13 Ways Restaurant Marketing Software Increases Revenue
Restaurants who want to thrive and grow need marketing. That statement may not seem groundbreaking to you (or it might – either way, keep reading to learn more). However, today restaurants who want to thrive need more – they need digital restaurant marketing software.
During just the past 2 years, both the restaurant landscape and marketing technology have changed dramatically because of the pandemic. This changed more than how people interact with restaurants; it forced shifts in technology forward to a more customer centric approach. This means more personalized and purposeful approach to brand experiences, messaging and customer communications across every channel.
So what does all this mean for restaurateurs and anyone helping restaurants increase revenue?
It means you need digital restaurant marketing software that has a built-in data management that frictionlessly integrates with all your systems and does marketing automation across channels all from one dashboard. People are connecting with and finding restaurants mostly digitally, so the best way to connect with potential and current guests is in the digital space.
Without digital marketing software, you’ll be doing a lot of digital marketing tasks separately and adding unnecessary work to your plate, which will slow down your growth (if not keep you from growing).
What Restaurant Marketing Software Do You Need?
Restaurant marketing software that includes a Customer Data Platform (CDP), and uses AI and integrations with other restaurant software, allows you to use your data to reveal guest journeys that match guest patterns and keep them returning to your restaurant.
This kind of software gives you a 360-degree view of what your guests love, how they engage with you, and more. You can use this information for outreach marketing using email, SMS, menu engineering, loyalty programs and other strategies that increase revenue across all ordering channels.
But before we get into specifics, let’s look at what we mean by digital marketing for restaurants.
What Is Restaurant Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing means using technology and the Internet to reach new guests and grow customer loyalty through the entire customer lifecycle. This includes a number of processes and outreach methods, such as:
- Gathering customer analytics and data using AI from existing sources like POS, WiFi, social media, third party apps and more with a CRM powered with deep customer analytics and AI
- Email and SMS marketing messages personalized to guests based on their behavior
- Testing and tracking what’s working and what’s not
- Engineering digital and online menus based on data
- POS cloud-based systems that track guest data
- Contactless ordering and customer interaction
- Online reservations
- Social media management and communication
- Reviews on Google and other online presence sources
- Ads
- Website/blog
When you use this information to personalize to guests, you can get more loyal fans because people are giving you more business simply because you’re listening.
This may seem like a lot, but with restaurant marketing software, going digital and personalizing marketing efforts can be easy. We’re going to discuss each of these points in more detail below.
Here’s why using digital marketing software is more important than ever: In 2020, only 6% of restaurants reported higher profit margins. The rest reported a loss. GoGoGuest helped brands increase their pre-pandemic revenue up to $18M during the pandemic, and over half opened 2 or more locations during that time.
13 Ways Restaurant Marketing Software Increases Revenue
GoGoGuest is a marketing platform made specifically for restaurants, to help with all of the following tasks so restaurants can improve guest engagement, succeed and reach their goals.
Here are just some of the ways you can use restaurant marketing software to personalize digital marketing:
1. Seamlessly Capture And Manage Guest Data Using Analytics and Ai
Using an AI platform drives an 84% average revenue increase.
GoGoGuest gathers data through integrating with your existing systems like your cloud POS, WiFi, social media, website analytics, third party delivery apps, online ordering and more.
The software gathers, organizes and presents the analyzed data to you, and gives you actionable insights to help you know how to take the steps necessary to increase your revenue and grow your business. It saves you both time and money, besides the fact that using guest data software is becoming a necessary part of any successful restaurant business in 2022.
Keep in mind: the more data you can capture, the more AI can help you – which is exactly why you need a data platform, because much of the information it gathers isn’t information you’ll think to access or be able to easily access, like social media, online reviews and more.
From there, you’ll get suggestions and ways to proceed with marketing, to create customer profiles and make smart business decisions that grow revenue through giving customers what they want, when they want it, and through optimization of food supply.
Here are a few more ways guest marketing software helps you with data:
- Cleans up inconsistencies and repetitive data so you get accurate reports and information
- Keeps you from having siloed data – meaning, instead of data in various places, it unifies the data to create a consistent and 360-degree view of all your data as a whole. It’s like seeing your restaurant from a birds-eye view, so you can then hone in on each area to see what needs improvement and optimization.
- Creates visual reports so you don’t have to take a lot of time to quickly understand the data.
- Answers your questions, so you no longer have to play guessing games.
- Gives you solid action steps for marketing and business decisions to save you extra effort.
2. Help New Guests Discover You
Restaurants who use guest data management software see a 78% increase in guest acquisition across ordering channels.
The first step in the customer lifecycle is discovery, which is what happens before the potential guest makes a buying decision at all. If they can’t find you, they can’t decide to purchase from you! So, how do you get yourself seen by hungry people looking for you?
You’ll need to find out what you need to do so these people can find you in search results for your specific restaurant type and cuisine, and during the days and times you’re open.
This can include anything from Google maps results, to third-party delivery results, to online reviews and more.
3. Get The Sale After Guests Discover You
90% of guests are doing online research before they order online or decide where to visit.
Once the potential guest sees you in their search results, they get to choose between you and your competitors. How do you attract that guest to make the reservation, order online or come to your physical location to eat?
Here’s what you’ll need to get more revenue from new guests:
- High ratings and multiple 5-star reviews on Google and the delivery platforms you use;
- An easy-to-use website with access links to your online ordering, reservations or chat (if you don’t offer online ordering and are only doing pick-up);
- Social media presence, especially if you don’t have a website, with easy-to-find links, reviews, photos and other useful information;
- Chat monitoring during service hours to answer questions and make new guests excited to try your restaurant.
Gamification increases sales by giving more to the guest experience. Restaurants who use gamification see 4x increases in redemption of their offers, and 3x the usage of coupons.
4. Design Personalized Guest Journeys
Only 12% of restaurants are using data to drive up revenue by an average of 10%. AI will become necessary for restaurants more in the coming years. The sooner you start, the sooner you can get ahead of the game.
GoGoGuest allows you to create individual customer profiles for each guest so you can understand your marketable audience through tracking their spending habits, visit times, favorite items, demographics and more.
You can then personalize marketing offers to customers (without extra work) via SMS or email campaigns in real-time, based on the time they normally visit and what they buy.
You can also recognize regular guests and train employees to greet them, as well as using the same data to inform your loyalty program, menu design and more.
5. Guest Engagement
Using guest data – which is gathered with permission from them first – you can increase guest engagement in multiple ways to increase ROI:
- Personalize offers: Send customers personalized messages and offers to entice or remind them to come visit or order from you more often.
- Ask For Feedback: Feedback is a great way to stay on top of your operational excellence standards. The solution you choose should allow a guest to offer transparent feedback about the food and service experience – good or bad.
GoGoGuest offers integrations that allow restaurants to collect feedback that can be triggered right after the order is delivered or picked up or when a tab is closed. We can trigger the feedback and reviews by channel and also capture information to a restaurant’s customer data platform (GoGoGuest has a built-in CDP if you don’t have one already).
Personalize The Re-Targeting Experience: Now that you have some feedback, make changes as necessary to keep guests happy and fix any guest issues to get them coming back again. This can be done through SMS, email marketing and more, which we’ll discuss further in the next points!
6. Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns that are hyper-targeted and data-driven convert at 98% (plus cost less than traditional marketing).
Email marketing is far from dead – it’s being used more effectively than ever by businesses that are utilizing the power of email marketing strategically. Some ways you can do this include:
- Sending personalized offers based on purchase behavior, last visit date and time, birthdays, welcome messages and “we’ve missed you” offers.
- Helpful and interesting information that enhances the guest relationship like recipes, upcoming events and stories of your restaurant.
- Any additional products or services you sell, like swag or event packages.
- Loyalty program offers and challenges.
Make sure you send emails that are professionally written in conversational language, and that are visually intriguing and beautifully designed to be responsive.
GoGoGuest’s digital marketing software comes with a built-in full feature email marketing software. For mid-market and enterprise brands who want more control, GoGoGuest also integrates with Emma, an email service provider that specializes in the mid-market to enterprise restaurant category.
7. SMS Marketing
75% of guests would rather receive communication via SMS text messages. Restaurants who send texts see ROI 10X faster than than any other communication channel.
Sometimes, text messages are the most effective way to get guests coming back or ordering online, and even to leave you reviews or join your loyalty program.
Send SMS messages to guests in real time, just a bit before the time they normally visit, for an offer on their favorite item or an upsell. This will encourage them to visit more often and to buy more.
An example of an SMS personalized offer would be: “50% off smoothies today only at your favorite location of our restaurant!” sent in the morning or an hour before their usual visit time. This can even be modified to specify the offer for their regular smoothie, for instance.
8. Use Your POS As An In-Store CRM
Treat guests like VIPs in-store by having their info show up on your POS for employees to call them by name and ask if they want their regular items or upsell specific deals, even at all your various locations and online ordering.
GoGoGuest integrates with multiple POS partners so you can use your existing systems:
- Toast
- Square
- PAR-Brink POS
- And more! Ask us about our full list of integrations.
9. Loyalty Programs
See 50% increased visits from guests who already know you, plus 75% new sign-ups when you improve your loyalty program to reach guests through data and outreach methods.
Using a data platform that integrates with your other systems allows you to optimize your loyalty program to fit your guests and drive more revenue.
- Pick a loyalty program that will resonate with your guests, plus change it up every so often to peak their interest and let it grow as you do.
- GoGoGuest runs a sales effectiveness analysis of your loyalty programs to see what’s working so you can change it up as you go.
- Offer guests exclusivity and rewards tailored to them so they see that you listen to them and want them to keep coming back.
10. Menu Engineering
Menu engineering includes menu design and optimization of dishes and ingredients, portion sizes and more to help you both save on costs and sell more of what brings in the most profits – especially with inflation and item cost issues.
Menu engineering uses the power of data and market basket analysis to help you discover:
- What items are the most popular and profitable, popular but not profitable, profitable but not popular, and not profitable or popular;
- Which items should be sold in combos because they’re most likely to be purchased together through product mix reporting and alignment;
- Opportunities for upsells and cross-sells that are most popular and profitable;
- Menu optimization for what goes where on your menus, both online and in-store, including what to put in your menu’s “sweet spots” based on eye-movement patterns;
- What items you should be promoting more often, and to which customers.
11. Product Mix Alignment & Market Basket Analysis
GoGoGuest uses Market Basket Analysis to predict customer purchase behaviors and reduce risk, saving you both time and money.
- Know which ingredients and products are worth the money you’re spending, and which aren’t so you can save where you can to increase profits and sell customers more of what they want.
- Know which times of the day an item is purchased the most, how many items guests are buying each day, and more to know how much inventory to buy and when.
PLNT Burger used Market Basket Analysis to discover that people loved their core menu items the most, and shifted their overall strategy to focus on those items, which led them to see an increase in revenue.
12. Measure Campaign Efficacy
Once you’ve used your data to plan your marketing efforts, it doesn’t end there. Testing and measuring engagement increases or decreases can help you tweak your programs and offers for optimum performance. GoGoGuest helps you measure the performance of each engagement channel, like email, SMS, loyalty programs and more to see which channels are driving the best engagement results and conversions to revenue.
GoGoGuest’s data software is able to give information about engagement on each channel through closed-loop reporting. This just means that marketing and sales channels are connected, which GoGoGuest’s CRM software does for you, so you can plan your marketing efforts based on the data collected, to use your marketing budget optimally for sales.
This is an ongoing process – the more you track and measure your marketing and sales campaigns, the better you can get and the more you can grow. Restaurant marketing software is what helps you keep the process going without having to put in extra effort or hire anyone new.
13. Save On Labor Costs and Train Employees The Right Way
50% of restaurants lose money on labor costs in difficult times, but 21% of restaurants had lower labor costs during the pandemic who used restaurant marketing software.
Speaking of saving on costs and hiring efforts, restaurant marketing software like GoGoGuest also helps you optimize your staff for the best service experience for your guests and will keep you from having high staff-turnover rates:
- Well-trained staff who is well-versed with your menu;
- A thought-out pick-up and delivery service experience (to make it easy for the delivery platform drivers and make sure that the order is picked up on time);
- Making sure your staff is using your software to know how to properly interact with guests so they don’t have to do the guesswork;
- Optimize staffing times and shifts so you have the staff you need for busier and slower times.
GoGoGuest helps restaurants start from anywhere, and scale everywhere. This means that no matter where you are currently with size, revenue and customers, and no matter how high your goals are, using GoGoGuest will allow you to get there and will grow with
FAQs
Who can restaurant marketing software help?
Using a platform like GoGoGuest to spearhead your restaurant’s digital marketing across all channels helps grow revenue for any size or type of restaurant, including:
- Full-service restaurants
- Fast casual restaurants
- Food Trucks
- Bars & Taprooms
- Food Halls
- Cloud Kitchens
- Catering Services
Can you use GoGoGuest if you’re not tech-savvy?
Absolutely. We made our platform with restaurant owners in mind, so it’s easy to use even if you’re not a marketer. We also have customer success to help you out whenever you have a question or issue.
How do restaurants do digital marketing?
Restaurants are able to incorporate digital marketing – whether they’re small or have multiple locations – with software like GoGoGuest made for the restaurant industry, that tracks and analyzes all the data across channels to inform their marketing efforts, spending decisions and more.
What is the best restaurant marketing software?
Brands who choose GoGoGuest see 40% more new guests and 32% more loyal fans, and see:
- 78% Guest Acquisition Across Channels
- 84% Lift in Revenue
- 92% Increase in Loyalty
- 79% in Cost Savings
What’s the best restaurant marketing strategy?
The restaurant marketing strategies that work do a few things: they personalize to guests, are tailored to the restaurant using data from the restaurant’s ordering and online channels – as well as in-store channels like POS and WiFi – and have multiple ways of connecting with customers, like loyalty programs, emails, text message marketing and more. They also test and refine their methods as they go to see what works best. Besides marketing, this also includes restaurant decisions like menu optimization and staffing choices, all backed by data. The best way to do all of this without hiring an expensive consultant is to use a restaurant data platform like GoGoGuest.
What is multi-channel marketing?
Multi-channel marketing just means marketing across various channels. This can include email, SMS messages, loyalty programs, traditional advertising, social media, Google reviews and more.
What is digital restaurant marketing software?
Digital restaurant marketing software is software made specifically for the restaurant industry that gathers and organizes data across sales channels to inform marketing decisions that help restaurants increase revenue. It does this by personalizing to the restaurants and their guests through creating customer profiles and tracking the customer journey, then sending offers personalized to each guest.
What is the most important marketing tool of any restaurant?
Today, the most important marketing tool is the marketing software. This is because it’s the most effective and affordable way to use your own customer data to market to your guests, so you no longer have to guess what’s going to work. It’s also the wave of the future, so starting to use software like this today will only continue to help you in the years to come.
What is the best restaurant marketing?
People who buy from restaurants need to first find your restaurant, which happens through search engines, social media or other methods. Then, they need incentive to choose you and to keep choosing you over others. GoGoGuest is a data platform and digital marketing software for restaurants that allows you to gather data across sales channels so you can strategically market to your customers, personalize communication and offers, tailor your loyalty programs and more to market to your guests.
