Social Wi-Fi has the ability to transform the way you promote your restaurant by leveraging multi-channel marketing.
Restaurant marketing has become far more sophisticated in our digital world. It has been substantially transformed over the last few years and restaurateurs have had to become savvier than ever to develop and execute a successful marketing strategy.
No longer do guests rely on print media, but rather make choices via online reviews, social media channels like Facebook, information sent via email, or through digital ads viewed as they browse the web. All these channels must be at the center of your marketing strategy to run a successful restaurant.
Online marketing may be where e-commerce thrives best, but there is actually far more potential for restaurants to leverage it with social Wi-Fi. In fact, it can even be argued that restaurateurs may have an upper hand when it comes to marketing online than any e-commerce store ever could.
What Multi-Channel Marketing Is
Restaurants have a lot of variety with regards to marketing because they have both physical and digital marketing solutions available to them. This mix of different platforms is known as multi-channel marketing.
Restaurants can communicate with guests directly and indirectly through websites, direct mail, email, social media, table side marketing, and more. This gives you a greater chance of reaching new guests or have regulars return to your restaurant more frequently.
Why It Matters
For a business to grow, it is vital to foster communication and interaction between restaurants and guests. Because each of your guests will prefer different forms of communication your customers will be everywhere — so, you should be too.
Offering a Seamless Experience
Multi-channel marketing provides a seamless experience across both real-world and digital spaces. This includes everything from in-store advertisements and displays to social media advertisements and email marketing. Multi-channel marketing allows you to tailor and align your branding across multiple different platforms.
Increase Visibility
By being visible on various different platforms, the likelihood of a guests coming across your marketing material increases exponentially. This is of key importance as studies have shown that time and time again, frequency breeds familiarity — and familiarity breeds trust. No matter who or where your customers are, you want to be there too.
How it Works
This all sounds great in theory but keeping track of different social media, CRM, and digital advertising platforms also sounds incredibly time-consuming. Fortunately, there are platforms that provide one-stop social Wi-Fi solutions that easily integrate with your current wireless infrastructure.
When a guest signs onto your free guest Wi-Fi at your restaurant via a social media platform, you are given access to their demographic information. You will also know how frequently they return to your restaurant and how long each of their visits are.
Comprehensive Analysis
Finding out what your customer behaviors are is of paramount importance. What drives a customer’s decision to visit your restaurant? What are they interested in? How old are they and what gender more frequently visits, if any? How much time do they spend at your restaurant? How many customers are repeat visitors?
Guessing the answers to these questions is generally not helpful and can sometimes be detrimental to your marketing efforts because you are operating on assumed or incorrect information.
Social Wi-Fi marketing solutions give you a real look at who your customers truly are. The interest and demographic information you’ve collected can be filtered through different shopper profiles.
Highly Targeted Communication
Different platforms require different types of messaging. What works as a storefront display won’t work in an email message. What works as an email won’t work as a Facebook or Google advertisement. With so many channels available, multi-channel marketing solutions let you control all of the digital media communications from a single place. This cultivates a highly attentive audience that will respond to your marketing. With the collected demographic and behavioral information, you can create pin-point accurate incentives to different types of audiences who frequent your location.
Running Campaigns
Since you can control many different digital platforms from a single place, it makes creating a highly coordinated campaign simple and intuitive. Customers do not change their preferred communication platforms easily — and convincing them to do so is nearly impossible. Rather than trying to mold a visitor to your system, you can adapt your campaign to multiple platforms increasing your chances of getting a customer to react in a positive way to your marketing.
Calculating Return On Investment
Running a multi-channel campaign gives you more reach but it also makes quantifying the return on investment more difficult. Just because a customer opened an email with an incentive, for example, doesn’t mean they acted on it and returned to your restaurant. Having a system that works with both a physical space via Wi-Fi access points and digital platforms allows you to close the marketing loop. By comparing who triggered an action online and whether they returned to your restaurant or cafe, you get a real sense of what your return on investment is.
Easy Strategies to Use
There are different ways to act on all of the collected contact, behavioral, and demographic information for marketing purposes. There is a variety of different ways to promote and market your restaurant but here are just four easy-to-implement strategies that you can use.
Get More Online Reviews
Building solid reviews will go a long way to getting more business. The best part is that reviews tend to snowball into more reviews which then attracts new guests to your business creating a positive feedback loop. After a guest leaves your restaurant, you can automatically trigger communication prompting them to share their experience on popular review sites.
Persuade Customers to Return More Often
Studies indicate that if you can increase your repeat customers by just 5%, you can boost your sales anywhere from 25% to a whopping 95%! With the demographic and behavioral information you’ve collected, you can create specific incentives and hyper-target a particular set of customers on multiple platforms to have them return to your restaurant more often.
Run Digital Surveys
Easily solicit information from your customers regarding what they liked and didn’t like, the overall dining experience, rate their servers, the ambiance, your menu, wine/cocktail
list, and more with a simple emailed digital survey. This information will allow you to be more proactive and take corrective action or invest more on the positive aspects of your restaurant.
Cross Promote Your Restaurants
If you operate under a group or run numerous restaurant brands under a corporate umbrella, you can leverage multiple locations. Having a wealth of information on your customers at a particular location can be used to promote new locations or establish additional brands. It can bring your new brand or location to the center of your customers’ attention in a relatively inexpensive way. It is an effective, targeted marketing practice with fantastic results. Moreover, you can evaluate how successful such a cross-marketing campaign is and evaluate the precise number of customers it brings to your new venues as well as their behavioral and demographic information.
Marketing effectively to your guests and building a relationship with them is crucial to the success of any restaurant, bar or cafe.
About the Author
Danny F. Santos is the content manager at Aislelabs, a provider of the most advanced Wi-Fi location marketing, advertising, and analytics platform in the market. He has over seven years of content management and technical writing experience.
