Most restaurant managers will tell you that a winning marketing strategy actively reaches customers across as many channels as possible. There are many factors to consider when choosing how to market a new bar or restaurant, including (but not limited to) walkability, location, and target demographic. Once you know who you want to target, you must reach out on social media, with flyers, through promotions, with radio spots – however you want to make it happen, you have to reach new customers and attract previous guests back into your location.

If you’re operating on a limited marketing budget, you must embrace a fact-driven analysis in order to keep your marketing efforts from becoming muddled and expensive. Learn how to properly measure the success of any particular marketing effort and you can refine the processes that work and drop the ones that don’t. Hone your restaurant marketing strategy by tracking these key metrics.

• LTV – This stands for “Lifetime Value.” When you’re budgeting for campaigns, consider the ideal customer relationship and quantify how much you would make if one customer became a loyal visitor to your restaurant. For bars, the per visit cost may only be $10 to $20, but if social aspects are in play and the customer becomes a big fan of your bar, they could bring their friends as well. Different establishments expect higher turnover rates (restaurants aimed at a younger crowd), so they may spend more acquiring customers than retaining visitors.
• CAC – The “Customer Acquisition Cost” goes hand in hand with LTV. Certain marketing campaigns are more costly than others – determine how much it would cost per campaign to acquire a customer, and compare that metric to the expected lifetime value. If the acquisition cost is nearly the same as the expected lifetime value of that customer, your marketing efforts are largely being wasted. Reach new prospects without spending the majority of your budget to have your message heard.
• Marketing Originated Customer % – No fancy acronym here, but it’s vital for the clarity and success of your future campaigns to determine exactly what percentage of your new customers, over a certain period of time, actually decided to visit your restaurant because of your marketing efforts. Don’t assume that your marketing campaign brought in more customers – there may have been other factors that led to a bump in foot traffic. Follow up via email or with surveys to find out what caused a new customer to become a customer in the first place.

These marketing metrics should be combined with the metrics you internally develop and track – like the margin on your menu items, and the average revenue per person per visit – to paint a data-driven picture to guide your marketing efforts.

Once you’ve attracted customers, you must also invest in technologies and methods for keeping them engaged in the future. In order to increase LTV and benefit your bottom line, you can incorporate Buzztime into your marketing strategy. Players receive triggered emails based on their gameplay, and the proven promotions add a personal touch that keeps players coming back to your bar or restaurant far into the future.

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