In today’s environment, restaurant marketers need to keep their fingers on the on the pulse of the cultural zeitgeist and be nimble enough to react quickly to cultural events, said Patrick Benson, director of digital, social, and influencer marketing at El Pollo Loco.
“If you’re not moving quickly, and moving at the speed of culture, you’re going to get left behind,” he said.
Benson, who spent several years shaping the social media strategies for hit TV shows such as Entertainment Tonight and American Idol, wasted no time latching onto the cultural trends that matter to El Pollo Loco’s customers when he brought his marketing instincts to the chain in 2020. Since, then, the Los Angeles-based grilled chicken chain has embraced the world of digital content creators, driving sales success and ongoing fandom.
Among his accomplishments, Benson has cultivated a network of influencers and built a following of about 160,000 followers on TikTok, after starting from scratch when he joined the company shortly before the COVID pandemic. Since launching the brand on the video-sharing platform, El Pollo Loco has garnered about 350 million views and more than 3.7 million “likes,” Benson said.
“We were able to get on it during the early stages, during COVID when everybody was online and at home,” he said. “Over the course of the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve really doubled down on the platform.”
A notable 2022 campaign leveraging diverse content creators on TikTok to promote the chain’s Shredded Beef Birria product caught fire, and helped the item become the chain’s most successful limited-time offer in the past 40 years, Benson said. Using the hashtag #DipNDrip, the campaign attracted more than 16.4 million video views.
More recently El Pollo Loco has been working with influencers to promote its Tostadas, which have long been a fan favorite, Benson said. Last year the company also launched an “Beats and Eats” campaign on TikTok, in which creators pair their favorite music with El Pollo Loco products.
“Fun stuff like that just really feels native to social media platforms like TikTok,” said Benson.
Marketing on social media has become much more conversational and personalized over the years, he said, which has led El Pollo Loco to look more closely at the engagement that its influencers have with their communities, as opposed to simply their number of followers.
“I’d rather have a community of 100,000 people who are talking about the brand, engaged, and are a strong fandom, versus somebody who has a million followers,” he said.
Striving for authenticity among its influencer partners and working with creators who are the right fit for the El Pollo Loco brand is also critical, said Benson.
“People can see right through a sponsored post,” he said. “They're going to know if it's not authentic. They’re going to know if they're just doing it because they were paid.”