Modern restaurants face a quickly evolving competitive environment with tight margins and rising consumer expectations, making it difficult to stay ahead of the curve. As a result, competitive intelligence is an essential tool for maintaining and even growing market share, preventing customer churn, and increasing customer loyalty. From sales prospecting to data enrichment processes, restaurant owners and operators can benefit from understanding their competitors to get a better sense of the market, and then use the data to inform their strategies and actions.
To stay competitive, restaurants need to leverage competitive intelligence solutions like Brizo, which provides a comprehensive and diverse set of data for deeper market understanding and analysis. With data focused on the foodservice market, plus insights from menu items and restaurant tech, Brizo helps restaurant owners and operators gain a distinct advantage over their competition. With this guide, learn how to evaluate and use a competitive intelligence solution to get the most out of your competitive research.
Understand Your Strategy
Understanding your strategy is essential to leveraging competitive intelligence solutions. Consider your goal – whether it be traversing new markets, increasing sales, forming better customer relationships, or something else. Once you know your goals, you can find the right solution.
Be sure to consider the restaurant’s current position in the market, including menus, pricing, location, and customer base. Knowing the competitive landscape and the restaurant’s current standings allows you to identify needs and anticipate future opportunities. With this in mind, you can identify the most suitable competitive intelligence solution that enhances your business operations.
Measure the Cost-Benefit of a Competitive Intelligence Solution
Analyzing the cost-benefit of a competitive intelligence solution is essential to making the most of your research. Consider the cost of the data, platform, and tools, and ask how else you could use those resources. Additionally, factor in smaller costs such as hiring or training to ensure you have the right staff in place to utilize the solution.
Once you determine the solution’s cost, accurately assessing the return on investment becomes essential. Consider both the short-term and long-term ROI when coming up with a solution – ask yourself how much revenue may be generated from the solution and the cost associated with implementing it. Once you understand the cost-benefit of the solution, you can make an informed decision.
Find a Solution that Enhances Your Current Systems and Strategies
With competitive intelligence, the goal is to enhance not replace. A competitive intelligence solution should provide a foundation from which to build better strategies and inform future decisions. An effective solution should keep with the same pacing and practices that restaurants use without disrupting daily operations.
When evaluating a competitive intelligence solution, consider the advantages it has over manual analysis, such as resource-saving, time-efficiency, and automation efficiency. Additionally, validate how the solution increases the accuracy, reliability, and scalability of operations.
Tap Into Unique Data Fields Specific to the Foodservice Industry
Many competitive intelligence solutions offer a wide assortment of datasets and data fields, but few provide proprietary data fields specific to the foodservice industry. Make sure to narrow down solutions to those that have entry points that exceed the industry’s standard datasets and leverage foodservice-specific data points.
These insights can include menu trends, segment trends, specialty items, pricing changes, past discounts, customer profiles, and more. With these sorts of insights, restaurants can understand their business and their market more deeply and make informed decisions about their menus and customer service. This detailed data can be used to inform marketing strategies and promotional campaigns and offer valuable information into what customers want.
Sales Prospecting in the Foodservice Industry
Today’s foodservice market requires sales teams to have data-driven insights and analytics that can be gleaned from competitors within the industry. A comprehensive competitive intelligence solution should include sales prospecting capabilities which can be used to discover open prospects, closely monitor competitors, and proactively search for the right leads.
This kind of sales intelligence helps inform target market strategies, increase lead conversions, and ensure the team is fully-equipped to close more deals with confidence. Additionally, sales insights can aid in discovering pricing, address new customer issues, and more.
Marketing to the Foodservice Industry
Competitive intelligence helps restaurants attract, convert, and close more leads with relevant data-led insights. Analyzing the complete market picture can improve one’s understanding of customer segments that seek out certain experiences, how to reach them, and how to convert their interests into sales. Additionally, leveraging competitive intelligence for research gives you access to more comprehensive and reliable data points to strategize on campaigns and market-specific messages.
Find Kitchens & Expand Operations
Competitive intelligence solutions provide access to clear views for production sources and expansion opportunities. By tracking consumer trends, businesses are able to make more informed decisions when expanding operations. Leveraging information supplied by the solution provides invaluable insights for businesses looking to streamline production and innovation, and keep up to date with potential business opportunities.
Data Enrichment
Finally, competitive intelligence helps enrich internal data systems with more comprehensive market insights, giving restaurants confidence in the decisions they make. By leveraging reliable customer data and insights for forecasting and customer analysis, restaurant chains can reduce the costs associated with customer churn and increase revenue over time.
Closing ideas
With an effective competitive intelligence solution, restaurants gain a competitive edge which can improve decision-making, offer advantages over competitors, and increase profitability. Companies can benefit from leveraging a competitive intelligence solution as it can produce highly targeted research and prospecting of the foodservice market, bolster sales prospects and marketing efforts, and enrich data systems and expand operations.
