Technology

How to use your back office data to power social media marketing

jersey mike's menu

Add smarts to your social with inventory-driven promotions

Almost all restaurants today use social-media channels for broad sales promotion. The challenge for operators often is creating promotional content for these channels that is timely, targeted and optimized for specific locations.

But what if your marketing team had access to store-level inventory data? Marketers could create targeted promotions with each store location’s best interests in mind.

Between POS sales data and operations-level inventory data, restaurant marketers using an integrated back office system have access to insights rarely seen in any industry.Now, with business intelligence so easily automated and sharable across an enterprise, corporate marketing teams can access powerful information that will help drive sales where and when it's needed. Creating tweets and status posts from location-based menu mix sales data can add a whole new dimension to your social programming.

A great opportunity for information sharing and collaboration

Finance and operations folks have always known that data gleaned from an enterprise back office platform can help them manage food and labor costs and increase profit margins. What’s not as well known is that the same enterprise back office data can help marketing teams quickly identify the right menu items to promote to drive the most profitable sales.

No longer just for your restaurant operators and the c-level crowd at company headquarters, today, a company’s cloud-based back office system can inform marketing teams of what each menu item’s sales performance is by geographic region or individual location, broken down by weekday or daypart.

Perhaps more importantly, it also informs marketing of each menu item’s profit potential. Menu mix data driven from your store’s back office system will help you make sense of what menu items to promote—and when and where to promote them.  

Want to learn more? Go to www.crunchtime.com, follow us on Twitter at @getcrunchtime or watch helpful videos at the CrunchTime! TV Channel.


Hidden gems! Are there menu items that are more profitable and drive sales momentum?

Jersey Mike’s Subs, with 1,500 restaurants open and under development nationwide uses their back office solution to help inform their marketing decisions. In the case study, learn how they:

  • Compare company-wide data to determine what's most profitable and why
  • Steer the company away from anecdotal to empirical data-driven facts
  • Create special offers to drive restaurant daypart performance
  • Test menu pricing strategies

This post is sponsored by CrunchTime! Information Systems

Multimedia

Exclusive Content

Financing

Despite their complaints, customers keep flocking to Chipotle

The Bottom Line: The chain continued to be a juggernaut last quarter, with strong sales and traffic growth, despite frequent social media complaints about shrinkflation or other challenges.

Operations

Hitting resistance elsewhere, ghost kitchens and virtual concepts find a happy home in family dining

Reality Check: Old-guard chains are finding the alternative operations to be persistently effective side hustles.

Financing

The Tijuana Flats bankruptcy highlights the dangers of menu miscues

The Bottom Line: The fast-casual chain’s problems following new menu debuts in 2021 and 2022 show that adding new items isn’t always the right idea.

Trending