Why feedback data is essential for Marketers
Why feedback data is essential for Marketers
We work closely with many departments in a Hospitality business. Operations are one of our biggest stakeholders as key users of the system, with Ops teams using Feed It Back to determine actions needed to improve the guest experience, be it the venue being too cold, or the steak being overcooked. These users of the system are in Feed It Back day in and day out, and like any system, if you use it regularly you get the most from it.
However, in this post, we want to focus on the Marketing team who in some cases are not using feedback data as well as they could be and we want to give some pointers as to how marketers can really benefit from becoming more frequent users of the system.
Understand your audience
You may not even be aware that Feed It Back can capture demographic data. These questions appear on one single page, making it easy for the guest to quickly complete and they have customisable options. Typically we see 50% of surveys with these items completed:
- Age range
- Gender
- Visit frequency
- Visit purpose
- Postcode
With Feed It Back capturing hundreds of thousands of survey completions each month, this is a vital source for you to understand your audience. Analysing the age range and gender of your guests alone can help you know if you are reaching your target market.
With visit frequency, it’s essential for Marketers to know what proportion of guests are first-time visitors so they can track their efforts in getting new people through the door. It’s equally important to track regular visitors to help identify trends in loyalty and what campaigns could be executed to keep regular visitors coming back.
Many of our clients have a focus on visit occasion or visit purpose, marketers have a huge opportunity to align this data with their marketing plan. Clients might be focusing on kids during half terms or might be positioning themselves as a celebratory venue. Knowing why guests are visiting you and how they score, can help improve this.
Postcode data also allows marketers to understand how far your guests are travelling to visit your venue and opens up opportunities to market in those local areas that your guests are travelling from.
User-generated content
The Feed It Back survey has a lovely feature that allows guests to upload a photo at the end of the survey. The guest can give permission for photos and comments to be used for marketing purposes. This presents a fantastic opportunity to share these on social media or internally to showcase the great work your teams are doing.
Reputation scores
By having the right processes in place you can help boost your online reputation and searchability online. By putting a customer survey in front of your customers it helps to keep any negative feedback offline and with our smart feature it can allow you to get customers to share their positive experiences on the review channels.
What does this help to do? Well, it helps to boost your star rating, the number of reviews and boost your searchability to help drive new customers to the venue. Just check out this case study from our friends at Rosa’s Thai Cafe.
All marketers want to track their brand’s reputation online and Feed It Back makes it easy for you to do this! Track the average company scores to ensure the line is heading in the right direction.
Menu engineering
We are experts at gathering and analysing product level data. Tracking 140k product ratings every month from a variety of Hospitality sectors means we can know which dishes and drinks are well-loved, disliked or just ok. Understanding the reasons behind the guest sentiment is just as important, so you know what to do to improve guest satisfaction. Whilst your F&B team will take care of spec issues, Operations chefs will be taking care of execution issues, Marketers are responsible for communications and menu design. Ensuring that dishes are communicated effectively is key. Our feedback data regularly surfaces when there is nothing ‘wrong’ with a dish, it’s just not been made clear on the menu as to the details of the dish.
Consumer research
At Feed It Back, we run an annual consumer research survey ‘Pulse’ which enables operators to find out everything they need to know about consumer habits, likes and dislikes. All the marketer has to do is send out an email to their customer database and we do the rest. This is data gold for marketers! Equally, our clients can run their own research surveys through us or slip the odd question into their regular guest survey to better understand the consumer anytime they would like.
And most importantly, improve your CRM customer journeys
At Feed It Back we pride ourselves on partnering with the best-in-class Hospitality tech providers. We integrate with the major CRM players meaning that survey completion data along with guest opted-in data is automatically sent to your CRM. This wealth of data enables you to really improve your customer journeys, by personalising them based on their feedback from a last visit using segmentation such as visit purpose or product level feedback.
You can also use a triggered journey to prompt a guest for a review on a public review site following their feedback. Be careful to ensure you are not breaking any Ts and Cs e.g. you should probably avoid incentivising for sharing positive feedback on social review platforms.
Suggested links:
Latest Pulse (consumer) research
Driving value and pricing for profit – product level insight