Now available: The Essential Guide to Marketing & Selling to Restaurants. Download it for free.
Now available: The Essential Guide to Marketing & Selling to Restaurants. Download it for free.
In the foodservice industry, precision is key when it comes to sales and marketing. Time and resources are limited for both you and your prospects.
Every interaction with a potential customer needs to be highly targeted and deeply informed to avoid wasted resources and missed opportunities.
How do you reach that level of precision? Market research is necessary to understand the dynamic foodservice industry and needs of your buyers. But what are the best strategies for food and beverage market research? In this section, we’ll review different methods of conducting that research, some of which are more effective and efficient than others.
Read on for the pros and cons of each approach to food and beverage research.
The most basic level of market research is a manual approach: think scouring Google Maps or going line-by-line on Yelp to find establishments that fit your criteria for location, cuisine, business type, and so on.
In small quantities, manually extracting basic information is easy enough; however, such methods are quite resource intensive and difficult to scale. In addition, the data collected through DIY methods may lack accuracy and consistency. Public sources like Google and TripAdvisor don’t always have upto- date or complete information, leading to potential blind spots or errors in your view of the market.
Some businesses may attempt to automate manual research by developing their own web scraping tools. However, doing so effectively is a costly endeavor, requiring significant resources that simply aren’t feasible for most companies.
Web scraping tools require constant maintenance to adapt to changes in website structures or to address any issues that arise. This ongoing upkeep can become a significant burden on your IT and budgetary resources.
While DIY scraping might work for smaller projects, it doesn’t scale well. As your business grows or your data needs expand, the limitations of this approach become more apparent, requiring a substantial investment in technology and personnel to manage larger datasets. In addition, without sophisticated data cleansing and verification processes, there’s a higher risk of working with outdated or incorrect information, which could lead to misguided conclusions.
Generic lead generation tools allow you to purchase business contact information like emails and phone numbers. The challenge with these contact lists is that they’re often nothing more than that – basic contact data without the context necessary to truly understand the businesses behind them.
This lack of insights makes it difficult to personalize your messaging, a critical factor in standing out from competitors.
In fact, your competitors might be buying those same lists, leaving you fighting over an identical subset of a much wider market! Most data providers don’t specialize in the foodservice industry, and many focus solely on chains, leaving you blind to the 66% of the market composed of independents. As restaurants close, new locations open, and contacts change, these contact lists are bound to become outdated almost as soon as they’re purchased.
Some providers do offer foodservice-specific data that goes beyond basic contact information. That being said, it’s important to investigate the source of their information before building a business plan off of those insights.
Many of these data sources rely heavily on qualitative survey results, often overlooking the hard numbers that reflect the current reality of the industry. Making business decisions based on the subjective opinions of a select group of respondents can lead to biased conclusions and a narrow understanding of the industry landscape.
Specialized market intelligence platforms like Brizo FoodMetrics equip you with a comprehensive source of quantitative foodservice insights. Say goodbye to scattered Google searches, generic contact lists, and biased surveys, all cobbled together to the tune of wasted time and mediocre results.
Brizo FoodMetrics collects and aggregates foodservice data from live industry sources, all in one unified platform. These insights enable you to make informed strategic decisions based on the current market landscape – rather than a small subset of the market or what it looked like six months ago.
Brizo FoodMetrics offers rich insights on over 2.1M+ foodservice establishments, from chains to independents, in six countries: US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.
Supercharge your market research with a free trial of Brizo FoodMetrics today!
This blog is an excerpt from our FREE 49-page resource: The Essential Guide to Marketing & Selling to Restaurants.
Download the full guide to learn best practices and tips on the steps that come after market research:
