Restaurant Marketing Assessment

Updated September 20th 2013

Marketing assessment is important as it helps you identify the most effective restaurant promotions and marketing strategies while avoiding those that are costly yet ineffective.

In order to determine the success or failure of your marketing strategy you need to assess its impact on your sales and profits.  It is always important to conduct a general marketing assessment once every quarter to monitor the impact and cost effectiveness of the various techniques you have used. This way you will be able to put more emphasis on the effective techniques and therefore improve your profits.

Marketing assessment simply aims at determining how successful your strategies are, identifying the threats and opportunities in the market, and developing or adapting more effective strategies.  You need to assess the success of individual marketing strategies by tracking promotions, conduct customer surveys, and comparing changes in the sales and profits. You also have to analyze the impact that new opportunities and threats have on the survival of your establishment. You determine next steps by focusing on the techniques you found effective and abandon or modify those that have not been as effective.

It is always important to track your marketing strategies and promotions even before you begin your marketing assessment. There are a number of methods and tools you can use to directly track specific promotions. Here are but a few;

1. Keeping track of Coupons – Coupons offer an excellent opportunity to track direct marketing campaigns as they can be used with almost all promotions. Ensure that you use different coupons for different promotions and at the end of it all you can determine their success by counting the number of coupons.
2. Using Special Phone numbers – You can give out different phone numbers for each promotion/ marketing strategy and then count the number of calls to determine the most effective strategy.
3. Use of Email Tracking software – This applies to those email marketing campaigns. You can always track the number of emails that were opened and how many people clicked the links on the email. Check out Infusionsoft features on credema-icc or credema and see how they monitor engagement.

 

There are practices that do not feature coupons, emails and phone numbers. These strategies cannot be tracked using any of the three methods listed above. However this does not mean that they cannot be assessed. There are two easy methods of determining how effective such marketing strategies can be:

1. First is by checking on sales – You can simply keep track of your marketing strategy by looking at the sales for the particular period that the marketing campaign was running and comparing them to those before that campaign period. Marketing professionals call it conversion.
2. The second method is by conducting Customer surveys – You can conduct a survey on a random sample of customers where you ask customers how they got to know about your establishment. This way you will determine which method is the most effective for advertising.  You can also get other additional information from your customers that will help shape your future marketing strategy.  Here are some details you should collect from your customers:

 

• Age bracket – If the marketing strategy was targeting a given age group. This will help determine if it was effective.
• Household size – The number and type of family members can also help design strategies that will attract other members of the family to your establishment
• Customer address – This will help determine the location of most of your customers and how far they live
• Occupation – Helps determine the income of customers and which promotions are suitable for them
• Customers Native Language – Helps implement more customer friendly promotions including bilingual marketing techniques
• How frequently they visit or order take outs from your establishment – This helps determine which customers are suitable for loyalty programs and promotions. It also helps improve on your takeout services.

 

Remember that your survey has to be unbiased if it is to help you in your general marketing assessment. Here are a few points where you can place your marketing survey;

1. At the table – They can be placed on the comment cards or issued to customers along with their bill. To encourage them to complete it you can offer an incentive.
2. Inside direct marketing materials – You can mail or email it to your customers and also offer an incentive.
3. On your website – You can place it on the restaurants website. For surveys check out credema and its server tool.

Written by Daniel Grossmann