How Guests Decide Where to Dine and What You Need to Do About It

Facebook. Yelp. Google. Grubhub. There are so many places where diners can find your restaurant online that it can almost seem impossible to know where to focus your marketing and advertising efforts.

Thankfully, you don’t have to gamble on a hunch nor do you have to spread your resources thin to try to be everywhere at once.

The 2019 Restaurant Success Report from Toast provides restaurateurs with valuable information about how guests decide where to dine. All you have to do now is put it to good use.

How Do Guests Decide Where to Dine?

Toast’s report asked both diners and restaurateurs: “How do guests choose a restaurant to dine at?”. These were the results:

You can see there’s a lot of discrepancy between what restaurateurs believe gets diners into their establishments and what actually inspires guests to dine with them. It would be wise to leverage this data as you evaluate your sales and marketing spend for 2020.

Here are some things you can do now to optimize how much time and money you put towards reaching guests online.

Prioritize the Guest Experience

Is it any surprise that both restaurateurs and guests agree that recommendations from friends and family are the most important factor in the decision-making process? What may surprise you, though, is that nearly 90% of surveyed consumers believed this to be so as opposed to roughly 70% of restaurateurs.

This just goes to show you that it’s what you do in-house, with every guest engagement, that truly matters. While online marketing certainly helps increase awareness with new guests, the quality of experience ultimately gives guests a reason to become loyal customers and your biggest advocates.

So, before you do anything else, look at tightening things up in your establishment to make the most of those personal referrals.

Keep Asking for Reviews

Although word-of-mouth is obviously a leading source of business for restaurants, so too are online reviews — something which both restaurateurs and guests agreed was the second most important decision-making factor.

With word-of-mouth referrals and online reviews ranking so highly, it just goes to show you how much more willing guests are to lean on the words of other consumers instead of on businesses. If you haven’t done so already, start working on collecting reviews (and feedback!) for your restaurant. Facebook, Google, and Yelp are good places to do this. You can also include comment cards tableside along with feedback forms on your website.

Spend Less Time Promoting Yourself on Social

Check out the points above for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and restaurant social media. Notice how the guest side of the survey is roughly half of what restaurateurs estimated? This should tell you something about the true influence of social media on restaurant marketing.

That, of course, is not to say that social media is ineffective. It just means you probably don’t need to spend as much time on social media platforms that aren’t built for restaurant marketing (like Twitter or YouTube).

However, since Facebook is equipped to show off things like menus, hours of operation, location info, reviews, and more, that’s a platform you should definitely keep investing time and money in.

Get Good Press

Were you surprised to see that television shows were rated so well by guests? Considering the popularity of food and travel shows, that shouldn’t come as too much of a shock though.

Getting a spot on a national TV show can be a huge deal for restaurants. Because not only is this a great way to get introduced to new diners, near and far, but it also opens your restaurant up to additional forms of press, like online articles.

Just look at this article from Delaware Online that went crazy after Guy Fieri popped into town. This wasn’t the only local news outlet that picked up the story either. And notice how the article isn’t really about Guy Fieri and his show. It’s about the dining establishments he visited.

If you hadn’t given much thought to getting press coverage for your restaurant before, this report might change your mind.

Wrap Up

In order to get more people to your dining establishment, you need to match your expectations to the reality of it. And if consumers are telling you that it’s word-of-mouth marketing, online reviews, Facebook, and good press that does it? Well, that’s where you need to shift your focus.

That said, don’t forget to look at your historical data. Your target customer base might not align perfectly with Toast’s survey data.

So, before you make any drastic changes, have a look at your restaurant’s spending reports, online performance reports, as well as your customer feedback. These resources aren’t just useful for predicting future trends or fixing faulty processes. You can also use them to figure out where best to reach guests in the first place.