Skyrocket Your Sales Through Effective Marketing Monitoring

Marketing has changed in the past few years. Restaurant owners no longer count on just word-of-mouth or magazine critics  to drive more sales. They now leverage digital marketing tactics to reach their target audience.

However, there is a point that many people forget when they are developing their marketing strategy: the monitoring of their actions.

Monitoring helps to better understand what works and what doesn’t work in campaigns and thus push us to develop and deliver the best possible results we can get.

So how do we monitor a restaurant business?

What are the key metrics that indicate a good or bad strategy? While every business model and industry is different there is one unique common thing in every one of them: their primary target:–the profit.

Now that the end-goal is clear we can reverse engineer which metrics will deliver the right information.

Use These Metrics

The first metric restaurant owners should be aware of is the conversion rate which essentially monitors how many of the acquired prospect customers will finally purchase your product. This actually monitors how many times you have achieved your ultimate goal. For example, in a restaurant business, this would be translated as the number of customers visiting your store -after having been influenced by your marketing campaigns- in relation to the total amount of people you initially reached.

The second metric is the cost per conversion. This aims to display the cost of every acquired customer. This will help you understand how much risk every possible strategy contains as well as which strategy is the most effective considering the costs.

The third metric that every business should implement in its monitoring process is the reach. This is just the  number of people exposed to your promotion.

These three basic metrics will give you the insights you will need and an overall view of your marketing campaign as a restaurant owner.

There are more possible attributes that could be considered as metrics such as the media that could be used for your outreach. For restaurants, this is still an important one. Reviews from authoritative magazines are still a strong practice to market a restaurant business.

With that in mind, you will have to find out how many of your newly acquired customers visited your restaurant because of a trustworthy review.

Restaurants need to find the proper ways to gather the data needed to create your metrics. If your restaurant business exists online then the best way to find what numbers you are getting is to create a Google Analytics account and link it with your website. This is a great platform that can provide you with a ton of insights.

For offline  monitoring, the best way is to directly link your marketing campaigns with the customer’s first visit to your restaurant. For example, if your advertisement was a banner in a magazine or a poster on the street then you could provide your target audience with a code that can be used for a slight discount. This is a great way for a restaurant to find out  its cost per conversion.

Another great tactic would be to ask your customers to review your menu, prices, their overall experience and how they found out about your restaurant in a short questionnaire. This is a double-win since you are taking honest feedback not only for your marketing monitoring but for your service development as well.

Set Your Goals in a Neat Timeline

Without the time factor, metrics are plain percentages. A marketing strategy cannot be floating free throughout your timeline. The only way to eliminate this is to have your actions planned and forecasted. This will be an area where you can describe your goals in a time-based logic. In the restaurant industry, such events could be considered the Valentines Day on February 14 or the Eat What You Want Day on May 11.

If you don’t know how to create such a thing then don’t worry. There are plenty of free marketing calendars across the web.

Update Your Marketing Approach

Everything you’ve previously done does not matter if you mess up this one. And that’s because the marketing monitoring aims to inform  about the status and the effectiveness of our efforts. Maybe you will find out that you need to reconsider your food prices or that your staff needs retraining.

Another way of updating your marketing approach is through designs. If you have decided that you want to focus on creating a brand for your restaurant 

You’ll have to dive into your metrics if you want to know what exactly is going on with your restaurant business. Monitoring your  narketing efforts should be crucial to you.  The only thing that matters more than your business being successful is knowing why your business is successful.