Sustainable Marketing: Cultivate Your Restaurant’s Audience

Growing your restaurant’s audience is a lot like growing great produce. The entire process requires time, planning, and varying degrees of effort and nurturing. The end product (or produce), in this case, is of course, the cultivation of your audience.

Sustenance for this particular product to grow and bloom is data. You can capture data from multiple sources to effectively communicate your message, get-to-know your customers, and nurture your customer database; it’s the lifeforce of your business.

The “Low Hanging Fruit” in this process, if you will excuse the pun, is capturing customer information from: online ordering, your website, table reservations, gated-Wi-Fi, and to some extent also social media engagement. This data is easy to capture and can be turned into actionable steps that aims to keep your customers returning to your restaurant. Think of data as like rain for your produce, nourishing it to grow good and strong, while fortifying its roots in your customer database.

Some plants that bear the sweetest fruit require more planning, nurturing, and watering though. Compare this to audience growth items such as surveys, loyalty programs, and POS data mining. Even though they might take a little more effort, the fruits of your labor will give your restaurant further valuable customer information to cultivate satisfied and loyal customers that, in turn, refer even more customers to your restaurant, and help you build a whole digital community.

There are lots of recipes you can use the help maximize this data and email marketing is one that is very fruitful, but often overlooked. According to the Data and Marketing Association, email marketing has a 122% media ROI, which is incredibly fruitful. It is a valuable tool that can galvanize your relationship with your customers and create loyal customers.

As any good farmer does, consider data and your audience growth across all your relevant business decisions. Is it really in your best interest to outsource your take-out business to a third-party vendor that might make your life easier in the short-term, but minimize the relationship and data you could capture from YOUR customer directly?

Each restaurant operator has to evaluate both sides of that equation independently, but it is critical to understand not only the margin you may be willing to concede, but the loss an opportunity to expand your direct audience. Healthy produce does not grow in a vacuum nor will your audience. Both require time, effort, and monitoring, but the end product is nothing less that you or your customers deserve.

If you would like more information on ways to cultivate and nurture your audience, Spillover Software Group offers an all-in-one solution to easily maximize this valuable data allowing your business to thrive and make customer data-driven decisions. For more information click here.