Why Understanding Restaurant Demographics Boosts Your Business

Understanding your restaurant's demographics is vital to the success of your business.

Knowing your customers gives you a better idea of their needs and how your restaurant can appeal to them. Knowing your target audience also helps you measure your success.

For example, if the target audience of your marketing campaigns doesn't align with the profile of the actual diners who come to your restaurant, you’ll need to reconsider your promotion efforts.

There's no point advertising to the wrong people and investing money and effort in the wrong place.

We’ll explore how you can better understand restaurant demographics in your business, and the best ways to put this information to use.

What are restaurant demographics?

Restaurant demographics are data and statistics about the people who visit your restaurant and common traits they share. This can include age, wealth or family status. It’s the data that confirms what kind of diners your business attracts, establishing your target audience. 

Using restaurant demographics helps you segment diners and understand how your venue can appeal to this audience. Demographics help optimise operations and reduce wasteful spending by helping you focus on what works instead of spending on less effective strategies.

It’s also important not to become too dependent on demographics. Remember that each diner is unique, with demographic information only revealing a small slice of each person. 

However, if the demographic data reveals your typical diner profile and this doesn't align with your ideal customer profile or your brand vision, then you might want to reassess your restaurant identity and mission statement to understand why you aren't attracting the type of diner desired.

What are the key demographics for restaurants?

When gathering demographic data, it’s crucial to avoid over-generalising your audience. Instead, you should use the data points to optimise your operations and marketing, not completely dominate your business. 

Some key demographics to consider are:

• Income: Consider how much your venue's average customer earns, and set your prices and marketing strategies to match. You’ll need to factor in your operational expenses, and if they can be brought down to better suit your target demographic. Or, you might try to offer a more premium experience if you want to target higher earners.  

• Age: Different age groups have different dining habits for your venue to consider. For example, older diners tend to eat earlier than younger diners. Meanwhile, younger diners are more likely to skip breakfast. This can be vital information for your hospitality business to consider when planning your opening hours or promotions.  

• Location: Consider if your target demographic can reach your location easily. Is your venue in a tourist hotspot, or are locals more likely to visit your location? This will affect your restaurant’s offerings.

• Familial status: Single customers, couples and families all have vastly different preferences in dining. A restaurant made for families will need a completely different aesthetic from a pub. You may also need different stock levels and seating for larger families. 

With ResDiary, acquiring customer information is vastly simplified. Our booking tools are a fast, efficient way to gather demographic data without inconveniencing your customers. By using integrations like Wireless Social, ResDiary can help you gather customer data from entire booking parties, not just the person who made the booking.

While some customer information can be easily gained through ResDiary, creating complete customer profiles isn’t a simple task. Demographics like income can be tricky to acquire and are not immediately obvious without outright asking, which could be done in voluntary surveys and post-dining feedback requested via email marketing, or by monitoring average spend per visit against booking profiles. 

You can rely on our analytics suite to help you analyse booking data and get more complete customer profiles. It may not be possible to have a complete picture of your customers, but demographics can still be useful to consider in your business strategy.

6 reasons why restaurant demographics matter to your business

Failing to understand your target demographics can lead to poor marketing decisions, reduced profitability, and unnecessary costs. 

Here are six reasons why knowing your demographic will be vital to your business:

1. Defining your restaurant brand

Your restaurant's brand is how you communicate your character, service and goals to diners. Your brand encompasses everything from your physical look to restaurant marketing. 

By understanding your target customer, you can emphasise the features and aesthetics that get their attention. A family restaurant can advertise a play area and a kids menu, while a restaurant targeted at high earners may market fine dining ambience for couples and single diners. 

If your brand isn’t resonating with your target market, you could be losing profits or focusing on a customer base your business isn’t suitable for. By using customer data to help define your restaurant brand, you can take inspiration from other successful restaurants with the same demographics.

Read our blog on Restaurant Branding: How to Build an Iconic Restaurant Identity to learn more about defining your restaurant brand.

2. Optimising your business

Understanding your demographics can help you to implement time and cost-saving practices that cater to your customer's preferences. This helps to reduce spending and encourage more profitable practices. 

Some business optimisation practices you can use based on your restaurant demographic include:

• Opening hours: Different demographics have different working times or free hours when they’re likely to visit your restaurant. Be sure to stay open when your target market has time to spend at your venue. Reduce operational costs by closing when your prime customers are occupied. 

• Location: If you haven’t opened your business yet, set up your restaurant close to your preferred demographic. For example, if you are catering to families, your business should focus on suburban areas, while bars or clubs should stay near central business districts. 

• Venue space: Consider the size of your venue and how to use it for your target demographic. If you have space for features like a play area, you can hook families with clear selling points. If you have a function space, you can attract larger groups of young people by offering events like bottomless brunches.
   

3. Choosing your menu and offerings

Does your business need a kid's menu or a larger cocktail list? Be sure to choose the menu items your target demographic enjoys when creating your dishes and promotions.

ResDiary can help you create and advertise promotions for your target market. These promotions, like set menus or special events, can be easily accessed via a booking widget on your website.

You can also analyse the performance and success of your promotions with your target market.

Did that after-work promotion attract the amount of young professionals you were expecting? Did your new kid's menu draw in more families or was there no change? This allows you to create more effective marketing strategies in the future.

4. Understanding your pricing

No matter what demographics you aim for, your business needs to make a profit to survive. If you are not aware of the income bracket of your target audience, you may be overpricing or undercharging for your food. 

For example, a younger demographic will have less to spend than retirees, meaning your menu needs to be more affordable without affecting your cash flow if that’s your target market. 

So, your menu pricing needs to reflect your customer's spending habits and guarantee a profit for your business. 

With quality CRM software like TalkBox or Acteol, your business can gain important insights into your customer habits. This, paired with booking information and spend data from EPOS integrations, allows you to create comprehensive customer profiles to use for pricing analysis.

83% of venue operators from the UK and Ireland and 71% of venue operators from Australia and New Zealand plan to increase their menu prices in 2025.

One way to tackle this, bring down costs in your restaurant and build a more affordable menu for your customers is with ResDiary. Our commission-free booking solution means more money from every reservation stays in your pocket.

We also offer a number of leading integrations from EPOS systems to marketing, offering an optimised way to build your hospitality tech stack. This brings down your operational costs, allowing you to offer better value for your customers.

5. Choosing marketing channels

Once you have a better understanding of your target market and what their preferences are, you’ll need to find the right marketing channels to reach them.

If you are advertising to a younger demographic like students, a social media campaign could be more effective than emails or traditional advertising. 

Thanks to social media like Instagram and Facebook, your campaign can reach new clients as directly as possible. By using ResDiary’s Meta integrations, customers can easily book a table through your Facebook and Instagram accounts. This brings more reservations to your business and significantly streamlines your customers' journey.  A family restaurant might partner with local schools or sports organisations to gain more local diners and build a better customer relationship. 

Or, if you have a venue located in a popular city centre, you might use third-party booking platforms to capitalise on the booking potential from tourists and visitors. ResDiary's integrations with hospitality discovery sites DesignMyNight, Quandoo and Restaurant Hub help you promote your brand to millions of diners searching for restaurant inspiration each month.

6. Creating the right marketing strategies

Any successful marketing campaign aligns with your brand values and speaks directly to your target demographic. Ensure you are effectively catering to your chosen demographic in your marketing efforts, to avoid unnecessary costs. You also need to ensure you properly express the voice and character of your business.

 Some marketing strategies you could use to appeal to different demographics include:

• Highlighting menus: Ensure that the most appealing menu items to your target demographic are spotlighted in your marketing campaigns. This can include emphasising a premium dish or highlighting a smaller portions menu for seniors. 

• Offering discounts: You can foster customer loyalty and increase interaction with limited deals. Create options like student or group discounts in your marketing material to get more attention from your preferred demographic. 

• Promoting specials: Customers will always be looking for special offers or need a reliable booking during holidays like Valentine's Day or Christmas Eve. Promote special deals to increase your local traffic and take advantage of yearly events.

ResDiary offers multiple solutions for effectively marketing and getting more reservations. With ResDiary’s email functionality and SMS marketing through integrations like Silverstreet, you can use your customer database to build greater customer loyalty.

How to better understand your restaurant demographics

The more demographic insights you have, the better you can tailor your offerings to your customers. Additional methods to gain more data on your restaurants demographics include:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) software: With CRM software like Acteol and TalkBox, you can segment customers to make their demographics clearer and market to them more effectively. You can build customer profiles and really understand the diners that make up your customer base.

• Booking data: With a table management system like ResDiary, you can gather booking data whenever a diner makes a reservation. Booking data lets you see how often a customer visits, the size of group bookings and so much more. It’s critical for enriching your understanding of your restaurant demographics. 

• Analytics suite: ResDiary offers a full analytics suite to analyse all of the booking data at your disposal. It helps to ensure you are properly prepared for your services and have all the customer information you need to grow your restaurant. 

Optimise your operations with ResDiary

With a platform like ResDiary, you have an efficient and easy-to-use tool to make the most of your customer's demographic data. From analysing booking data, to building precise customer profiles to making the most of social media, ResDiary is the perfect tool to make the most of demographic data. 

You can quickly and effectively gather and use vital customer information to optimise your business. ResDiary also takes no commission fees, so you can get more business without offsetting your profits. 

Build a business that will keep your customers coming back for more: Book your ResDiary demo today.