How did a Restaurant Double it’s Business Using Social Listening?
How did a Restaurant Double it’s Business Using Social Listening?
Social media has never been so significant for brands as it is now, in the present day scenario. As more and more brands are leveraging social media for engagement, lead generation and sales, knowing the power it carries; I want to draw your attention to how you can use social listening and monitoring as a powerful medium to determine the acceptabilty of the features that are associated with your product or service, among your target audience. Sounds Interesting? Let’s dive deep into it.
To start with, allow me to tell you a few words about feature analysis.
What is Feature Analysis?
Feature analysis is a detailed study of the features that are associated with the product or services of a brand to get a detailed overview of the strengths and weaknesses, by analyzing which features are getting positive feedback from your customers and which features are not doing well and requires improvement.
Now, that you have a fair idea what feature analysis is, I will use a case study based approach to help you understand more and find actual answers with data.
Let’s take the case of a restaurant (name changed)- “The Funked Place“.
What is Our Goal?
Increase in customer retention for The Funked Place by leveraging Rank Me Online social listening tool.
Current Scenario
The Funked Place is a Delhi based restaurant located near to a metro station and is known for:
- Fine dining
- Italian food
- Continental food
- Live music performances
The restaurant has three closest competitors in this space in the Delhi-NCR region. Each one of those players has established their own niche.
All three restaurants including The Funked Place have substantial number of Zomato reviews. Currently, the responsibilities of the brand manager at The Funked Place include:
1. Manually going through all the reviews on Zomato
2. Manually checking social media handles of The Funked Place for customer feedback
3. Manually checking social media handles of their competitors to check responses of their customers
4. Manually analyze all the customer feedback gathered and drive actionable insights from it
Well, that’s hell lot of a task to perform!
It takes the brand manager approximately 2 days every week to complete these tasks. The process is very slow since the customer feedback received for all three restaurants is huge. This is why The Funked Place approached us to setup a tracking system for them to track all mentions and analyse them in real-time.
And we happily did it!
The outcome? Just have a look at the summary table below-
Summary of The Funked Place Feature Analysis with Review Analyzer
Insights
Recommendations
Result
1.
Zomato is the most important platform for food related reviews. But for restaurant trying to establish a niche in musical performance instagram was also a very important platform.
Encourage artists to post about their performances on instagram and Post about the upcoming performances through The Funked Place Instagram handle
Engage with customers on Instagram.
12 % more footfall in musical events organized within 1 month
2.
Flavour of the food was a major factor amongst the audience, the restaurant was recommended to.
Respond and engage with customers who mentioned flavour positively as a thank you to the customer
42% increase in repeat customers
3.
The signature cocktails were found to be especially popular among the restaurant’s customers.
Industry analysis showed that such cocktails are more often mentioned alongside events like ladies night or jazz night.
Post more about their signature cocktails on social media. A theme was created matching an event with a few cocktails to receive more footfall during similar events.
23% increase in conversations around signature cocktails on social media by the audience
Main Topic Analysis
Food and Music are the 2 most important topics for the all four players
For this case, our Review Analyzer found out that the 2 major topics on which the conversations were happening were-
1. Food
a. Majority of conversations for The Funked Place was about food. And that’s quite obvious!
b. Zomato was the most important platform for food.
c. They need to focus a lot on Zomato reviews because when people think about restaurants Zomato is the first place they check for the reviews.
2. Music
a. Customers of competitors were talking a lot about Music
b. For Music, Instagram was the most important platform.
c. The artist and bands were posting about their performances in the restaurants and a lot of music aficionados who had attended these performances were also posting about these events on Instagram.
d. This helped The Funked Place in realizing that to get more people to come to the restaurant they need to build a presence on Instagram for the various musical events hosted by the restaurant.
Topic Analysis for “Food”
The Review analyzer picks up all the conversations around food and conversation around the different aspects for food such as:
1. Flavour
2. Portion Size
3. Variety in Menu
For example, if a person mentions the food as delicious or tasty, it will be categorized under flavour. If a person mentions that a new item was added in the menu, that conversation will be categorized under variety. Under this categorization, the division of the conversations was as follows:
Flavour is the most important aspect of food
Insights
Recommendations
1. Flavour was a major factor amongst the audience.
2. Customers were excited by trying out new items added to the restaurant menu.
2. Also whenever a new item was added to the menu, even if temporarily, the restaurant was recommended to post the image of the new dish on social media and Zomato to create buzz around the new dish.
The review analyzer picks up all the conversations around music and conversation around the different aspects for music such as:
1. The Song
2. The Melody
3. The voice of the singer
For example, if a person talks about the tune or melody, it will be categorized under tune. If a person talks about the voice of the artist, it will be categorized under voice. Under this categorization, the division of the conversations about music was as follows:
Insights
Recommendations
2. People were more likely to check the musical performances on Instagram or YouTube.
- The brand was recommended to create brand awareness for musical events on
- Youtube
- The restaurants also encouraged their artists to post through their account about their upcoming performances. This created a buzz among the artists audience about the restaurant and saw more footfall during the various events.
The review Analyzer then identified the topics within the Food to dive deep into the customer feedback. These topics were further divided into sub-topics to segregate the conversations happening on :
1. Food items
The Review Analyzer then picks up all the conversations around food items talked about. The topic picks up conversation around the different kind of food items served by The Funked Place such as:
a. Italian
b. Continental
c. Indian etc.
For example, if a person mentions pizza, it will be categorized under Italian
2. Drinks served
The review analyzer picked up and segregated the conversations among the different types of drinks served at the restaurant.
Insights
Recommendations
- Apart from the classic cocktails and mocktails served at the restaurant, the signature cocktails served at the restaurant are also quite popular among the customers.
- Industry analysis showed that such cocktails are more often mentioned alongside events like ladies night or jazz night.
- The restaurant was recommended to post more about their signature cocktails on social media.
- A theme was created matching an event with a few cocktails to receive more footfall during similar events.
Our review analyzer further identifies the specific items being talked about in the conversations along with the tone associated with those conversations. So that instead of reading multiple mentions and manually collating all the information to make it actionable, the tool just notifies the brand about their strong and weak points. Such reviews need to be monitored and understood on a real-time basis to proactively act upon them and gain a competitive advantage.
The positively and negatively mentioned food items along with their number of mentions are shown below in the table-
Positively Mentioned Items
Negatively Mentioned Items
Veg Pizza (60)
Double Cheese Pizza (58)
Cheesy French Fries (57)
Chicken Lollipop (52)
Nachos (47)
Potato Wedges (47)
Dahi Kabab (40)
Paneer Tikka (40)
Peri-Peri Chicken Burger (32)
Pepperoni Pizza (30)
This analysis helped The Funked Place
1. In understanding which of their dishes are working well with their customers
2. In understanding which dishes need to be improved upon
3. In getting insight into their customer’s experience with their food items
4. In prioritizing the factors that need to be improved.
This tool becomes crucial because of the fact that not all reviews with positive star ratings contain all positive mentions about the brand and vice versa. No doubt, it is much more likely that negative attributes will be reported in one and two-star reviews and it is absolutely crucial to monitor and analyze those. Nonetheless, it is important for brands to analyze both positive and negative reviews to get the maximum benefit from Review Analysis.
Competitive Analysis
A similar analysis is done for the competition as well to understand how their target audience feels about similar services provided by the competitive firms. Understanding the feature analysis for the competition can also help brands improve their services and marketing efforts.
Know more about- what is competitive analysis and what are its benefits for a brand!
Moving forward, if there is something about a competitor brand that their customers really enjoy, other brands should think about implementing the same in their own portfolio of services. On the flip side, if there is something that people don’t like about a competitor and the other brand really does that well, it is a selling point that should be included in marketing activities. Finally, a comparison between the brand and its competitors provides a deep knowledge about what customers would find useful. Brands can then think about either adding the same functionality or if they already have it, adding extra emphasis to it. Only after a deep understanding of the perception of competitive firms amongst the target audience can a brand leverage their positioning.
–
Methodology
1. Setup Tracks for The Funked Place and three competitors to gather all customer feedback available online.
2. Identify the main areas important for any business in this industry. Here, in the case of The Funked Place, the key areas are:
a. Food
b. Music
c. Location
d. Restaurant
3. Categorized the customer feedback into these areas for all 4 brands along with the sentiment associated with the feedback.
4. Derived strengths and weaknesses of each brand through the Review Analyzer.
Once the trackers were setup for all four brands, the data from all over the web was brought onboard in the dashboard. After the data is gathered, it goes into the review analyzer tool. Review Analyzer is the Rank Me Online proprietary tool which analyzes the qualitative data to find topics that are being mentioned in the conversation by the audience. As shown in the figure, any conversation regarding food or drink items are categorized by the tool under Food and any conversation regarding music, jazz, live performances etc are categorized under Music. This helps brands club different topics mentioned in different conversations under actionable categories.
Now that you have a clear understanding on how the The Funked Place leveraged our social listening and monitoring tool to double up their business, keeping that in mind you can give Rank Me Online a try and that too for free!!
