Selling WiFi Marketing to Restaurants

Digital marketing agencies and MSPs can increase their revenue by selling WiFi marketing to restaurants.

For any business where people wait or spend time, the potential applications of WiFi marketing are broad. This insightful approach to marketing can be instrumental in helping your clients engage with their customers, and it can be the foundation of a new and lucrative offering for your business.

MSPs that offer guest WiFi can charge clients for WiFi marketing as a standalone service or as a bundled add-on, a move that typically results in more sales of their existing offering of managed WiFi services. Both MSPs and digital marketing agencies can provide WiFi marketing services as a turn-key or DIY offering. Their clients will gain valuable insight into their customer’s behavior—insights that fuel targeted customer outreach and facilitate the optimization of loyalty programs.

WiFi marketing services have a very relatable value proposition, but to effectively communicate the benefits of WiFi marketing to a restaurateur, a reseller must understand the business owner’s primary concern, which is engaging with their customers. 

With guest WiFi in mind, let’s look at both parties involved, starting with restaurant customers, then examining the business owners who are forever chasing those customers. We’ll wrap up with a discussion of how WiFi marketing yields an incredible range of opportunities to engage with restaurant visitors.

A Profile of Restaurant Customers

Restaurant customers are spoiled by choice—they have so many options when selecting a dining establishment, it’s made them fickle. Their attention is very hard to get. They’ll make a repeat visit, but only with encouragement, and they might actually exhibit brand loyalty if a restaurant earns it.

In the restaurateur-client relationship, customers and prospects hold all the cards. Restaurant owners must do marketing backflips to get their business.

The good news is, WiFi marketing targeted at restaurant guests lets business owners engage with their elusive audience using the most effective techniques and communication channels available. 

When patrons take advantage of guest WiFi, they’ll provide valuable contact information, plus, WiFi analytics expose details about customer behavior that can help restaurant owners improve operations and optimize customer outreach. Those are the kinds of things restaurant owners worry about, as we’ll discuss in the next section.

A Profile of Restaurant Operators

Restaurateurs know what they’re up against. They operate in a landscape that’s packed with competition—attracting and retaining customers is their top priority every day.

To meet their primary concern, getting people through the door, the proprietor of a restaurant must figure out what the customers want.

While POS data reveals what clients buy and when they buy it, it doesn’t reveal what they want. Discovering that requires that business owners learn about and create a relationship with their customers, which in turn requires two things: customer contact information and details about the customers’ interactions with the establishment.

WiFi marketing gives restaurant operators access to both those things. Business owners can collect multiple forms of contact info. Then, with WiFi analytics providing insight into customer behavior (how long they stay, how often they visit, etc.), restaurateurs can optimize and automate how they present offers and solicit reviews.

Restaurant Guest WiFi Marketing in Action

Offering guest WiFi is a way to access crucial channels for customer engagement, specifically, the customer’s email inbox, texts, and social media. 

Unlike hotels and gyms, in which customer registration yields at least one piece of contact information, a restaurant guest can visit an establishment without providing so much as their first name.

By offering guest WiFi, not only can restaurateurs gather visitors’ email, social, and SMS contact info, they can use the platform to track customer behavior, like peak hours and the average duration of a visit, or the date of an individual customer’s last visit. Insights like those can help restaurateurs fine-tune operations and tailor customer outreach to maximize its effectiveness.

The benefits of WiFi marketing are easy to explain, and when you describe its role in customer engagement, a business owner will see that it can be a great addition to their marketing strategy. Below, we’ll get into more details about the key selling points of WiFi marketing. 

On-Site Engagement Opportunities

Because their competitors offer guest WiFi, it’s become a must-have amenity for restaurants. Offering it puts a restaurant on a level playing field with other businesses, and it creates goodwill with customers.

It’s safe to say that one of the primary aspects of on-premise customer engagement with guest WiFi is the provision of the service itself—people need to access the internet, and if they can’t do it in one place, they’ll move to another.

However, just providing guest WiFi won’t make you money. That’s where WiFi marketing comes in, and onsite customer engagement opportunities abound. When a restaurant visitor accesses the WiFi network, a splash screen can welcome them, present an offer, and ask that they check in on Facebook.

By timing a message to be sent right after a person disconnects from the WiFi network, business owners can ask for a review at the moment when the visitor is most likely to comply.

WiFi marketing enables numerous ways to target members while they’re in the building and even more for engaging with them between visits, as we’ll discuss next.

Off-Site Engagement Opportunities

WiFi marketing allows restaurants to collect valuable customer data. Having the right piece of contact info—the key to the customer’s most-viewed communication channel—is vitally important.

WiFi marketing is a magnet for all sorts of customer contact information, so your clients can leverage the power of email, text, and social media to automate loyalty programs, solicit social media sharing and reviews, present targeted digital ads, and optimize all forms of customer communications.

Aside from using collected contact info to engage with customers, restaurant owners can use their WiFi network to track customer behavior with great precision.

WiFi analytics can describe customer traffic, with data about first-time visits, return visits, visit duration, etc. That information lets business owners create personalized customer loyalty programs, reach out to long-absent customers, and target offers to customers based on profile and demographic data.

Restaurants—The Perfect Arena for WiFi Marketing

Offering food and fun, one might think that restaurants wouldn’t have to try that hard to attract and retain customers. The problem is heavy competition. Restaurant customers have so many choices!

To be successful, restaurant owners must go out of their way to engage their customers, and WiFi marketing can be a valuable source of information that will help them do that.

As a reseller, you can capitalize on WiFi marketing in restaurants. It can be a key part of your client’s customer engagement strategy because it’s perfectly suited to get restaurants more business and foster customer loyalty in countless ways.

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