Restaurant Marketing Attribution
In today’s restaurant industry, the competition is as fierce as it has ever been. In addition to that, customers have so many more choices of where they choose to dine. For these reasons alone, restaurant owners and operators need to do everything they can to ensure that their marketing strategy is optimized to its highest potential.
Until recently, brick-and-mortar businesses did not have the advantage that online companies have enjoyed for so long – plentiful customer data. And without customer data, offline marketing attribution becomes extremely difficult.
What is Offline Marketing Attribution?
Wikipedia defines marketing attribution as, “a set of user actions (‘events’ or ‘touchpoints’) that contribute in some manner to a desired outcome, and then the assignment of a value to each of these events.”
For instance, if you run a restaurant marketing campaign with an advertisement on a local radio station, you want to know how many customers came to your place of business, and how much they spent. This would allow you to evaluate the efficacy of the radio spot. A positive or negative return on investment would give you the information needed to make a data-driven decision on whether or not you should continue the campaign or stop it.
Why is Restaurant Marketing Attribution Important?
The whole concept of marketing attribution is to quantify the influence that each of your advertising campaigns have on a patron’s decision to visit your restaurant, or to come back again. For offline businesses, this can be a challenge. But it is necessary, nonetheless.
Many restaurateurs will focus on individual channels, and which channels provide the most effective impact on overall sales. This form of measurement is not enough in today’s marketplace.
Accurate offline marketing attribution needs to be on a much more personal level, and the data needs to be much more comprehensive. This requires large-scale, accurate and comprehensive data collection, which until now has been much to costly for most restaurant owners and operators.
Fortunately, WiFi technology has produced a whole new way of gathering reliable, accurate, and comprehensive data from customers who actually visit your place of business.
How to Gather Effective Marketing Attribution Data
When customers with WiFi-enabled devices (smart phones, laptops, tablets) come into your business, the devices emit a wireless signal as they scan for a WiFi access point. With a world-class WiFi marketing and analytics platform installed, you can identify and track each individual device by a unique code contained in the signal.
Even if the customers do not log into WiFi, the platform knows that someone is there, how long they have been there, and if the visit is a first-time, or repeat visit. This can give you great insight into your customer behavior. You can see key performance indicators from a very large sample size of your customer base.
You’ll see data like:
Multi-unit chains have can even compare their different store analytics, such as traffic data or customer churn rates of each location or group averages of locations. This helps to identify opportunities to optimize operations and marketing.
When customers do log into the WiFi access point, even more data can be collected, and marketing attribution can be implemented.
WiFi Marketing & Analytics
When a customer attempts to log into WiFi at your place of business, they will be taken to a WiFi landing page, also known as a captive portal. This page requires the customer to enter some information, such as their name and email address, prior to accessing the internet.
At this point, Bloom Intelligence creates a customer profile for the customer. All of the data previously associated with the device will be added to the customer profile, along with any future visits.
Using the Bloom Intelligence advanced suite of marketing tools, marketing campaigns can be created which can target specific customer personas, or be sent to your entire customer database. And since Bloom knows who received the message, who came back to your place of business, and whether or not they redeemed any offer, tangible marketing attribution data can be realized.
You’ll know who received a marketing message, who actually viewed it, who came back through your doors, and who redeemed any offer. This is data that brick-and-mortar stores have never been able to access before, and it is extremely valuable when developing marketing strategy or evaluating existing strategy.
Bloom Intelligence Can Give You What You've Been Searching For
One of the most powerful benefits that a business can gain from using a WiFi marketing and Wi-Fi analytics platform is the ability to see accurate, real-time results from WiFi restaurant marketing campaigns.
After all, if a business is unable to track performance of marketing campaigns accurately, it becomes impossible to know if they are providing positive ROI. Likewise, it makes testing and optimization impossible.
Bloom Intelligence gives you the ability to track the results of every campaign you create. All the way down to a customer returning to your place of business and/or redeeming an offer. Bloom’s WiFi analytics detect the device of any consumer that walks back into your location that received one of your offers, messages or surveys.
This allows you to see which campaigns are working well, and which need attention. Likewise, it allows you to do A/B testing on your messaging and media to gain the largest ROI possible.
To learn more about the ways the Bloom Intelligence WiFi marketing & analytics growth tools can help you improve your restaurant marketing to drive more sales, improve overall customer experience, measure customer sentiment and grow your business, schedule a free demo today.