The Hidden Gap in Your Marketing Spend

From the Desk of Jonathan Lim, Founder and CEO of Oddle

A recent conversation with the COO of a large Japanese restaurant chain got me thinking.

He told me his ideal outcome for marketing was simple: he wants every marketing dollar to be spent correctly.

That is a goal almost every restaurant owner or operator can relate to.

But the moment you unpack what that really means, a deeper problem appears.

A marketing dollar is not just a budget. It is a series of decisions.

You are deciding:

• who to target
• which channel to use
• what promotion or message will actually convert that specific audience

This is where many restaurants run into trouble.

They want precision. But they are executing with very little clarity on who their current customers actually are.

Restaurants want precise marketing without precise audience understanding

Most restaurants do not struggle because they lack marketing activity.

They struggle because their execution is built on assumptions.

A typical campaign starts with an idea:

• a seasonal promotion
• a set lunch
• a collaboration
• a new menu launch

The promotion gets decided first. Then the restaurant pushes it across Facebook, Instagram, maybe TikTok, sometimes through paid creators. Budget gets spread across channels. Content gets produced. Ads get launched.

But in most cases, not enough thought goes into the most important question:

Who exactly are we trying to reach?

Not in a vague sense. Not “foodies” or “people who like Japanese food.”

In a real, operational sense:

• How are our current customers discovering us today?
• Are they finding us through Google, Instagram, TikTok, walking past, or word of mouth?
• Do they live nearby, work nearby, travel specifically to dine with us, or just happen to be in the area?
• Which age groups are responding to which channels?

Without these answers, marketing becomes broad rather than intentional.

And broad marketing is often mistaken for good marketing simply because it looks active.

The gap between the customer you think you have and the customer you actually have

Most restaurants have an idea of their ideal customer profile. That is useful. Every brand should have a view of the diner it wants to attract.

But an ideal customer profile is still, at least partly, a hypothesis.

What matters just as much is understanding your current customer profile.

Because your current customers reveal what is already working. They tell you:

• where attention is actually coming from
• which channels are genuinely driving visits
• whether your restaurant is winning because of convenience, visibility, reputation, or destination appeal
• which age groups are responding to which discovery channels

This is the missing layer in many restaurant marketing conversations.

A restaurant may believe Instagram is its main growth lever because it feels brand-building. Another may assume influencers are the answer because that is what everyone else is doing.

But attention is not the same as fit.

Not every eyeball is equally valuable. Not every channel brings the right diner.

The gap between your assumed customer profile and your actual customer profile is exactly where the waste lives.

Two questions that can change how you allocate your marketing budget

At Oddle, we recently launched a check-in survey for restaurants using Oddle Loyalty.

The idea is deliberately simple. When customers enrol, we ask two questions:

1. How did you discover the restaurant?

Options include walked past, Google, Google Business Profile, Instagram, TikTok, GrabFood, or peer recommendation.

2. Where are you from?

Options include live nearby, work nearby, travelled specifically to try the restaurant, or happened to be in the area.

Because this happens as part of the Oddle Loyalty enrolment flow, restaurants can also capture date of birth, giving them visibility into age groups.

On the surface, these look like small data points.

In reality, they are incredibly powerful when connected.

Once you combine discovery channel, location context, and age group, you begin to see your actual customer profile far more clearly.

And that is where better marketing decisions begin.

What the data actually unlocks

Once you have this breakdown, patterns emerge that most restaurants have never seen before.

When you map discovery channel against where diners come from, you start to understand things like:

• whether nearby customers are finding you through Google while destination diners are driven by social media
• whether weekday traffic is largely office workers from the surrounding area
• whether weekend traffic is coming from people who made a deliberate trip

When you layer in age group, a second level of insight appears:

• which platforms are reaching younger diners versus older ones
• whether a particular age group is underrepresented and what that means for where you are putting spend
• whether your assumption about who follows you on TikTok actually matches who is walking through the door

These are not vanity metrics.

They are the foundation of intentional marketing.

The question is no longer just: What promotion should we run next?

It becomes:

• Which audience already responds to us?
• Which channels are actually influencing discovery?
• Where do we have hidden upside?
• What should we double down on?
• What are we overspending on today?

That is a much more strategic conversation.

Better data makes influencer marketing more disciplined too

This applies especially to influencer marketing.

Many restaurants still choose creators based on reach, popularity, or aesthetics alone.

But the better question is whether that influencer’s audience actually matches the customer group the restaurant is trying to attract.

If your data shows that your core diners are younger destination seekers who actively travel for new food experiences, then certain creators will be highly relevant.

If your business is primarily driven by families, nearby residents, or office lunch traffic, then a completely different kind of creator, or even a different channel altogether, may make more sense.

Without customer understanding, influencer marketing is hopeful spending.

With customer understanding, it becomes selective execution.

That is a very different thing.

You will never achieve perfect precision. But you can stop executing blindly.

It is impossible to spend every marketing dollar with perfect precision.

Platforms like Meta and TikTok operate largely as black boxes. Attribution is never perfect. Algorithms are not fully transparent. Some level of uncertainty will always remain.

But perfect precision is not the real goal.

The real goal is to reduce waste and improve the quality of your decisions.

If a restaurant knows that most customers come from nearby offices and discover it via Google, that should shape both spend and content. It should invest more seriously in search visibility, local presence, and lunch-focused messaging.

If a restaurant sees that a younger audience is travelling specifically to try it after discovering it on Instagram, that suggests a different playbook. Creator selection, visual storytelling, signature dishes, and social-first content deserve more attention.

The point is not to eliminate uncertainty.

The point is to narrow the target.

And when you narrow the target, execution gets sharper.

Good marketing does not start with the promotion. It starts with the person.

Restaurants often think better marketing means better content, more ads, more creators, or more promotions.

Sometimes that is true.

But more often, better marketing starts earlier.

It starts with better alignment between:

• who your customers are
• how they discover you
• where they come from
• what content resonates with them
• which channels deserve more investment

The best operators do not jump straight into execution.

They first try to understand reality.

Once you understand your existing customer profile, your marketing stops being random activity and starts becoming deliberate action.

Restaurants do not just need more tools.

They need more intentional systems.

Systems that do not just collect data, but connect it to execution.

That is what we are building with Oddle Loyalty. Not just a way to reward customers or run campaigns, but a clearer feedback loop between who is coming, how they found you, and what to do next.

You may never spend every marketing dollar perfectly.

But you can absolutely spend it more intentionally.

And in marketing, intentional execution will almost always beat mindless implementation.

👀 Curious where your restaurant stands today?

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