The reason why marketing funnels are so wildly popular is because they provide clarity into what you spend your time and money on, and how it translates into the financial health of your business.
For example, you can see exactly how much budget you have spent in a specific time period, how much effort you spent on that project and what amount of leads or sales came from the time and budget.
In order to have this level of clarity, you need to have proper tracking. Tracking is incredibly easy for online-based businesses such as e-commerce stores because there are website tracking tools that let you know who visited your website, who became a lead on your website, and who purchased on your website.
So how can you track the amount of people that visit your restaurant, become a lead in your restaurant and end up purchasing in your restaurant?
Well, you don’t really need to track those specific things. Actually, a restaurant marketing funnel would be more about how to get customers that are not in your restaurant and get them into your restaurant.
Once they are in your restaurant you can say that they are pretty committed to purchasing from you.
So our tracking will actually need to be how much traffic and leads we get from outside the restaurant, then attribute those traffic and leads to the people that go into your restaurant.
One more misconception when it comes to marketing funnels is that they refer to online marketing. While most marketing funnels live on the Internet, they are not restricted to the internet only.
Any amount of traffic or leads can come from non-internet sources such as mailers, media placements and more.
Regardless of where you traffic and leads come from, you always need to make sure that you get Traffic and leads numbers included in the project.
Most websites have traffic and lead tracking automatically available. They do need to be enabled and connected to something like Google Analytics though.
When it comes to other sources such as media placements and mailers, you need to make sure that whoever you are buying distribution from also provides traffic and leads numbers.
In the case of a mailer, you need to know how many people were sent the mailer. Then you can count how many people bring the mailer into your restaurant. The same goes for media placement.
One more thing you can do is to connect your physical traffic sources to your website(s) so that you get automatic tracking right when your customer visits your website because they typed it in from the physical mailer or media placement.
