Target Audience

Discuss about the Digital Marketing for Tourism and Hospitality.

La Porchetta is Australian and New Zealand restaurant franchise. In these countries it has become one of the largest Italian restaurant chains. The first restaurant was opened in 1985 and soon it became famous because of its menu, atmosphere and other great value. The restaurant tries to be part of local community. The owner of the chain is Tony Madafferi. The web page for La Porchetta is https://www.laporchetta.com. The trademark logo of for La Porchetta is “Eat Live Love Italian”. Sara is the CEO of the La Porchetta. She was IT manager at major bank. Her skills help in supporting business operations.

This paper is based on the 7Cs model to analyze the website. The target customer of business are the people who like Italian foods. In terms of demographics, the target audience is mid income and high-income male and female who like to go out for dining. One of the limitation of this report is that it is based only on secondary sources and primary research is not done.

The main purpose of the website is to keep consumers informed about the latest offerings at the restaurant. With this website, customers can reach out to restaurant and learn more about the latest offerings.

Except eating, most of the formalities can be done on the site. For example: booking a table, locating the nearest store and online ordering. The customers are also provided with menu on the site. The menu is different for different regions like Melbourne Metro, Victoria Regional, New South Wales, Queensland and New Zealand. This indicates the restaurant gives special attention to the customer preference.  The restaurant provides separate menu for kids as well. The kid’s menu is also reflected under the tab “MENU”.

The website also demonstrates the business opportunities. Those who want to own franchise of La Porchetta can easily register themselves on the site. It is hassle free new business opportunities for many people. Testimonies of existing franchisers are already there which adds credibility factor in decision making. The website plays an important role in franchise licensing and distribution business.   The company is open in terms of social connection. Its availability on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google+ indicates that it is socially very active .The customers can easily put their feedback on these platforms. Thus company gives assurance of reliable service because any negative comment on these platforms will genuinely hamper the image of 30 year old brand. The company accepts vouchers on online ordering. The restaurant prepares authentic recipes, shows warm welcome to customers and respect is given to all the employees. This is the reason company has spread it’s across the country.

Purpose of the Website

The main objective of the company is to expand La Porchetta is expanding through franchising model. There is flat fee system.The franchise is supposed to give particular fee periodically irrespective of what amount they make. Also, they have turned their small business of take way into a proper restaurant having liquor license.

The target customer of business are the people who like Italian foods. In terms of demographics, the target audience is mid income and high-income male and female who like to go out for dining.

The restaurant industry is a highly competitive industry in Australia. One of the key behavioral traits of consumers in this industry is easy-switching. People like to try new restaurants and it is not easy for restaurants to have a loyal customer base in place.

La Porchetta’s homepage is imperative. Customers can easily navigate through the website. The webpage is easy to understand. It has all main tabs on the homepage. For Example: Menu, Locations, News and Events, About Us, Franchising and Order now. The homepage clearly describes how you can socially connect with La Porchetta i.e. through Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Google+. The page is very relevant for busy customers. It explicitly tries to answer three big queries which people generally have when they go to a restaurant. These are “BOOK A TABLE”, “STORE LOCATOR” and “ORDER NOW”. The latter section of the page describes about the company, Newsletter, connecting to society etc. One main point which can be highlighted here is the company does not promote itself based on discounts and offers. This ensures that La Porchetta is trusted brand and it does not need to attract audience to homepage by sales promotion. The instructions are simple and easy to understand.

The website dos not have text-based navigation which helps customers to understand the path of various sections. The site has all details about the food, its ingredients, price, and extra toppings etc. which make it really convenient for customers. Appropriate page font, right color combination ensures that leads do not have any issue in viewing the product details. The main buttons are highlighted and prominent which makes easy for customer to complete the action. The client testimonials on the site help in building trust among customers and potential business partners. There are blogs, eye catching and informative video as well as separate YouTube channel for that. It helps to engage customer for longer durations. It provides options to select extra toppings. The whole ordering process is simple. The website ask user to form account. This way the company can easily maintain the database for customers. It helps in enriching marketing efforts.

Business Opportunities

It is also important to analyze the website for 7Cs of customer facing attributes. The summarized view of these 7Cs can be shown as:

Dimension	La Porchetta Score (out of 5)	Comments
Customer	4	The customers are at the core of business. The website has everything focused on customers.
Cost	4	The company does not compromise on cost and believes in quality and the same is evident from company values. It has just positioned itself as a justified cost player in the marker
Convenience	4	The ease of navigation is very good that adds to the convenience part
Communication	3	The website has contact us option; however, there is no live chat. Therefore, 3 for communication
Caring	3	The website lists the value of the company, that shows caring attitude
Coordinated	3	Ease of navigation adds to the coordination part
Confirmation	2	The security aspects of website are not clear to end consumers. Therefore, 2 for confirmation

	Score (Out of 10)
Usefulness (Overall)	8
Informational Fit to Task	7
Interactivity	9
Trust	8
Response Time	8
Ease of Use (Overall)	9
Ease of understanding	9
Intuitive Operations	9
Entertainment (Overall)	8
Visual Appeal	9
Innovativeness	7
Flow emotional appeal	8
Complimentary Relationship (Overall)	8
Consistent Image	8
Online Completeness	9
Better than alternative channels	7

La Porchetta’s ability in addressing market demand is supported by its online presence and investment in Information Technology for the entire value chain. The business has to set up distribution Centre to respond to the growing business. This ensures consistency in taste as well as quality. The website helps in promoting and marketing which ultimately will lead to survival and succeed. The customers may not only order online using the mobile platform or website .But it also promotes O2O model.O2O model is online to offline model where new customers may visit the website and this attracts them to the physical stores (Wiener & Saunders, 2018). The important key here is value addition. The website helps the company to follow Omni channel strategy i.e. adopting many business channels after logical thoughts (Cao, 2014). The company has created best marketing strategies online in terms of newsletter, community, accepting vouchers etc. It has given thought over different themes and stories on its website to engage customers on the blog. However, the company needs to check whether people are not adopting O2DO i.e. online to discounted online strategy where they visit the website see the product and then goes to another economical website (Lee & Sardeshmukh, 2016). La Porchetta has authentic Italian cuisine for all age groups along with liquor license and kids product. The restaurant through is online website can target time conscious, techy customers who prefer to visit online. The online model is used to attract fresh minds for the franchising model of the company. The company has grown itself within 30 years at a very fast pace. The brand quickly made a mark in the hospitality sector.

Conclusion

Apart from offline sales, La Porchetta’s management needs to consider the number of hits on its website, number of likes on social media and look towards the conversion. The quality score of La Porchetta is already good which results in displaying the website on the top of web browser. It is necessary to identify the difference between site visits and conversions. It should involve in data analytics to understand all possible aspects. Analytics is the required way to improve performance (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2016). It helps in analyzing own performance as well as competitor’s performance.

One of the challenges faced by customers is lack of advice before making a purchase. The company can introduce a chat room session to help the customers in case of any confusion with this decision (Whyte, 2017). It is necessary that company responds to all necessary queries quickly. The company also needs to take necessary actions to retain the site optimization (Mumcu, 2016). The site should be managed by professionals. The right high ranking keyword should be selected. These should be inserted into company’s website to enhance optimization (Zilincan, 2015). They should also have organic link to the website. It helps to synergize marketing activities.

Another recommendation for organization is to invest heavy on blogging. Blogs are useful to create brand knowledge. For retain customers it is necessary that remarketing advertisements are used. La Porchetta has already started moving towards blogging, linking with customers. A campaign was launched on Mother’s Day. The role of digital marketing in La Porchetta’s business will boost its bottom line. The videos of recipes which La Porchetta put on YouTube will create a positive impact on customers.

One of the major drawbacks of any e-tailing is the inability of the site to offer the same customer experience as offline (Neacsu & Sheldon, 2015). These basic tools will help the restaurant to sell more. It is necessary that using these sites La Porchetta could create value addition they desired. Different digital channels cater to different objectives of restaurant. For example, all social media channels help in creating brand awareness and engaging audience (Ryan, 2016).

References:

Cao, L. (2014). Business model transformation in moving to a cross-channel retail strategy: A case study. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 18(4), 69-96.

Chaffey, D., & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2016). Digital marketing. Prentice Hall.

Lee, C., Hallak, R., & Sardeshmukh, S. R. (2016). Innovation, entrepreneurship, and restaurant performance: A higher-order structural model. Tourism Management, 53, 215-228.

Mumcu, C. (2016). Analytics in digital marketing. In Sport Analytics (pp. 137-151). Routledge.

Neacsu, T., Woods, L., & Sheldon, D. (2015). Ecommerce SEO: An advanced guide to on-page search engine optimization for ecommerce.

Ryan, D. (2016). Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation. Kogan Page Publishers.

Wiener, M., Hoßbach, N., & Saunders, C. (2018). Omnichannel businesses in the publishing and retailing industries: Synergies and tensions between coexisting online and offline business models. Decision Support Systems.

Whyte, W. F. (2017). The social structure of the restaurant. In The Anthropology of Organisations (pp. 19-27). Routledge.

Zilincan, J. (2015). Search engine optimization. In CBU International Conference Proceedings… (Vol. 3, p. 506).