We all want to start a successful restaurant — and the benefits of knowing target audiences in hospitality are essential. For many, a target audience is the reason why a venue exists, improving guest satisfaction, matching their expectations with experience and reality, reducing any unnecessary disappointments on the way.
So how can restaurants discover their target audiences without any trouble? As more customers look for stress-free ways to dine out, our guide draws on expert advice to help boost restaurant confidence when selecting and catering to their new-found target audience(s).
Sizing up your target audience could be your next best financial move — so why not go further and employ completely free restaurant technology? Contact our expert restaurant team for more good news.
Why is Restaurant Target Audience Important?
Target audience determines the services your restaurant singles out to interest future consumers and restaurant guests.
Of course, this requires nuanced and careful thought. If your restaurant offers multiple styles of cuisine for instance, your target audience will be multiple, requiring consideration for the various types of people.
Keep in mind that a target audience is never stable. There are over 90,000 food businesses in the United Kingdom alone. With such choices at customer’s doorsteps, being able to cater to multiple styles and preferences is very much on the table. Therefore, a restaurant that continually adjusts its target audience increases its chance to stay in business and succeed continually.
6 Tips for Finding Target Audiences for Restaurants
We have selected the best tips and tricks to efficiently find your restaurant’s target audience. Hungry for more? Some of England’s best restaurants and cafes know exactly who they are catering for, establishing their target audience from the word “go”.
1. Consider Neighbour Restaurants
“Image is important,” our ultimate guide to starting up a restaurant says. For restaurants to get their concept and overall image right, they need to consider who sits directly beside them — their neighbours.
Dine out in all your neighbouring restaurants. The overall similarities are the important thing to note, to get a flavour of the local competition. This provides ample opportunity to note the strengths that competitor restaurants relish in.
So who is going there? What age bracket do they belong to? What clothes do they wear? Picking up on the nitty-gritty details — e.g. age, fashion choices — will give a fair idea of the type who decides to stumble into your venue.
2. Partner Up
To widen your target audience, partner up with another hospitality business in your area. This means you and your partner personally share responsibility for the business — but it also means you have a larger platform to stand on, with a potential partner that is more confident in catering to a target audience.
Restaurants can even partner with industrial bodies. This helps to stimulate interest and create consumer confidence with certifications, awards, and high-profile consumer choice accreditations.
3. Calculate Demographics
Now the ideal customer is on the menu, it’s time to figure out who you’re realistically going to sell to.
Sizing up your target demographic requires planning. Potential restaurateurs have to consider both the strengths and limitations of data, the data’s uses and users.
Conducting an online survey is a quick ad hoc way to start but more rigorous methodologies are readily available, provided by professional bodies.
4. Get Friendly With Social Media
Maximise customer interest in your venue with one of today’s most target audience useful tools: social media. Taken seriously this is a branding opportunity to create appealing imagery of a restaurant online. Target audiences for restaurants love Instagrammable food, as social media is essentially digital word-of-mouth to share the good news about your services.
When customers begin to arrive, don’t forget to encourage everyone to share their thoughts and experiences online. It’s a free way to imprint your restaurant’s image onto the minds of others across the globe.
5. Support Your Restaurant’s Style
A restaurant refit can work wonders. Any venue that consistently upgrades and strengthens their identity will strengthen their appeal to a target audience. New uniforms, new furniture, new décor — all can make a big difference later on when a restaurant has more money to spare on such necessities.
For instance, if an upscale restaurant further establishes a more formal atmosphere with shirts and ties for uniform, they reinforce the ideal environment their target audience interested in fine dining is looking for.
6. Ease Customers Through Service
Customer identity may be at the front of mind when it comes to discovering a restaurant’s target audience and further afield. However, with budgets stretched, strategies that cost money are something that new venues are less willing to consider.
Yet there is another way to attract your target audience and retain their custom: ease customers through table service with a free table booking and waitlist system.
Think about how many customers your restaurant plans to process throughout forthcoming days and weeks. If you’ve got several hundreds in mind, it’s better to have a helping hand — one you don’t have to buy or pay fees to use.
Like a great deal of the top apps on the market, Carbonara App is super simple to use, providing new restaurants, cafes, and venues with the tools they need to bring customers back time and time again, including
- Free guest messaging services, using both SMS and WhatsApp technologies
- Free online booking service
- Free drinks pre-order system, creating extra revenue for restaurants
And much, much more. Carbonara App is one hundred per cent free and can be set up in less than five minutes.
Still asking what are target audiences in hospitality? Carbonara App helps you to discover your very own target audience while keeping restaurant tables full. Tell us more about your restaurant and understand why the target audience is important.
