How Restaurants Can Manage Both Marketing and Ordering with a Single Platform

How well you market your restaurant will determine to a large extent whether it will be successful or not. It’s important for your business to engage customers as effectively as possible in order to drive demand and relevance as well as to be competitive and maintain reputational excellence. Managing both marketing and ordering activities at the same time can be exhausting, which is why it’s important to bring in some help.

Restaurants are busy places and sometimes things can go off course as far as marketing and ordering are concerned.

Benefits of Having a Single Platform

Here are some advantages for managing marketing and ordering functions in one fell swoop, using a single technology platform:

1. Better customer service

With a single platform in place, customers can easily browse through your food order menu and order. It’s that simple! According to Upserve, 20% of the customer base is comfortable with placing food orders online because they think that’s it’s way more convenient. As a food business operator, you can handle multiple orders, keep everything on track and see business volume breakdown by any timeline through interactive reports.

2. Better Marketing Opportunities

A single platform funnels your marketing efforts with enough data to with potential users. The ability to target your local audience at the right time with the right messages converts clicks into actual delivery/pickup orders with a custom Facebook ad strategy and setup. For example, JoyUp’s campaign ad formula generates a 4x-5x return on ad spend.

3. Better Insights

Who are your regular customers? What do they like about ordering from your restaurant? Which food items are popular? Are they aware of the promotions and offers on the website? These and many other related questions can be answered using analytics and insights provided by a robust single platform for restaurants.

Challenges of Having Separate Platforms

The following are just some of the challenges that restaurants commonly face when it comes to having separate systems for managing both marketing and ordering:

1. Disjointed Ordering Process

Convenience is one of the reasons why customers prefer ordering their food online these days. However, there are still plenty of websites that have been created without giving any thought to optimizing the user experience. By integrating a single platform to your business you get the advantage to automate the order-taking process, which frees employees to focus on receiving payments, making change, ensuring order accuracy and preparing to-go meals.

2. Lower ROI on marketing

Issues to do with delivery, not only include delays, but also the quality and quantity of the food, packaging and unpleasant behavior by delivery persons. Think about rider statuses while they’re en route to making deliveries; an occasional draft of customer complaints, inventory management, and the sales volume. All this discourages customers from ordering through your platform. Streamline your website design to make it easy for potential customers to order using a single platform

3. Poor Customer Service

Shoppers are willing to spend 17% more money with a business that constantly offers good customer service. Whether it’s regarding delays in delivery, dissatisfaction with the food queries about payments and refunds or any general questions and complaints, customers will want to get in touch with you and want to feel like they’re being heard. Bridge that gap of handling all your customer issues with an integrated single platform to automate conversations.

To stay effective in your business, you need to bring marketing and ordering under one platform in order to work as an integrated unit rather than separate entities. This way you’ll avoid confusion and improve your target audience’s confidence. So, if you’re planning to make changes to your existing business, your focus should be adopting an all-in-one platform to manage your business operations.