Sponsored by Reveal Mobile
As a foodservice marketer, you know it's no longer good enough to create on-point digital ad campaigns and hope they drive foot traffic to your physical locations—you also have to show measurable results for reach and engagement and use the data to optimize your ad spend.
Savvy marketers are solving these challenges with location-based data tools that measure paid digital campaigns and deliver specific and actionable insights that optimize ad strategies and improve return on spend. Here’s how you can, too.
Optimizing data, enhancing ad efforts
As marketers for chain and multi-unit operators, you’re likely already collecting a ton of data about your customers from POS systems, mobile apps, websites, and more. You know the more data you have, the more you can strengthen your ad campaigns.
Still, according to Nation’s Restaurant News’ 2023 Restaurant Technology Outlook report, 7 in 10 restaurant operators question whether they are optimizing the customer data they already source.
The truth is many brands aren’t yet taking full advantage of their data. Engaging a trusted technology partner to manage your campaigns can help you more easily gather location-based marketing data that reveal deep insights into your customers’ dining-out behavior, and then use that information to enhance advertising efforts.
For example, digital media agency OffBeat recently mounted a successful TikTok campaign for one of its national restaurant clients with the help of Reveal Mobile, a location intelligence and geofencing marketing provider. Using Reveal’s VISIT Local platform, OffBeat was able to leverage the chain’s location data in its media planning and targeting to ensure its ad dollars were optimized to acquire new customers, steal share of stomach from competitors, and drive repeat store visits from current customers.
“Within just a few days of launching a campaign on TikTok, we saw a positive impact on our restaurant client’s foot traffic,” said Erin Tobias, director of paid social at Offbeat.
OffBeat then leveraged attribution reports included in VISIT Local platform, to get real-time insights to track who visited which restaurant locations and competitors’ locations, and foot traffic over time. The Atlanta-based media firm used the attribution report insights to quickly strengthen the campaign as it was running and to provide accurate reporting once the campaign ended. The results exceeded industry standards.
“Reveal’s reporting showed that targeted audiences were 27% more likely to visit the restaurants during the campaign period than they were prior to the campaign,” added Tobias.
While using location data to make post-campaign analysis to inform future ad campaigns can be helpful, a key advantage of innovative tools such as Reveal Mobile’s VISIT Local, is real-time data.
Using real-time geofencing, you can target and advertise to your most qualified audiences when they come close to one of your restaurant locations. When the target customers are inside the virtual boundary, it activates ads and push notifications enticing potential customers to visit your nearest restaurant. By accessing, gathering, and tracking data on foot traffic during campaigns, marketers can apply the most actionable insights in the moment—when they are likely to have the most impact.
The team at Flagship Marketing Group knows first-hand the benefits of having real-time data gathered with Reveal’s tool.
“Pure gold!” says Kelli Pilkington, Flagship’s Marketing Director. “If we can get ahead of the campaign's success while it's still active, we can achieve higher results in real-time rather than have to wait until completion, do a full evaluation, and then start a new campaign after the timeline has already ended.”
Additionally, it can be hard for non-tech experts to understand complex campaign reports, which adds another benefit to opting for agency-managed campaigns.
“You’re spending a lot of money on digital ads, you may as well understand what you’re getting,” says Randy Kilgore, Reveal Mobile CRO.
Getting on track(ing)
While precise location data is critical to improving your ad campaigns, before you can analyze campaign data, you need to have proper tracking in place to collect data. Then, using location analytics, you can tell whether your campaign is meeting traffic goals and determine if the messaging is working and use that information to energize upcoming campaigns or to further optimize your campaign for better results.
It’s an innovative and strategic approach that has the power to jolt sales: According to Zipdo, 75% of retailers report having seen a 5% increase in sales because of location-based marketing.
Flagship Marketing Group has used Reveal Mobile’s location-targeting tools for every different stage of its restaurant clients’ growth.
“From new openings' strategies versus those restaurants that have been open for 20 years, the [Reveal] platform appeals to both focuses and targets the demographic we need to drive traffic in innovative above-the-industry ways,” says Pilkington.
But if your brand isn’t yet taking full advantage of location-targeting technology you won’t have much data to measure.
As a result, more marketers are discovering the need to—and benefits of—working with agency-managed platforms, such as Reveal Mobile’s VISIT Local, which can provide support for location-based efforts from strategy to targeting and tracking to post-campaign analysis.
As you can see, it’s clear that in 2023 and beyond, location-based analytics—understanding where your customers are and what they are doing in those locations —should be a core part of the marketing game plan for any national, regional, or multi-concept chain with physical locations.
Ready to up your digital marketing game with location-based analytics? Contact the team at Reveal Mobile today.