How We Helped a Local Restaurant Boost Traffic & Customer Loyalty [Case Study]
This post highlights a marketing plan created for a popular Mexican restaurant, Cancun Grill, located in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The goal was to better understand their customers, evaluate local competition, review strengths and weaknesses, and make recommendations to keep customers coming back and increase overall traffic.
About Cancun Grill
Cancun Grill is known as one of Eau Claire’s most popular Mexican restaurants. Customers choose Cancun for the quality of food, generous portions, pricing, and the welcoming atmosphere in each of its locations. The restaurant appeals to families, young adults, and groups who enjoy dining together in a social environment. Weekends are typically very busy, while weekday and lunch traffic is less consistent.
The restaurant benefits from strong word-of-mouth, repeat customers, and long-term employees who contribute to a familiar, friendly experience. Specials such as kids-eat-free nights and discounted margaritas continue to perform well and help bring customers back.
The Challenge
Speaking to the restaurant's representative, their goal was as one would expect any business' goal to be: increase revenue. Of course, this isn't exactly the most robust goal for a campaign. It lacks actionable steps. It lacks a time frame, and most importantly, it's way too broad. So the first step for us was communicate that and come up with a more specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goal. The final goal we came up with was to increase overall restaurant traffic by 15% within the next 6 months through targeted marketing campaigns and promotions.
SWOT Analysis
Once we had our main goal defined, we went ahead and conducted a SWOT analysis to identify the restaurant's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This analysis helped us better understand the internal and external factors that could impact the success of our marketing efforts and what we should look out and plan for.
Competition
Of course we all know as marketers that the biggest pain point for any business is the competitive environment. Having a thorough understanding of who you competitors are, what they offer, and why customers would choose them over you is incredibly important for coming up with a plan.
Here's what we uncovered:
- Competitors include other Mexican restaurants and local dining options in the area
- Prices are very competitive, so pricing and menu offerings are crucial
- Several competitors offer strong weekday specials, delivery options, and active Facebook pages
- Cancun Grill is pretty far out out of the way from the local University, while other restaurants were a bit closer
What Worked
Now that we had a thorough understanding of the restaurant's internal and external environment, we were able to identify which areas needed work and which direction they should take to achieve their goal of increasing weekday traffic and overall customer engagement. Here's what we came up with:
- Expand lunch menu and offer lighter, build-your-own options.
- Promote desserts more clearly and introduce monthly features.
- Grow Instagram presence and highlight specials visually.
- Encourage loyalty program enrollment through signage and QR codes.
- Develop recurring weekday promotions that encourage repeat visits.
- Strengthen community partnerships and event participation.
Not only did this strategy address the restaurant's immediate challenges, it also laid out a clear roadmap for how they should operate in the future. Even if they don't stick to the plan, they now at least have a more thorough understanding of what their customers want, and how to keep customer loyalty strong.
