Geofencing for Restaurants: How to Attract Attention & Increase Store Traffic
Trends are constantly changing as digital marketing evolves and businesses take advantage of new technologies. The latest new trend for digital marketing is here: geofencing for restaurants.
The popularity of geofencing is one that has multiplied during the last few years, and it's not going away anytime soon.
Find out how geofencing for restaurants can effectively work to build brand awareness and drive increased store traffic, and why your restaurant needs to jump on this trend before everyone else does.
What Is Geofencing for Restaurants?
Geofencing marketing is the technology that allows hyper-focused advertising messages to be pushed out to people within a certain area that you wish to target (fence). This can be a general area (zip code or city) targeted during a specific time and space for an event, or even drilling all the way down to addressable geofencing and reaching your audience at their home.
Geofencing for restaurants refers to the specific ways that restaurants can use geofencing to build brand awareness, stay top-of-mind with nearby customers, and drive in new and existing diners.
Why Should I Use Geofencing for My Restaurant?
The ability to get your message to your target audience is extremely powerful. But billboards, mailers, and so many other advertising platforms are extremely difficult to quantify your precise ROI.
Geofencing solves this problem.
The precise number of impressions served, clicks generated, and people who have walked into your restaurant after seeing an ad are all easy to determine and reportable at any time.
Geofencing for restaurants makes it possible for you to run effective marketing campaigns while being able to measure real results and calculate a clear ROI. All you need to know is your average ticket price and the number of conversions (individual instances of someone walking into your restaurant) and subtract your spend, and your ROI has been calculated, easily and efficiently.
Even more, geofencing often produces great results.
At MyArea Network, we regularly see restaurants drive over 100% ROI in their campaigns. In a recent article about geofencing ROI, we broke down three campaigns that produced an ROI of 156%, 344%, and even 437%!
How Can I Use Geofencing for My Restaurant?
There are many reasons to use geofencing technology for restaurants with the primary being to get your message to a very specific and precise audience.
Some examples of ways to use geofencing for restaurants include:
- Competitor Targeting: Run geofencing ads for your restaurant to people that visit nearby competitor locations.
- Traveler Targeting: Genfencing nearby hotels and resorts to target tourists or travelers close to your restaurant.
- Addressable Targeting: Use addressable geofencing to display ads to audiences located at a specific address.
- Event Targeting: Geofence events taking place that have the same audience that would typically visit your restaurant.
Competitor geofencing for restaurants is one of the most common uses for restaurants that want to increase their store traffic and take market share in their local geographical area.
Read More: Local Branding and Customer Acquisition with Geofencing
Develop Geofencing Ideas for Your Restaurant
If you aren't sure how you can use geofencing at your business, consider a few of these scenarios.
Does the business down the street have a packed dining room with a long wait-list while you can still increase your traffic by 10% on the same night? Have digital geofences around restaurants nearby that typically have the same demographic that would visit your restaurant. You can target these guests to get them to convert and visit your restaurant the next time they go to dine out.
Have a restaurant that thrives on tourism but want to increase traffic during off-peak times? Use geofencing for your restaurant by targeting hotels and resorts in the area that have guests that match the demographics of customers. There are unique ways to ensure the ads are only served to those people while they are physically near your restaurant.
Do you already have a list of addresses for your target audience? Addressable geofencing for restaurants would use those same addresses, draw fences around each location, and serve impressions to that audience for as long as you would like. Instead of picking up a mailer for a single time use or have it discarded, that same group will see digital ads for your restaurant a few times a day for weeks, or months. Repeated touches like this help raise awareness of your restaurant and reach top-of-mind the next time those people are ready to eat out or order in.
Do you know what events your target audience will be attending? Event targeting is great for reaching look-a-like audiences and finding new customers that would be right for you. If there’s a fancy charity event or gala in your city, and your restaurant is known for its gourmet cuisine, the event could be a solid target for your event geofencing campaign. Are you an owner of a beachfront restaurant that wants to increase dinner traffic? Targeting concerts on the beach, or other nearby events could bring in a lot of new business.
Who Is Geofencing Right For?
As you can see, there are a variety of ways to leverage geofencing. Whether you are starting your marketing from scratch or already have an existing audience, you can use geofencing to attract or re-engage interested customers.
Thousands of businesses across the globe are already using geofencing advertising, and that number will only grow as more companies realize the value of this program and the data it reveals.
Individual mom-n-pop restaurants, multi-location restaurants and franchises, and upscale dining establishments are using this technology to improve their understanding of their client base and attract new customers at the same time.
Start Using Geofencing for Your Restaurant
MyArea Network has extensive experience in utilizing geofencing advertising for clients in nearly every type of restaurant category, from fine-dining steakhouses, fast casual restaurants to pizza chains and everything in between. Our knowledgeable customer success managers (CSMs) create a restaurant marketing plan with targets that are optimized to draw in your intended audience and provide an accurate ROI.
Even better, with mySuite, you never have to wonder how the program is operating. The data is transparent and easily accessible, and our CSM team will work with your marketing team to make sure the information is understood, and what processes are being followed to get the maximum ROI for your business.
To set up your first geofencing campaign, start by signing up for mySuite. mySuite is a free set of local marketing tools that allows you to create geofencing campaigns to reach more customers in your local community. Sign up today and get started.
