By Ron Stefanski, Contributor
Successful restaurant brands are based on the ability to build strong relationships with your target audience.
But, before you can start to do that, you need to be able to profile your target audience so you can create effective campaigns to attract, engage, and delight the right customers with your offerings.
Customer profile information will allow you to make smarter decisions for your business, particularly in the area of marketing. You can also use it to test which of your strategies need improvement, and help you create new, effective, and more engaging campaigns.
Read the rest of this guide to discover what restaurant customer profiles are, and what their benefits are for your business. We’ve also shared a few examples from prominent restaurant brands to give you some inspiration.
What is a Customer Profile?
Customer profiling refers to the process of researching your current customer base in order to get a detailed picture of your target guest.
At the highest level, restaurant customer profiles will help you define your target guests categorically so you can properly segment them for more effective marketing, advertising, and various other cost-saving purposes.
The image below depicts an example of what a restaurant customer profile might look like:
Demographics: This includes the customers’ age, gender, income, children, marital status, employment status, education level, physical location, etc.
Psychographics: These describe the consumers’ psychological attributes, such as values, personality, interests, preferences, opinions, attitudes, and lifestyles.
Geographic Data: Restaurant owners can use the information of where customers live to send different messages and offers by region. You can even bring it down to the street or neighborhood level to optimize your marketing campaigns even further.
Behavior Data: This is powerful information that includes things such as purchase patterns, online behavior, loyalty, presence analytics - offline behavior, and more.
With the information you get from your customer profiles, you'll be able to engage your restaurant patrons on a more personal level which will ultimately lead to a boost in your bottom line.
As any successful marketer will tell you, basing your marketing decisions on hunches, opinions, or gut feelings can have a devastating impact on your restaurant’s profitability.
You need to use correctly obtained customer profiles to get accurate data on your patron demographics and behavior so you can make data-driven decisions to grow your customer base.
Put differently, as a restaurant owner, you’ll be able to use customer profiles to create a brand culture based on what customers actually want as opposed to what you think they want.
You can use this culture to create an in-house aesthetic that you can then replicate across digital channels to get better results from all your marketing efforts.
You can leverage the information gathered from your research to inform things such as:
The design of your restaurant’s interior
Your menu
Restaurant logo
Social media posts
Email newsletters
Online ads
…and more.
As you’re going through the process of conducting your research, ask yourself questions such as:
Who are my best existing guests (demographics, lifetime value, etc.)?
What are this customer’s pain points?
Why do they need what I offer?
What kind of action do I want customers to take?
What’s the best way to reach my ideal customer?
What kind of promotions or deals would interest different customer segments?
What types of promotions and deals would they not be interested in?
What new products or services might engage this customer?
How can I attract more customers like my ideal customer?
What type of imagery would engage this customer?
Keep note of the answers in order to get more detailed and properly defined customer segments.
This will give you a better picture of the types of marketing messages and promotions to send to your customers, both current and prospective.
Now that you understand what customer profiling is, let’s take a look at some of the benefits to be had from creating customer profiles for your restaurant.
Benefits of Restaurant Customer Profiling
Below, we discuss some of the main benefits that come from understanding the profiles of your expected or desired customer base.
Better Marketing Decisions: Marketers can use actual data to know their customers at a detailed level so their campaigns and messages are based on more than just a personal opinion.
Lower Customer Acquisition Costs: Seek out lookalike prospects online and target them in a more effective, and therefore cost-efficient way. There’ll be a much higher probability of these people becoming new customers.
Increased Customer Frequency and Spend: You can turn customer profiles into customer visits by using the customer profile data to help you make smarter decisions and generate positive ROI for your restaurant.
Personalized Marketing: This type of information can help you target your marketing messages to make them super relevant to your different customer segments. You can target by age, location, visit times, and other demographic or behavioral data points.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: The data you get from your customer profile research will allow you to get to know your customers on a more personal level, helping you drive higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
As you can see, there are many ways you can use customer profiles in your marketing strategies as a way to increase customer frequency, boost customer spending, and enhance customer satisfaction, among many other benefits.
You’ll also realize a lot of other unintended advantages when you leverage this information in your restaurant business.
For instance, you’ll find that over time, the overall quantity and quality of your customer base will increase as you find new and improved ways of attracting, engaging, and marketing to your different customer segments.
Examples of Restaurants Using Customer Profiles for Marketing
Now that you understand what customer profiles are, why they are important, and the benefits that come from creating customer profiles for the restaurant, let's take a look at a few examples of specific uses of customer profiles and how different restaurants use the information gathered to further their objectives.
Example #1: Designing the Restaurant’s Interior
This business definitely understands the value of customer profiles and the different ways they can be applied to restaurants. They use the information gathered to inform the design of the establishment’s interior.
By gathering information such as “Do our customers have kids?”, “What type of imagery would appeal to our customers?”, and so on, they are able to design an interior that their target customers (families with kids) will find appealing.
Example #2: Sending Personalized Offers
This is yet another restaurant marketing tactic that allows you to take advantage of customer profile information to grow your business.
By using Wi-Fi technology to gather location-based information, such as entry and exit times, favorite visit days/times, dwell times, etc., a restaurant will be able to offer personalized deals and discounts to entice more customers to return, thereby boosting the establishment’s customer lifetime value.
You too can use this powerful tactic in your restaurant by gathering this type of data and using the right tools to set up automated marketing campaigns based on specific triggers that will send promotional messages to segmented customer groups whenever predetermined behavioral criteria are met.
Example #3: Enhancing Your Marketing Efforts to Build Passive Income
Many successful restaurant businesses use their comprehensive customer profiling information to inform many different aspects of their marketing strategy, including the menu, logo, on-site content, and more.
This helps them create more effective campaigns that are extremely targeted to their ideal audience, allowing them to increase customer value, customer spend, customer frequency, and the restaurant’s overall bottom line.
It can also help you to create new revenue streams that can help your restaurant build a steady source of passive income that can get you through slow seasons. Many restaurants use a variation of online courses as part of their employee training.
However, you can also use an online course platform to sell educational content to your loyal customers. Teach them how to make specialty dishes, sauces, and desserts.
By understanding your customer profile, you may be able to teach other culinary, restaurant management, cleaning, interior restaurant design, branding and marketing, or other skills your customers actually want to learn.
If you don’t have the time to produce your own online courses, you can buy PLR courses from many other eLearning professionals. When you buy the legal rights to a course, it becomes yours to use however you wish. After purchase, just upload the video on your website, throw on a small price tag and watch the passive income start rolling in.
Example #4: Purchasing and Staffing
In addition to giving you a greater understanding of your customers, restaurant customer profiles can also be useful when used for purchasing and staffing.
You can use the information you gathered to help you better predict when you are likely to have high-traffic days and times. This way, you'll be able to bring on enough staff at those times so you can avoid overstaffing and losing precious payroll dollars.
You'll also be able to make better-informed purchasing decisions, allowing you to keep items fresher for longer while decreasing the likelihood of your restaurant running out of certain products.
Example #5: Saving on Advertising
Last, but certainly not least, your restaurant customer profile information will help you save on advertising by allowing you to target your paid ads to your ideal customers. This will increase the chances of reaching people with a high likelihood of becoming customers.
When you can target your prospective customers in this way, you'll get a head start on your competitors, allowing you to gain a competitive edge to ensure lasting success for your restaurant business.
Conclusion
I hope this article has convinced you about the importance of collecting customer profile information for your restaurant.
Used wisely, customer profiling will prove to be a crucial part of your restaurant’s marketing process that has a huge impact on your bottom line.
If you're not already collecting this valuable information in your business, you are probably leaving a lot of money on the table, particularly if your competitors have already invested in this powerful strategy - so get started right now.
Are you already taking advantage of your customer data? If so, share the different ways you’re leveraging the information to enhance your restaurant’s marketing!
About the Author:
Ron Stefanski is a website entrepreneur and marketing professor who has a passion for helping people create and market their own online business. You can learn more from him by visiting OneHourProfessor.com. You can also connect with him on YouTube or Linkedin.
