Demographically Targeted Promotion Ideas for the Hospitality Industry

Demographic targeting is the most important part of ensuring your text message scheduling and marketing campaign is working -- check out our earlier post on demographics in advertising and how to utilize them. If you're wondering exactly how you can apply these lessons to your own business (and you happen to be in the hospitality industry), we've done the hard work for you! Use these demographically targeted SME marketing and promotions ideas via text message scheduling for everyday success in your business.

For coffee shops

1. $1 Tuesday for cakes: This one would be targeted towards women -- yes, there are plenty of men with a sweet tooth, but the gals outweigh them by a mile in the sugar-licious stakes! You can expect quite a few coffee sales along with your cheap cakes.
2. 50% discount on lunch-hour coffees: You can frame this as a happy-hour-style SME promotion. You'd be targeting office workers, and those that you know work in your immediate area. Use phone number prefixes to determine who to send these scheduled text messages out to.

For restaurants

3. Kids eat free: Target this one to customers that you know have children -- an obvious one! If you have children yourself, you'll know how little they actually eat at one meal, and can safely offer tiny plates of food along with free refills of pasta, or nuggets and chips, or whatever you do at a very low cost.
4. Oysters and champagne night, $20 per head: If you have included marital status information in your demographic gathering activities, you can quite easily target couples with this text message scheduling promotion. Alternatively, look back through your old booking sheets and see who has booked tables for two. A male name on the booking sheet generally indicates a couple coming.

For bars, pubs and clubs

5. $3 cocktail night coming up: Women are more likely to drink cocktails than men are -- and big discounts on these traditionally expensive drinks will be a sure-fire pleaser. Make this SME promotion for a limited part of the night, so that you attract customers but don’t run a huge loss.
6. 24 beers in 24 hours competition: These will be legal in some areas but not in others, so that is the first thing you'll need to investigate before implementing this demographically targeted text message scheduling promotion. Once that's done, go for younger men (and be prepared to pull an all-nighter!).

4 Ways You Can Use Text Message Scheduling to Manage Employees

One of the biggest challenges and biggest expenses in running a business is managing the people within it. Wages make up a big part of expenses, and sick days and missed shifts not only cause headaches, but cost even more money. Text message scheduling is a great way to automate some parts of the employee management process, so that managers can focus on keeping the most expensive and important part of the business healthy and happy! Here are four text message scheduling techniques that apply to any business with employees.

Distributing rosters

Let your employees know their shifts as soon as rosters are completed with text message scheduling. You can input the data by simply copy-pasting the shift times in the appropriate format into a text message for your employees. A delivery report means that you have hard copy proof that your employees were notified of their shifts!

Even when absenteeism is not an issue, scheduled text messages informing employees of rosters eliminates confusion and cuts down on paper usage -- much more appropriate in the modern world.

Staff meeting notices

Text message scheduling to a group using web based software is extremely quick and extremely cost-effective -- much more so than ringing employees individually to let them know about an upcoming meeting. The cost for good text message scheduling will usually be around 10p per message, and you can request employees reply to confirm that they are attending. This strategy helps ensure everyone gets the message at minimal time and cost.

Social club events

Send out a reminder about Friday drinks, Monday lunchtime's trivia event, or an upcoming office birthday party using text messaging. Even people who aren’t working (and so won’t be checking their work e-mails or noticeboards) will get the message, and won’t miss out on the event.

Memos

Use this technique carefully; text message scheduling for memos sounds like a great idea for ensuring blanket coverage for management's message, but the practicalities can be a little restrictive. You only have 160 characters to get your message out, or else a second message will be sent. Sending two messages is unprofessional (and more than a little annoying for the recipient!). This strategy can be useful as a reminder for policies that everybody has previously discussed, but is rarely a good format to deliver more extensive new information.