Why is the customer journey important for restaurant digital marketing?

What is a customer journey?

The customer journey is the process that a customer goes through when interacting with a company or brand, from initial awareness to making a purchase and beyond. It encompasses every touchpoint and interaction that a customer has with a business, both online and offline.

Understanding your brand's customer journey is crucial for digital marketing because it allows restaurant and food service businesses to tailor their digital marketing strategies to meet the needs and expectations of their customers at each stage of their journey. By mapping out the customer journey, businesses can identify areas where they can improve the customer experience and create more personalized and targeted marketing campaigns.

This deep understanding of the customer journey enables restaurant businesses to build strong and lasting relationships with their customers, increase customer loyalty and retention rates, and ultimately drive growth and profitability.

Why is the customer journey important for restaurant digital marketing?

The customer journey is a vital aspect of digital marketing as it plays a crucial role in turning potential customers into loyal patrons. By understanding and mapping out the customer journey, restaurant businesses can guide users from the brand awareness stage to the purchase stage and beyond, fostering customer loyalty in the process.

In the digital world, the customer journey is a visual representation of the different touchpoints and interactions that a user goes through before making a buying decision - choosing your business for a dining reservation or to place an online order for breakfast, lunch or dinner.  

Every customer interaction, whether online or in person, plays a role in influencing a potential buyer or existing customer to choose your brand over your competition.

Guide to designing your restaurant's customer journey 

This guide explores the fundamentals of designing the customer journey for your restaurant. The content provides explanations and analysis of target audience, customer segments, and customer journey touchpoints. You'll gain the opportunity to reflect on your restaurant's user experience both in-store and online, and potentially establish a framework for discussing these questions with your team.

1. What are the characteristics of a potential customer who chooses to order online on DoorDash rather than purchasing directly from your restaurant or coffee shop? What reasons do they have for paying a higher price for the same product?
2. Take a deeper look into your customers who live within the 12 mile radius. Then ask these questions: How big is your market opportunity? What are the personas of your target audience? How do I position my brand to fit their needs?
3. Are there any similar demographic traits and behavioral patterns among your top customer personas? 
4. What are the key touchpoints that motivate a buying decision? Does the customer frequently order their meals? Is the buying pattern more seasonal? Is the customer a member of your loyalty program?

A deeper understanding of your customer personas enables restaurant and food service companies to create personalized and targeted marketing strategies that resonate at each stage of their journey. By optimizing the digital customer journey, businesses can enhance the overall customer experience, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive higher conversion rates.

Identifying your target audiences and core audience groups

Identifying your target audiences is a crucial step in creating effective marketing strategies. Without a clear understanding of your target audience's demographics or psychographics, every marketing effort is simply a guessing game.

In order to reach and engage potential customers, it is important to have a clear understanding of who they are, what they need, and how they make their buying decisions. 

Here is a sample of key insights that you could learn from your own data:

• Does your restaurant brand attract more male or female shoppers or both?
• What is the age range of your most loyal customers? 
• Are they from an affluent market? Or do they fit the bargain hunters' profile?
• Does your brand cater to locals, tourists or both?
• How digital savvy is your top customer groups?

As an independent business, investing in market research and customer persona research can be a costly exercise. However, a digital marketing platform like GoGoGuest makes it possible for small to mid-sized restaurant groups and businesses to access their data and gain the actionable insights to create user personas and map customer journeys at half the cost. 

What is a customer persona?

A customer persona is all about understanding who your customer is. Customer personas help businesses understand their target audiences by identifying demographic information, pain points, motivations, and behaviors. By developing one or two common customer personas, your restaurant and food service businesses can gain valuable insights into their audience's needs, preferences, and buying habits. 

Examples of customer personas:

• Women who are stay at home moms
• Women who are married and retired
• Single women who are young professionals
• Single men who are young professionals
• Men who are married and retired
• People who prefer fast food over a variety of meals
• People who prefer to eat high protein meals
• People who are on a vegan diet 
• People who prefer to order fresh made meals for delivery
• People who prefer to eat out
• People who prefer to make meals at home

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer's route to engagement with your business is a valuable tool for understanding the customer's entire journey, from the awareness stage to the consideration stage and beyond. It helps businesses identify customer touch points, understand the customer's motivations and expectations, and tailor their marketing strategies accordingly.

Mapping out the user experience

Mapping out the user experience is a crucial step in digital marketing as it helps businesses understand the customer journey and optimize their strategies accordingly. One effective way to achieve this is by creating a customer journey map that takes into account the unique intricacies of individual personas.

1. To create a customer journey map, start by identifying your target audience and developing customer personas. These personas should be detailed and based on real data or research. Consider demographic information, pain points, motivations, and behaviors. This will provide the foundation for understanding your customers' needs and wants.
2. Next, conduct surveys to gauge customer behavior. Surveys can help gather valuable data on customer preferences, experiences, and expectations. Use the collected data to identify areas of improvement in the customer's experience. Look for common pain points, roadblocks, or moments of delight.
3. Once you have gathered the necessary data, start mapping out the customer's journey on a visual representation. Begin with the awareness stage, where the customer first becomes aware of your brand or product. Then, move through each stage of the customer's journey, such as consideration, purchase, and post-purchase.
4. As you map out the journey for each persona, consider their unique characteristics and motivations. Tailor the map to address their specific pain points and preferences, ensuring that it accurately reflects their individual experiences.

By mapping out the user experience through a customer journey map that takes into account individual personas, your restaurant business can gain a deeper understanding of your customers and identify areas for improvement. This insight enables you to optimize digital marketing strategies, enhance the customer experience, and ultimately build long-lasting relationships with their target audience.  

Recommended reading: How to serve up a great restaurant customer experience.

Mapping out your restaurant's digital touchpoints

Touchpoints are the interactions customers have with your business throughout their journey. This includes all the channels and platforms they encounter, such as your website, online ordering, eCommerce (if you're also selling retail products), gift cards, social media, emails, SMS campaigns and customer service interactions.

Mapping out these touchpoints and understanding drop-off or churn points for each customer persona can help your restaurant business elevate the user experience. Every customer interaction, whether online or in person, plays a role in influencing a potential buyer or existing customer to choose your brand over your competition.

Listen for key and valuable actionable insights

The digital customer journey provides businesses with valuable and actionable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs. By analyzing data from various channels and touchpoints, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their customers and improve their marketing strategies.

Analyzing data from different channels and touchpoints allows businesses to track customer interactions at each stage of the journey, from awareness to consideration to conversion. This helps identify potential bottlenecks in the customer journey and optimize marketing efforts accordingly.  

Here are some examples of data sources that you already have access to, but are not leveraging for new opportunities and improve operational efficiencies:

• Customer data from your POS 
• Purchase data 
• Frequency of visit
• Products frequently bought
• Day part dining preferences 
• The average purchase each visit
• What % of your customers live 5-10 miles from your physical business?
• What % of your customers are guests from out-of-town?

Here are some examples of actionable key insights that you could easily glean from your own data with a digital marketing platform like GoGoGuest.

• What is the average purchase each visit for a customer persona who spends 3 hours using your guest WiFi vs someone who is not a guest WiFi user?
• How many subscribers opened and clicked your email or SMS campaign who also made a purchase within 14-day window?
• Did you know that over 50% of your app subscribers are not making a purchase. 

To effectively analyze data from these various sources, businesses can utilize data management, audience management and campaign performance tools all built-in to your GoGoGuest platform. These tools help break down data silos and provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey. They allow restaurants and food service businesses businesses to aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources in real-time, enabling them to make informed decisions and take immediate actions based on customer insights.

Analyzing conversion rates and your customer funnel

Analyzing conversion rates and funnels is a crucial aspect of digital marketing.  By utilizing analytics tools, restaurant businesses can gain valuable insights into how users interact with their physical and digital touch points at each stage of the customer journey.

What is a customer funnel?

A customer funnel is a visual representation of the steps a customer takes on their journey to becoming an informed and a paying customer. It's used to track how customers move through the sales process, from initial contact (discovery and brand awareness) with a business all the way to a completed purchase. 

Implementing a digital marketing strategy and using tools that support your strategy  is important because it allows businesses to understand what path customers take when considering and choosing their dining experience. 

A few tips when thinking about your restaurant's customer funnel:

• A female consumer in her 30s who is vegan is rarely on social media
• A digital marketing strategy that focuses primarily on social media content and neglects web digital content marketing, digital PR, and SEO may limit visibility to the female consumer in her 30s.
• Your customer funnel should consider where your target audience is consuming content, what type of content would they find appealing, and what would get them to take notice of your brand?

Personalization in your customer journeys elevates the customer experience and the success of your digital marketing campaigns. Learn about email marketing personalization.

Insights and analytics tools 

 Analytics tools like GoGoGuest sales performance and campaign performance solutions measure the effectiveness of each email marketing campaign.  With these tools you can:

• Learn about the "known with PII" customers who opened, clicked and made a purchase after being prompted by an email or SMS campaign
• Learn about the "known customers without PII" and unknown customers who also took action and made a purchase after receiving the email or SMS campaign.
• By understanding these patterns, a digital marketer is able to measure the effective of the entire campaign including the how well the subject line resonates with the segment, the product offered and the call to action. 

Meanwhile, analytics tools such as Google Analytics provide businesses with a wealth of data to measure the effectiveness of their website marketing efforts. With these tools, businesses can track key metrics and indicators, such as entry pages, exit pages, how much time does a customer spend on your website before leaving, bounce rates, shopping cart abandonment rates and conversion rates. These metrics help identify areas for improvement in the customer journey and guide marketing strategies accordingly. 

In fact, there is a whole digital marketing practice devoted to analyzing these metrics and the improvement of the user's experience. Take a look at this UX research study on The Current State of Checkout UX - 18 Common Pitfalls and Best Practices.

Crafting your restaurant's digital marketing strategy

Your digital marketing strategy is the roadmap that guides your efforts to reach and engage with your target audience online. It involves carefully considering your business goals, understanding your target audience, and creating a plan to effectively reach and convert them.

By taking the time to develop a well-thought-out and data-driven digital marketing strategy, you can ensure that your efforts are focused and aligned with your business objectives, resulting in increased brand awareness, customer acquisition, and ultimately, business growth.

Developing a Customer-Centric Strategy

Developing a customer-centric strategy is crucial in digital marketing for several reasons. By placing the customer at the center of all marketing efforts, restaurant businesses can create a more effective and successful approach.

• Understanding customer needs, pain points, and priorities is key to tailoring marketing campaigns that resonate with the target audience.
• By analyzing customer data, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers' preferences, desires, and behaviors, allowing them to create targeted messaging and content.
• Personalization and customization are essential for creating a positive customer experience. Customers today expect brands to deliver relevant, meaningful content that speaks to their specific needs and interests. By tailoring messages and offers to individual customers, businesses can enhance engagement, increase conversion rates, and foster customer loyalty.

By taking a customer-centric approach in-store and online, restaurant businesses can also identify and address potential pain points in the customer journey. By mapping out the entire customer experience, food service businesses can identify areas where customers may face obstacles or frustrations and take proactive measures to overcome these challenges.

Conclusion

An independent and mid-size restaurant group often lacks the right resources to start, run and manage an effective high-performance digital marketing practice. With so many channels for discovery and growing brand awareness, today's digital marketing landscape makes it challenging for restaurateurs to keep up and make the right choices to grow their profitable revenue.

Discover how GoGoGuest is helping restaurants and food service businesses harness the potential of digital marketing without the hassle.  Book a demo.