Does market intelligence fit in the restaurant world?

Do you understand your customers and their likes?
Do you understand your local community and its patterns?
Do you understand consumers, how they determine eating habits, and why they eat where?

These are all questions that good marketing teams study, research, experiment with the results, and study more. Notice I didn’t mention ‘guess‘ in there anywhere. Nor did I mention ‘what the boss likes‘ in the list. Paying customer patterns can be gleaned from the right studies with the right questions of the right people, our customers and lost customers.

Query your customer base. Ask them what they like and do not like about your restaurant and its offerings. Ask them what drew them to you, or what made them almost not buy-in to you.

Query the marketplace. Ask customers what made them choose your competitor over you. Ask them what they did not like about your messaging or what you could have done differently to encourage them to love you.

Study the competitive environment. Study it intensely, and consistently. Believe me, your competition is studying you — what you do right and what you do wrong. If there are certain types of messages on platforms that you’re not using that look to be successful, take that as a clue.

Gather market intelligence from social communities. There is a wealth of consumer activity that can be observed from likes, comments and posts on Facebook, Instagram, Snap, etc. Study patterns. Study voice and tone. Study the messaging that other advertisers use, which could (and should) be totally different from the messaging used in traditional advertising channels.

And the best tip of all — track your studies and results. Solid reports over verified data can be a gold mine of information for most thinking minds in your restaurant. Don’t undervalue the work your marketing team is doing. Gather information, analyze the data, organize your reports, and make them available to everyone on the team.

Market Intelligence. How intelligent is yours?

* photo courtesy of Rachel Claire @ Pexels