The Nuances of Marketing

Dee Hadley, CMO, UNO Restaurants

Business Strategy Analysis

We start with our business strategy. What are we trying to achieve? What is the biggest strategic opportunity— increasing visit frequency with current customers or acquiring new customers? We then incorporate our targeting strategy (who are the most profitable consumer segments?) and ROI data on each marketing vehicle with a single-minded objective of “how do I most effectively and efficiently reach and engage my core target. All of those things should answer the question around where to invest.

Know Before Implementing

Test and learn. Build your library of tested programs. Pick the ones that meet your strategic objectives with strong ROI. “Test and learn” is becoming more important than ever with numerous technology solutions in the digital marketing space. Here at Uno’s, we’ve tested several digital marketing programs in the past couple of years from banner advertising to mobile to paid social to a loyalty program to table top tablets. We rolled out table top tablets (Ziosk) last year for most of our company owned system after testing with 20 or so restaurants for over 3 years.

Understanding Marketing

Know your target audience, and most importantly their needs and how your brand meets those needs. Test, test, test. Tactics must follow your strategy, not the other way around. Mass customization— technology gives us so much information about our customers, but how you leverage that to scale up your marketing efforts would be critical.

 We all know data is not insight, and without insight, data is meaningless 

For traditional retail businesses, being able to understand that final link from digital KPIs (CPC, CPA, etc) to actual visits would be important. A single view of the customer across various channels is easier said than done, especially for non e-commerce businesses like restaurants. There are solutions out there, but most of them are very costly, therefore, out of reach for most restaurant concepts which is unfortunate.

The other pain point is how to make sense of a large amount of data available to us. For example, I get over 500 consumer verbatim comments from our table top tablets every morning. How do we distill a large amount of data into one or two actionable insights without having to invest in additional human resources? We all know data is not insight, and without insight, data is meaningless.

Driving Towards Mobile and E-marketing Technology

Mobile continues to play an important role in consumers’ lives, so we are paying close attention to how we can engage our customers with mobile whether that’s mobile payment solutions (this is not common in the full service restaurant environment) or i-beacon technology based solutions. The other key trend that I am paying attention to is solutions that would link digital marketing actions, i.e. clicks and page views to actual visits to our restaurants.