Determining your target audience is a key step to successfully executing your social media strategy (that you set up after last week's blog post). I hope that one of your strategic goals and objectives is to get more business into your restaurant, in which case you need to market to the customer who is most likely to come into your restaurant, and buy something!
Defining your "Target Customer"
Take a look around the restaurant, who are the people who are currently coming in and spending money in your establishment? Families? Couples? Groups of ladies? Co-workers enjoying happy hour after work?
The best way to figure out who your target customer is, is to talk to them! As the owner or manager, you should have a great relationship with your customers. Start asking them questions such as:
What brought you in today/tonight?
Did they come in for a family dinner, retirement dinner, birthday dinner, avoiding traffic?
Determining the purpose of visit for your "average" customer will help you create content that is relevant and compelling to your target customer. If you have co-workers stopping by for happy hour, you will want to create posts that highlight your great happy hour specials or your unique drink menu.
Do you live around here?
Determining how far people will travel to eat with you?
Is your average customer from a 1 mile radius, or are you a specialty steakhouse that people love to enjoy an anniversary dinner and are willing to drive 10 miles to have dinner with you?
This will also help determine your advertising radius for paid social ads. You don't want to advertise to people in a 20 mile radius (and pay to have that many impressions) if 87% of your customers live in a 1 mile radius. You will have much more success in getting someone in the door if you focus on your target.
What's your favorite item on the menu?
This will help learn your customer's favorites. You will want to create content around the favorites, when someone new comes in because of a "favorites" post, you have a high probability of winning over a new customer.
Use your Target Customer Persona to talk to your audience.
Once you know what your Target Customer looks like, how they think, what they like to eat, how often they come in ... use this information to talk DIRECTLY to your customer in your posts.
We can help you work through this activity and hone in on your perfect target customer(s). Give us a call. We're here to help you be successful.
Comments