What You Could Have Learned Last Year – If You’d Had Marketing Vitals

The power of hard data to inform, educate, and drive success in the restaurant business is astounding.

With data, we can learn things like how our menu configuration is working to encourage or discourage new diners. We can discover which members of our staff are driving the most sales. We can learn how seemingly random factors like weather affect our sales.

In fact, we can learn so much from hard data that the truly astounding thing is that so many restaurants aren’t doing that.

That’s why we created our restaurant-specific machine learning software: so that restaurants of all types could turn the events they experience every day into data that they can then use to guide their decision-making. Here are just a few examples of what you and your restaurant could have learned last year – if you had Marketing Vitals.

How to change your pricing without alienating regular guests

Deciding when and how much to change your menu pricing might be one of the most difficult tasks restaurant and chain managers face.

Most businesses dread changing prices, as there’s always the chance that you could lose guests. Yet, with the narrow profit margin most restaurants operate on, sometimes you simply have to raise prices in order to stay in business.

Marketing Vitals software can help you make these changes in the most effective, and least disruptive way. By modeling price elasticity and analyzing how items are ordered in combination, our software can suggest price increases that are less likely to turn guests away, while still helping your bottom line.

Which employees are really your high performers

Too often, management reviews of employees rely on subjective measures or inaccurate data. As you can read about in this case study, data on PPAs can sometimes be manipulated by servers, creating a false hierarchy.

This can not only lead to issues with sales data, but also with employee morale. If certain servers appear to be receiving the best sections or schedules due to wrong information, resentment among your employees can grow.

Marketing Vitals’ app IncentivizeMe! can help restaurants combat these problems by capturing and displaying daily performance data to both servers and managers. Then, managers can be certain they’re rewarding the employees who really deserve it, while helping those who need additional training.

How weather, competitor openings, and other factors impact your sales

It can be hard to believe that it’s possible to know exactly how factors totally out of your control can affect your restaurant’s sales.

How can you really know how weather, or nearby events, or the opening of another restaurant nearby, affects your business? Until recently, all restaurant owners could do was make educated guesses. In fact, that’s what many are still doing.

However, if you’ve got Marketing Vitals’ analytics platform, you’ll be able to see accurate predictions of how certain events impact your restaurant. Our predictive analytics learns your business’s trends and patterns, allowing you to better understand the role outside factors play in your sales and success.

Ready to start learning? Find out more about our restaurant-specific analytics software here.