How to Entice Your Restaurant's Target Audience
NNo matter what you do, your restaurant isn’t going to be everyone's cup of tea.
The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll find success by attracting the people who do believe in your restaurant's brand, mission, and vision. This group of people is also known as your target market, or target customer: the group of potential customers whose behaviours, preferences, and values align with yours. By being more diligent with who you target through your restaurant marketing, you increase your likelihood of creating a repeat customer out of every guest.
Know Everything About Your Target Customer
Before you get to the actual marketing of your restaurant, you need to sit and think about who exactly you're marketing to. The process of understanding who your customers are takes time, careful observation, and a little analysis. To help you identify your customers on a general basis, come up with an outline of your most frequent guests. Are they families with kids under 10? Are they college students? Are they the corporate lunch crowd? A helpful exercise is to have the manager-on-duty record a very brief daily summary of the types of guests they saw come in during their shift. Do this each day for a month in your manager logbook, and you’ll have a pretty accurate foundation to build your personas on. It can just be a sentence or two along the lines of “lots of families today” or “had four corporate lunch meetings.”
Start Advertising Your Business
Once you have an idea of who your customers are, you need to figure out where they are and what they like in order to target them most effectively with your marketing. If you're trying to appeal to families, Facebook ads aimed at parents is wise, while college students might be more receptive to on-campus ads, Instagram marketing, or promotions that involve free cover charges or discounted food and drinks.
Invest in SEO
Attracting personnel to your business is no longer a sustainable customer acquisition channel, though you should still invest in making your restaurant's outward appearance pop to win yourself some foot traffic business. Discovering new restaurants most often happens digitally, across a number of websites, with the majority coming from Google.
It is estimated that Google processes over 63,000 searches per second, 5.6 billion every day, and 2 trillion every year. It’s a very smart business decision to not only get your restaurant listed on popular search engines like Google, but also to optimize your restaurant's website in order to appear as a listing when a Google user types in a search related to your business, like "Italian restaurants near me," "restaurants with happy hour near me," or "cheap eats near me."
This blog was inspired from Toast https://pos.toasttab.com/
Find out more about how to track down your target audience by utilising the Operations Manual http://businessmanualsmadeeasy.com/products/operations-manual
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