What is a Restaurant Sales Funnel?
Sales funnels are a common concept in sales as a whole, encompassing the journey that customers must go through to reach the final point of purchase. A restaurant sales funnel refers to the process that a customer undergoes between first becoming aware of your presence to them sitting down to eat at your restaurant.
Understanding the Sales Funnel Stages
Sales funnels (and, by extent, a restaurant sales funnel) operate off of a five-tiered system. Each stage has a crucial impact on the overall success of a sales funnel, as they each handle a different part of building interest in your services. The five stages of a restaurant sales funnel are as follows:
Awareness
- Awareness begins from the moment that a potential customer discovers your brand. Maybe they walk past your restaurant on the street, see it on Google or a third party delivery app, or perhaps they hear about it from a friend on social media. What matters is that now they know you exist.
Interest
- Interest begins once a potential customer has taken full notice of your restaurant. Whether this takes the form of comparing you to other restaurants via search engine or simply peeking at your menu, once they’re curious, we want to encourage them to follow through.
Decision
- The decision stage begins once a customer is ready to make their decision! Often, some sort of incentive for them to decide on you (a promotion, event, or discount) is ideal here.
Action
- The action stage comes once the guest decides to try your restaurant out. They show up to your doors and sit down; note that until they’ve ordered and paid, the action stage isn’t over.
Retention
- Retention begins once the guests have left. This is where things go into full drive; we want them to come back, and we do everything that we can to encourage that. Clearly, we won’t be knocking on doors, but targeted social media advertising, marketing, and regular events and discounts can go very far to accomplish retention.
Why a Sales Funnel is Important for Restaurants
Sales funnels are important in any business for one simple reason — they’re how you bring in new customers over the long run. While marketing will do its job either way, a sales funnel allows you to have a consistent stream of new customers. And, as we all know, new customers become regulars quite quickly.
The Stages of a Restaurant Sales Funnel
We broke down the five stages of a restaurant sales funnel earlier, but now it’s time to really dig into each stage — let’s dive right in.
Awareness Stage: Attracting Potential Customers
So, we know what the awareness stage of the restaurant sales funnel is — but how do we act on it?
Put simply, you do what you do best! Cook delicious food, sell awesome drinks, and have fantastic service. While you can certainly keep up marketing efforts, the awareness stage is (unfortuantely) a bit more passive. We want to wait for potential guests to notice us, and the time-honored way of being noticed is to do what you’re known for doing.
Interest Stage: Engaging with Your Audience
The interest stage is still not quite what people think of when they think of sales. Rather than trying to encourage people to come in and eat, we’re trying to build interest. This is often done best through social media and proper search optimization. You want your restaurant to appear alluring. So, take some great food photography, highlight your lobby and ambiance, and start building interest!
Decision Stage: Encouraging Reservations or Orders
The decision stage is where we begin to get active in pursuing potential customers. Generally, this is done through the use of discounts, events, or promotions. Whether this comes in the form of a happy hour with cool drinks, a BOGO deal on appetizers, or a flat percentage-based discount, we want to win any toss-up against other restaurants. If you regularly host events like karaoke or trivia, these also make for easy ways for people who may be on the fence. In short, give them something fun or free!
Action Stage: Securing the Sale
The action stage begins when a guest has entered the building. From here, it’s showtime — put on your game face, send out the best food and drinks that you can, and be welcoming. The more satisfied they are during service, the better chance we have to retain them for future service.
Retention Stage: Building Customer Loyalty
Speaking of retention, this is the bread and butter of creating a community of regulars for your restaurant. While discounts and events can do a lot here, the main things that will keep regulars are the food, drinks, pricing, and service. If you’re more affordable, higher quality, or friendlier, chances are that you’ve got yourself a returning guest.
How to Create a Restaurant Sales Funnel
With the stages of a restaurant sales funnel explained, let’s talk about the actual process of creating one.
Identifying Your Target Audience
First things first, (as with all things in marketing) we need to find our target audience. The reality is that not everyone will love your restaurant. Because of this, it’s important to narrow down to whom your business will truly appear.
Generally, it’s best to think about what you offer here. Are you a hip, young person’s bar or gathering spot, or are you more of a family restaurant? Do you offer traditional fare, or is it more creative or artistic? Does your food come straight from the farm, or do you order produce from the suppliers that you can afford? The answer to all of these questions is important — and not something to fret over.
The reason we ask these questions is to narrow down how to frame your offerings. We want to highlight what you do best, whether that’s night life, a third space for families, or a space to have intimate meals.
Setting Clear Goals for Each Funnel Stage
To properly pursue each stage, we need to have realistic and clear goals. These don’t have to be incredibly convoluted, mind you; they can be as simple as “attract ten new customers with social media.” What they do need to be, though, is realistic and well-defined.
Creating Engaging Content and Offers
A lot of the attention that you’ll attract is going to come from social media and any offers that you may have. Because of this, it’s crucial that you’re active on social media and create good, engaging content. In other words, take your time with your posts! We aren’t going for volume here, but quality.
Beyond social media, it’s important to have events and deals that attract customers. These can take a lot of forms, but it’s best to focus them on what you do best. Are you a brewery? Offer new customers a discount on beer. Do you make awesome, unique appetizers? Provide a BOGO deal during happy hour.
Leveraging Technology and Tools
Technology is incredibly important in general, but it’s vital to the success of your restaurant sales funnel. We’ve mentioned the use of social media several times here, but it shouldn’t be your only approach. Make use of email and SMS marketing, proper SEO optimization, and mobile marketing to make the most of the tools you have available.
Strategies to Optimize Each Stage of the Sales Funnel
Awareness: Leveraging Social Media and Local SEO
As mentioned seemingly nonstop now, social media and local SEO will be your best friend here. Social media is a major player in the modern world, and for good reason. It’s never been easier to share images, videos, and ideas than it is now — and you should absolutely be taking advantage of it.
Optimizing for Google search (SEO) is also vital for awareness, check out our guide on restaurant SEO to see how you can get your restaurant website to rank higher on Google.
Interest: Using Email Campaigns and Loyalty Programs
Email marketing is an old concept, but one that works. Newsletters and loyalty programs are an excellent way to build interest from people who haven’t been through yet for one simple reason — word of mouth. People love free things, and if a loyalty program gets them free things, they’re more likely to tell their friends.
Decision: Offering Promotions or Limited-Time Deals
Limited-time deals and promotions work great for helping people make a decision to come to you. Why, you ask? They create a sense of urgency. If a potential customer thinks that they need to act now to try some new special or get a cool deal, they’re more likely to move into the action stage — and that’s the magic of a restaurant sales funnel.
Action: Streamlining Online Ordering and Reservations
Once it’s game-time, we need to be sure that things are running smoothly. Ensure that your reservation and online ordering systems are running properly, that the people who use them are trained up, and get back to delivering awesome food and service.
Retention: Implementing Feedback Systems and Personalized Marketing
Retention is a difficult task, but it’s one that we want to become normal. The best way to get guests to come back is to provide an easy way for them to provide feedback and, importantly, keep up with marketing. The former allows them a way to complain about what was done poorly and praise what was done well (potentially leading to reviews which can bring in other new people); in contrast, the latter reminds them about you.
How to Measure the Success of Your Restaurant Sales Funnel
With all of that out of the way, let’s talk about actually measuring the success of your restaurant sales funnel.
Key Metrics to Track for Each Funnel Stage
The most important metrics to track here are as follows:
- How often are people viewing your social media pages?
- How often are people interacting with your social media posts?
- How often is your restaurant searched on Google locally?
- How often does your website get traffic?
- Are you getting more reservations?
Each of these questions leads to a key metric that will allow you to judge your success. Views affect awareness, interaction ties into interest, searches and website traffic indicate that they’re in the decision and action phases, and reservations indicate retention.
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