Loyal customers are what keeps any restaurant successful, so having effective ways to engage and track them is always important. One metric Bloom Intelligence uses to measure this is the Lifetime Value of Customers. A high result indicates customers spend more time and money at your establishment. Personalizing content for key demographics is a great way to engage customers and keep them loyal to your brand, but finding the right ways to do this can be challenging. Here are some ideas when tailoring your content.
The benefits of personalization are numerous. Harvard Business Review reports have found that personalization can cut extra costs in half, increase revenue by as much as 10 percent and make advertising up to 15 percent more effective. Most marketers and content managers agree that personalizing makes sense, but implementing this content is more challenging, so let’s focus on the implementation side.
As personalization involves tailoring customer interactions based on the client’s preferences, knowing as much as possible about the client will help you succeed. Bloom Intelligence provides useful tools for gathering customer data and works in a nonintrusive way so that you gain information about clients when they visit your establishment and website. This works when Wi-Fi access points collect data from electronic devices, and this helps gather basic data like the number of total clients and first-time visitors while other features compile emails and gain data from Facebook logins.
There are several ideas for creating tailored content, as everything from product recommendations to graphics, search results, discounts, page content, emails and more can be customized. Start by looking at your current offerings and finding the opportunities that already exist.
Let’s talk about a fancy steak and seafood restaurant called Bliss. Their food is on the pricier side, and a significant portion of their business comes from people who dine at the restaurant a few times every year for special occasions. To provide value to guests and entice these guests to keep coming back for important celebrations, customers get a free appetizer or dessert on their birthday.
The restaurant already collects emails to send birthday coupons, so this provides a good place to start when personalizing content. Those who sign up agree to receive other emails too, but Bliss mostly sends generic emails, if any. As people using the birthday gift enjoy deals and discounts, the restaurant could send emails for special offers. However, the emails aren’t just a sales opportunity.
Personalization is a reminder to provide value to clients first and sell second. Creating content for your target audience means they will spend more time on your digital platforms, so you must provide something to catch their interest.
Let’s go back to the steak and seafood restaurant. Bliss adds a blog to their website and shares posts they think their readers will enjoy like what wines pair well with fish or how to identify the best cut of steak. The age demographics collected from the Analytics Dashboard identifies that those in their mid-40’s are the restaurant's main customers. Bliss thinks they’re personalizing content by offering blogs about heart healthy food or having date night at a romantic restaurant now that the kids are out of the house. These posts aren’t overtly salesy but tie back to them.
Bliss puts snippets of blog posts in their email and finds that people open the emails but don’t click the link. Have they made a misstep with their content? When investigating, Bliss figures out their content is what readers want but their website is the problem. As Bliss’s brand is fancy and upscale, their website is very polished and technologically advanced. It’s just too tech-savvy for their demographic. The website itself is like a big exercise in personalization. When dealing with an older audience like this, a new landing page strategy may be needed that is simple and easy to navigate.