2nd step for a successful restaurant / pub – Audience & Buyer Persona
Identify your Audience
It’s important to accept, that your business is yours, but it’s not for you. Your business has to serve your customers and not you. It’s simple, your business has to be very customer oriented. As an entrepreneur you have to make decisions based on customer needs. It may be difficult for some people to accept this, but let me be very clear now: the world needs leaders (and not bosses) who are able to evolve and who are able to think with open mind. If you are one of them, your business has all the chances to succeed. You need to build a restaurant or pub that people like and you will never have financial problems.
So everything depends on your customers, but who are they? It would be easy to say that everybody who enters into your business, right? Well yes, but still, it’s not that simple. There are at least three categories:
Regulars
These are the people who love your restaurant or pub, you already won their heart and they may make a big percentage of your profit. But not only the profit makes them valuable for you. Since you meet them regularly, you can ask them “Hi Barbara, how are you today?”, but you can also ask them “Hi Barbara, our design is a bit old-fashioned, we’d like to change it, where would you start?” or “Hi Barbara, next time bring your friends and we’ll give everyone a free drink”. As you can see, you can involve them into your business decisions and you can also get more customers by them. These are positives for you, but behaving like this with your regulars has another benefit for you: it builds a relationship between you and them. Good customer relations are essential for your business. Remember, if you have regulars, it doesn’t mean you can’t lose them. That’s why you also need to continuously maintain your relationship with your regulars as well.
Local Guests
Local guests are people who live close to your business (perhaps in the same city) but are not your regular customers. You might meet them once or twice a year, or you might only meet them once in a lifetime. Those customers are holding big potential for you, because if you are able to have a big impact on them when they enter into your business you can convert them to regulars. We are human beings, so we make our decisions based on our emotions, and once we have made a decision, we try to justify it with logical arguments. That’s how we work, first we decide to buy that nice red new car, then we will give ourselves (and our wife/husband) more and more reasons why we need to change the car and why the old one is no longer suitable. Because of that you have to make a big emotional impact on all of your new customers. How? There are many ways of doing that. Outstanding restaurant design, comfortable chairs, surprisingly fast service, good food/drinks, low prices, etc. There are many ways of doing that, the best is not to choose one but to provide all of them.
Outsiders
People living far from your business. You meet these customers when they come into your restaurant or pub on their travels. They will never be your regular customers, but they can still be one of your most important customer types. What if your restaurant is located on a road that connects cities, or if your restaurant is in a tourist area? In these cases, these types of guests may be the most important ones to you. But even if it’s not your case, you may bring in these people using some simple steps. Put your business on Google Maps, putting a billboard near the road, etc. By doing that your business will look like a living fancy place, that’s what you want, right?
Buyer Persona
We talked about the different categories of customers, the opportunities they bring and how you can exploit these opportunities. But the fact is that you cannot target all the customers you ever had. They are not the same, they like different things, designs, food, drinks, etc. Because of that, your next step is to identify your target audience.
The easiest way to do that is to create a “Buyer Persona“. A “Buyer Persona” is a fictional person who represents the characteristics of the people you want to target.
- Name: You can choose any name you would like.
- Age: It’s one of the most important characteristic. For example, older people will not like a modern restaurant design, while the younger generation will not like an old-fashioned design. Each of your decisions should be strongly dependent on the average age of your target audience (the age of your buyer persona). At this point we strongly recommend to focus on the younger generation who are familiar with technology, because the proportion of these people will constantly grow. Also let us recommend a good POS system which is fit for this, yes, we are talking about MobiRest, click here to learn more about it.
- Location: Are they living near your business, or are we talking about tourists?
- Relationship Status: Are you targeting families or single persons. They have different needs!
- Work: What kind of work does your target audience do? Do they have one?
- Education: You and your waiters, have to behave differently with differently qualified people.
- Interests: If you can find the common interests of your target audience, then you have a real opportunity to win them over by offering related things.
- Behavior: For instance if your target audience often use Facebook or Instagram you can create a profile there for your business, then you can also publish some ads there in order to get more and more customers. (maybe even regulars)
- Taste: You can target people based on what they like to drink or eat. For example, you could build a whole business around targeting vegetarians.
Once you’ve established your buyer persona, you’ll know what your target audience wants, so what to focus on. Don’t forget to write down all the conclusions you have drawn, good luck with that, see you in the next step.
