All marketing gets broken down into 3 stages: traffic leads and sales.
The more traffic you get, the more leads you get and the more sales you get.
Beyond that, the more sales you get, the more people that experience your business and spread word of mouth about your business, which brings you even more traffic.
This may sound familiar to you but the terminology is a little different in restaurant language.
In a restaurant marketing setting, the customer stages are broken down into:
- Not aware
- Awareness
- Customers
- Repeat customer
- Loyal customer
- Winback customer
Every person in the world is in one of these stages. For example, if you are a local business, not a lot of people are aware of your business outside a specific mile radius. However people who are familiar with the area most likely know about you, some of them because customers or loyal customers.
Even people who have visited would be customers but if they haven’t come back to visit in over a specific amount of days, they would be considered a winback customer.
Alternately, if you are a restaurant chain, not many people outside of your locations know about your brand. However people near your locations know about your brand, some being customers and some being loyal customers,
The big difference with a multi location business is that it is more accessible. This means that if someone has visited one of your locations but hasn’t visited after the normal repeat time rate but they are close to one of your other locations, they are just a lost customer because they have access but hasn’t visited.
As an owner of a franchise restaurant, you should know that when someone visits one of your fellow franchisees locations, they are most likely bringing traffic to your business as well.
Let’s say that you have a franchise location in Los Angeles and your fellow franchisees are located in San Francisco, Chicago and New York.
Every time someone visits one of the other locations and not yours, they are providing an experience to that customer and adds to the perceived brand of your franchisor. If that perceived brand increases then next time they see your location as they are traveling to Los Angeles from another location, they will prefer to visit your business over other competing businesses.
This plays hand in hand with restaurant brand loyalty.
