or who have churned and are not coming back to your restaurant.

Then you can set up an automated at-risk customer campaign that uses machine learning to target your churned customer at the right place with an offer to entice them back.

According to research from Bloom, our customers see up to 38% of their at-risk customers return. Improvements can make a massive impact on your bottom line.

Saving at-risk customers should be an ongoing and consistent part of any marketing strategy.

Restaurant Marketing to Save Churning Customers


10. Content Marketing for Restaurants

As it is defined today, content marketing for restaurants is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action.

There are two primary reasons to consider content marketing for your restaurant business.

First, while there is high consumer confidence, there is also considerable competition.

According to Deloitte’s latest Retail, Wholesale and Distribution Outlook, U.S. retailers will quite possibly face some headwind this year.

“With the outlook for global growth dimming and the uncertainty of trade tariffs unlikely to go away soon, we expect real GDP growth to slow to 1.6 percent this year from 2.3 percent in 2019. Overall, we expect real consumer spending growth to slow to 2.2 percent in 2020 from 2.5 percent in 2019.”

So you see, this makes solid customer loyalty extremely important.

With fewer dollars to go around, you want to keep your customers coming back. Content marketing is the perfect strategy to generate that type of loyalty.

You want to engage your restaurant customers in a way that will have them coming back to your store again and again, and then translate that engagement into tangible ROI.

To do this, you need to be able to segment your customers into specific groups and measure the behavior of each customer individually, based on the content they receive.

How to Collect Restaurant Customer Data

There are several ways to collect customer data, such as through your POS system, loyalty platform, or your website.

However, for most brick-and-mortar restaurants, the ideal solution is a quality WiFi marketing and analytics platform like Bloom Intelligence, which can consolidate this customer data.

After obtaining the comprehensive, cleaned data, the marketing ideas become endless. You can send specific emails to specific customer segments about:

  • Weekly specials
  • Monthly freebies
  • Events (such as local craft beer/wine tasting, kid’s night, etc.)
  • Newsletters from the company CEO
  • Highlighting menu items or employee achievements

With the Bloom WiFi marketing and analytics platform, you can also send out marketing messages based on demographics and user behavior, triggered by things like:

  • Birthday
  • Age or gender
  • Milestone number of visits
  • Customer ratings
  • Evidence of churning
  • Upon exit
  • After X amount of days since you have last seen them
  • Much more

The critical thing to remember is that you need to gather as much data as possible about your customers to segment your audience and personalize messaging to each section.

Proper segmentation leads to increases in customer engagement, which can build loyalty to your brand and keep them coming back.

And this, in turn, leads to higher customer lifetime values, which increases your profit margins and helps you hedge against an unpredictable and possibly volatile economic future.

Content Marketing for Restaurants


11. Create a Restaurant Loyalty Program to Boost Marketing Results

Customer loyalty programs are enormously popular in restaurants all over the world.

Owners and operators know this customer-engaging restaurant marketing strategy has a strong capability to expand their customer base and extend the average lifetime value of their customers.

Marketing professionals know that retaining loyal customers is much less expensive than finding new ones. The primary goal for any restaurant should be to nurture and build long-term relationships with their customers to build brand loyalty.

Implementing a loyalty program is a great strategy to help you do this. It can be one of the most powerful ways to retain customers.

These lucrative programs are increasingly pervasive for one simple reason—they work.

They work because consumers like (and even expect) them.  Consider, for example, these metrics from CMO:

  • More than 75% of consumers currently participate in at least one loyalty program.
  • Almost half of the consumers have joined a hotel program.
  • About 40% of consumers are part of an airline program.
  • Loyalty marketers on average receive about $12.00 in earned media for every dollar they spend
  • Loyal customers, on average, spend about 70% more than first-time customers.
Using a WiFi Marketing Platform

With Bloom Intelligence, you can build a successful and reliable customer loyalty program for restaurants.

Bloom integrates with companies like Fishbowl and Paytronix to help build a more substantial, more effective customer loyalty program if you already use those services. We become the rocket fuel to build clean customer databases automatically on your existing platforms.

If you do not have an existing loyalty program, you can use Bloom’s customer loyalty program to reward your customers based upon their actual behavior.

Bloom tracks every device that enters your restaurant, whether the device logged into your guest WiFi or not.

However, when a customer logs into your WiFi, their previous and future visit data is attached to their customer profile.

They only need to log into your WiFi once, and Bloom will be able to track every visit to your place of business.

For a customer loyalty program to be successful and boost your restaurant marketing efforts, you need accurate, reliable, and clean customer data tracked from every visit.

With Bloom, you’ll have access to enormous amounts of data about the customer. Our platform will automatically collect, clean, and analyze your customer data resulting in actionable key performance indicators, large clean customer databases, and a suite of automated marketing tools. Now you can track the tangible ROI of every campaign.

Bloom utilizes advanced algorithm sets that include machine learning and predictive analytics to provide in-depth customer insights that can help create automated email marketing campaigns to encourage your loyalty program members to return.

This automation will increase your loyalty program results, along with your bottom line.

Download our free guide – Drive Traffic and Loyalty to Restaurant with Marketing Automation.

Restaurant Marketing Loyalty Programs

You can track the effectiveness of all campaigns with our advanced attribution models that know when a customer receives a message, returns to your locations, and redeems your offers at your restaurants.

Then you can take the guesswork out of marketing for your restaurant.


12. Social Media Marketing for Restaurants

Social media has become an everyday part of our lives.

As humans, we love to interact and share our lives with others. Today’s popular social media platforms have allowed us to do just that.

Likewise, it has allowed restaurant marketing professionals to market their brand at a very low cost.

Countless millions of people are on free platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram every day. So, it only makes sense for restaurant marketers to jump onboard.

The key to success for restaurant social media marketing is to define and execute on a specific brand voice and image. Once defined, you must be consistent not only with your brand image but with your engagement as well.

Engaging with your customers online is the fastest way to get them excited about your restaurant. Try posting about things like:

  • Event Promotions
  • Food & Beverage Special Deals
  • New Menu Items
  • Contests
  • Employee Spotlights
  • Customer Spotlights

Above all, you should then engage actively with your followers. Respond to them, ask them questions, talk to them, thank them. And remember to be consistent in your voice and tone.

Many restaurant owners and operators are worried they will not have the time to keep up with posting consistently on social media.

If this is the case, start off with just one platform and go from there. Allow a trusted team member to help with posting and responding. Start slowly and work your way toward more and more social engagement.

How To Gain More Followers

Of course, none of this will work if you have no followers, so it is important to have a way to gather a large following quickly and easily.

A WiFi marketing and analytics platform can help. When guests are at your place of business and attempt to log into your WiFi, you can ask them to follow your social media accounts, direct them to specific social media pages, or use social media logins on your social WiFi landing pages such as Facebook Connect or LinkedIn Connect.

If your customer uses these single-source logins on your WiFi landing page, we can automatically pull this customers profile information into your database as long as they allowed you too within the settings of the social media platforms.

Likewise, you can add a follow button on your website and in your email marketing messages.

If you have an advertising budget, Facebook and Instagram can be great for paid restaurant marketing. When a customer logs into your guest WiFi, an internet cookie is added to their browser.

Then, when the user visits other websites, the cookie will communicate with your restaurant advertising platform and your ad will be displayed on the other website’s page.

This is known as standard re-targeting. It allows your brand name and image to be shown to the user consistently as they browse the internet.

Social media marketing is a key marketing concept that should be a primary focus of restaurant owners and marketers.

Restaurant Marketing with Social Media


13. Promote Your Brand with Visual Media

Photos and videos are a win-win for social media and email marketing. But they need to be the right photos and videos.

First and foremost, use images that are relevant to your brand, your message, and the platform itself, whether it be your website, social media, WiFi landing page or email.

For instance, if you are promoting a new menu item, make sure to have a high-quality image of that item instead of a stock image of customers dining at a restaurant or an unrelated food item.

If possible, it is recommended to have a photographer take pictures of your actual establishment so that when a visitor sees the image, they will recognize your brand and feel more comfortable engaging.

There are several types of image formats that can be used in marketing – JPEG, GIF, and PNG being the most popular. They’re all appropriate for different scenarios:

  • JPEG – Use JPEG images when you want the file size to be smaller (more on that below). This is a great option for most photographs but should be avoided with logos, textual images and images containing large areas of flat color.
  • GIF – Use GIF images for animated images, clip art, flat graphics, and images with not many colors or precise lines. A good option for logos with blocks of colors.
  • PNG – Use PNG files for logos and line art, or when transparency is indicated. These files are a good option for colorful images, and they do not lose quality through compression.

As a rule, choose whichever format is the best balance of color, quality, and file size.

Optimize for Mobile Restaurant Marketing

Likewise, with over 50% of emails now being opened on a mobile device, it is important to use images with smaller file sizes.

You never know who might be stuck on a 3G network, or when service is spotty.

Compress your image to the point where the file size is smaller, but the quality remains high.

Try these tricks for an added bonus:

  • Attract customers with shareable photos and videos on your WiFi landing page. It’s the first thing they see, so make it worth the sign-in.
  • Make your splash page social-friendly with like, share, follow, pin, and tweet buttons.
  • Spread the word by asking customers to check-in with social sites like Yelp when they sign in to your guest WiFi.
  • Engage customers with shareable deals, customized for each social media site so their friends can share, too.
  • Retain customers and gain new ones by asking for reviews. Everyone will get to see how great you are!

All of these capabilities are native features in the Bloom Intelligence platform and help build positive connections between your customers and the members of social media networks.


14. Execute Data-Driven Targeted Email Marketing Campaigns

Since its inception, email marketing has always been a great way to market products and services to consumers.

Unfortunately, building an email list has been difficult for brick-and-mortar marketers. Likewise, it took a very long time to build a list of any significant size.

However, now it is entirely possible for brick-and-mortar companies to build huge lists of actual customers.

Using your guest WiFi access points, you can build a large list of customers with very little effort.

When a customer attempts to log into your WiFi, they will be taken to a WiFi landing page. On this page, they will be required to enter their email address, or log in with their social media account.

Their information is immediately added to your customer email list. Then you can begin adding them into your restaurant email marketing campaigns.

This is known as WiFi marketing for restaurants.

With a WiFi marketing and analytics platform, like Bloom Intelligence, you can easily create email marketing campaigns.

You can send emails with coupons, offers, rating requests, or any other information you’d like to send. Likewise, Bloom will provide attribution to your campaigns.

Since the platform will know when a customer comes back through your door, or if they redeemed any offer, you will have access to reports on every campaign you execute. This allows for testing and optimization over time.

If you’d like to learn more about using your guest WiFi for email marketing, download our free guide – Using Marketing Attribution To Power Up Your Restaurant Marketing


15. Share Your Positive Press

Have you made the news lately? Have you been featured on a popular website? Are you releasing your own press?

Sharing positive press with your current and potential customers has been a staple of successful restaurant marketing for decades.

It is a great way to show your current and potential customers the quality of your services or your philanthropic viewpoints.

At the same time, you are getting your brand name, and possibly its image, in front of more people. And since it is positive, the customer will begin to compare your brand with positive emotions. Positive press is more important than ever to both your brand and your bottom line.

Whenever you are the focus of positive press, make sure to begin sharing it as soon as possible – before the “buzz” dies down. Create a “Press” section on your website and publish the article there.

Then share that page on social media and ask your followers to like and share it. Send the link and a summary in an email to your CRM database.

If you are using a WiFi marketing and analytics platform like Bloom Intelligence, you can quickly build a database of thousands and thousands of your actual customers, including cleaned, verified email addresses that you can use as an additional communication channel to highlight your positive press.


16. Discover Bloom Intelligence

The restaurant industry is extremely competitive, and marketing continues to be as tricky as ever.

However, Bloom Intelligence can give you that competitive edge by engaging your customers on a much more personal level that leads to a higher restaurant revenue per square foot.

The Bloom Intelligence WiFi Marketing Automation and Customer Intelligence Hub is a robust restaurant marketing platform that restaurants use to grow their business.

Bloom provides physical locations with the ability to:

  1. Understand their customer behavior at their locations.
  2. Build large clean customer databases quickly.
  3. Segment their rich customer profiles into buyer personas to personalize your customer’s experience.
  4. Re-market to customers based upon their behavior and buyer’s persona.
  5. Track every marketing campaign down to a customer walking back in your door and the tangible ROI of each campaign.

As you can see, this is WiFi marketing for restaurants at its finest.

 

How to Implement Customer Demand Generation for Restaurants with WiFi Marketing & WiFi Analytics

Utilizing your guest WiFi access points, Bloom gathers anonymous customer data.

As a result, this data informs you about your customer’s behavior at your locations- even if they never log into your WiFi.

Bloom Intelligence collects, cleans, and analyzes this anonymous customer data and represents this customer behavior data in your dashboard with key performance indicators such as:

  • Traffic Count
  • Dwell Time
  • Popular Visit Times
  • Churn Likelihood
  • Customer Lifetime Value

Once a customer logs into your guest WiFi and opts into Bloom Intelligence, you automatically capture their digital profile.

Bloom verifies all emails in real-time and cleans all customer data that is collected.

This verification allows us to build sizeable clean customer databases quickly with detailed customer profiles that include names, emails, phone numbers, zip codes, birthdays, and individual customer’s presence analytics.

Now that Bloom has automated the building & cleaning of your customer databases, we now give you the ability to segment your customer databases in a combination of different ways or giving you the ability to build buyer personas.

 

Using Buyer Personas for Restaurant Marketing Success

Buyer personas are groupings of people with similar characteristics.

You can associate these lists to campaigns so that you can personalize the messaging to your customers, which drives higher engagement rates.

Now that you have this extensive cleaned customer database that you can segment into buyers’ personas, you can start re-marketing to your customers.

Bloom’s WiFi marketing for restaurants allows you to send one time or repeating messages, offers, or surveys. More importantly, we will enable you to trigger messaging based upon your customer’s behavior.

For example, one of Bloom’s triggers is our at-risk customer trigger. We use machine learning to identify your customers that have been lost and target them with an offer at the right time & place. Our customers are seeing up to 38% of there previously list customers returning to there locations.

This is a big deal because it is much cheaper to save an at-risk customer than to gain a new one.

All campaigns can be tracked down to someone opening your email, walking back in your door, redeeming at your location, and the tangible ROI of every campaign.

Restaurant Marketing Strategies

As a result, WiFi marketing and analytics can open up an entirely new world of marketing possibilities for restaurants, including restaurant guerrilla marketing tactics.

Bloom WiFi marketing for restaurants gives you the ability to have the same competitive edge that online companies have in terms of measuring customer behavior, building customer databases, and the ability to personalize your marketing at scale.

It’s time to start leveraging your guest WiFi to gain a competitive edge. Then watch your profits grow. Schedule your free demo today and see how Bloom can help your business grow.

If you’re researching for the best platform for your business, click here for an easy process to follow and a free spreadsheet template when choosing a WiFi marketing platform!

In addition, learn more about cutting-edge marketing with our list of 2021 restaurant marketing ideas to grow your restaurant business.

 

 

SAVE TIME, INCREASE CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUES, CREATE NEW CUSTOMERS

What our happy customers
are saying

“SaaS that covered so many bases for us instead of having to use multiple software products. Bloom Intelligence has simplified our responses to reviews, customer feedback, and more. I highly recommend Bloom Intelligence.”

Robert Sanderson

“Bloom Intelligence really is a step ahead in terms of marketing software and metrics. Their product is reliable, fast and innovative and has helped the company I work for really grow.”

John Marchetti

“Working with Bloom Intelligence has been amazing. They assist you every step of the way and work with you hand in hand to make sure you are optimizing your advertising potential. We are excited to use this tool to help learn more about our customers so that we can personally engage with them and understand our strengths/weaknesses.”

Ariel Ramirez

“In these challenging times, it has been a pleasure working with Bloom Intelligence to help facilitate our service offering to our clients. They were extremely responsive and provided support to mitigate risk and minimize revenue loss. Great partner!”

Stefan Kim

“We’re extremely pleased with the wealth of customer data that we’re able to gather, at a very attractive price.  In addition, we’re able to communicate our new product promotions by using  the landing page as a digital billboard.  A “no-brainer” for anyone working with limited Marketing $$.”

Bob Cross, Vice President of Operations

Restaurant Marketing FAQs

What is the best marketing strategy for restaurants?

Of all the restaurant marketing strategies, perhaps the most effective strategy is using a WiFi marketing and analytics platform. It allows you to collect customer contact information, segment your customer list, create targeted, personalized messaging, and remarket to them for maximum results.

What is restaurant remarketing?

Restaurant remarketing is a powerful way to connect with visitors to your website or customers who have logged into your WiFi. It allows you to send targeted advertising, and behavior-driven promotions to those people through online advertising or email marketing. It’s a key marketing concept that should be a primary focus of restaurant owners and marketers.

What is restaurant marketing segmentation?

Restaurant customer segmentation refers to the process of subdividing a customer base into specific groups based on similar demographics, psychographics, and/or various behavior data points. This information can guide restaurant marketing professionals when developing new marketing campaigns for each group or optimizing existing ones to personalize the customer experience online or at their physical locations.

How do you use smart coupons to market a restaurant?

The best and easiest way to implement and maintain a digital smart coupon program is to use a WiFi marketing and analytics platform like Bloom Intelligence. The platform allows you to easily create and send customers a unique, one-time-use code that they can redeem on their next visit. The coupon is stored on their mobile device.

The Power of Restaurant Marketing with Bloom

Optimize restaurant marketing in 2021

Optimize retail &
business operations

Track restaurant marketing in 2021

Track attribution of
customer campaigns

wifi marketing for new customers

Trigger marketing
campaigns based on
marketing presence

how wifi marketing helps

Measure the health
of corporate & franchisee
locations

wifi marketing for coffee shops

Compare locations or
group of locations to
quickly identify opportunities
or threats

Are you ready to grow
your restaurant business?

If so, find out how Bloom’s restaurant marketing platform measures offline guest
behavior and builds guest loyalty.

It’s time to start leveraging your guest WiFi to gain
a competitive edge. Then watch your profits grow.

Get a Free Demo