Digital squeezeDigital squeeze

Mark Brandau

As restaurant marketers organize their departments to house the non-broadcast functions of social-media, local-store and digital communications under one roof, they are finding efficiencies and cost savings by consolidating as many of those marketing tools as possible into single platforms.


Chains are discovering that these platforms not only help to reduce their marketing budgets, but they also give them new ways to track, target and broadcast promotions to a finely tuned subset of customers.


Culver’s launched a text marketing program with software firm Signal in November and integrated the vendor’s e-mail platform last month. Containing both functions under one umbrella will help the quick-service chain execute promotions that integrate with its social-media presence and new “Welcome to Delicious” campaign on TV, as well as save money, said Emily Patterson, marketing manager for Culver’s.


“We definitely have cost savings versus having two separate vendors,” Patterson said. “We can have our social, text and e-club complement our TV ads with the new brand direction.”


The consolidation also enables Culver’s to follow up with text offers at the local level and gather fans’ contact information.


“We send e-mails systemwide for campaigns, but we also send local messages via text,” Patterson said. “Our primary goal is to make things easy for our franchisees. To know how many loyal guests we have on these platforms is a huge benefit.”


Signal also lists Little Caesars Pizza as a restaurant client. Other established platforms have begun to add marketing functionalities, such as online-ordering vendor SeamlessWeb, whose MenuPLUS service lets its 5,000 restaurant clients in 27 cities upload specials and food photos to the ordering website to cut down on some local-store marketing costs. Startup vendor SinglePlatform manages and updates the menus, deals, event listings and photos across hundreds of search engines, city guides, restaurant review sites and social networks for about 3,000 restaurants.


Automatically social


Tasti D-Lite, the Franklin, Tenn.-based chain of frozen-treat shops, actively has pursued social-marketing integration by pioneering the “passive check-in.” The brand is the launch partner of startup SNAP — Social Network Appreciation Platform — which enables it to link its TastiRewards loyalty program through the point-of-sale system to Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. When loyalty-club members swipe their TreatCards at the POS, a tweet, a Facebook post, and check-ins on Facebook Places and Foursquare automatically are sent to those customers’ friends and followers.


Those automated messages can contain a coupon that other people can redeem, said BJ Emerson, Tasti D-Lite’s vice president of technology.


“The long-term strategy within the appreciation platform is to bolt in e-mail functionality and text campaigns to all these loyalty-club members,” Emerson said. “This is our global database, so it wouldn’t make sense to build a silo somewhere else.”


Tasti D-Lite most recently linked loyalty-card purchases to Google Latitude check-ins, as well. Another startup, Beanstalk Loyalty, also offers restaurants the chance to integrate their loyalty cards to social-media posts with every swipe at the POS.


All of Tasti D-Lite’s locations use the same payment processor for credit cards, which offers the loyalty-card processing for free, meaning the brand’s expenses for the TastiRewards program linked to SNAP involve only the cost of the TreatCards and a monthly fee.


“Loyalty customers spend more per transaction on average, so we’re encouraging the adoption of the TreatCard and loyalty club,” Emerson said. “When we go into a new market ... people are learning about us for the first time through some of those messages.”


Using social media can cut down on local-store marketing costs, he added.


“Our Florida franchisee paid 10 cents per TreatCard, and then one customer there uses it and has 27,000 followers on Twitter,” Emerson said.


Benefits of bundling


Rafael Barbosa, marketing manager at Fire Ice, a five-unit Mongolian-barbecue chain in Boston, used CaptureCode to consolidate its marketing.


“Combining an e-mail platform with the loyalty program is such a great benefit,” he said.


The chain just integrated text marketing into its plans and soon will target offers based on ordering preferences, such as sending kids-eat-free deals only to people who ordered kids’ meals in the past year.


“With other services you have to send that one e-mail to everyone,” he said. “If I want to promote my new margarita, why not send it just to those who order our margaritas?”


The application’s analytics also let the restaurant track redemption sources, Barbosa said.


Fire Ice assigns a unique code to offer cards from each hotel in town, just as it links different codes to ads in different newspapers. 


“We found out the hotel next to us was giving us barely anything, while the one across town gave us 40 percent of our business,” Barbosa said.


He identifies places that refer the most business and adjusts marketing spending accordingly.


Javier Perez, marketing director for Boston-based multiconcept operator Legendary Restaurant Group, said the CaptureCode system lets the company tailor messages depending on location. 


“We have five restaurants with a huge database between all of them, and now we can segregate the list to specific locations and people that signed up for the loyalty club there.”


Perez said his guests primarily are redeeming offers on smart phones, although some older patrons who may not own Web-enabled phones prefer to have their codes scanned from a printed e-mail. The restaurants’ servers, many of them young smart-phone users, have adopted the technology quickly, he said.


“It’s so simple to just scan the code and watch it do everything you want it to do,” he said.

Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected]

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