How a National Pizza Chain Was Wasting Dough by Not Leveraging Local Slices of Data

Let’s take a look at a national pizza brand with over 500 locations, to better illustrate the point of why hyperlocal consumer insights and local data insights are more relevant than at the DMA level.

Until now, the pizza brands’ national marketing team had executed campaigns segmented and tailored (targeting, offers, creative) to each of the 210 DMAs it served and occasionally a few individual locations that required additional attention. Campaigns were launched and optimized toward cost-efficiency and reach, with the goal of generating awareness and engagement while providing a relevant brand message to the end customer.

Post-campaign, results including reach, frequency, and audience attributes are reviewed and distilled down by the pizza brand’s executive team to inform new product rollout and overall brand direction. 

The questions we need to ask are: 

• Are DMA’s truly accurate representations of each and every community in the area? 
• Is the brand genuinely speaking to each community with a relevant message, and with the product or offer that most appeals to them? 

The answer is no. In fact, targeting by DMA is an outdated way of executing local digital marketing effectively. 

For example, 4 locations in the pizza brand’s Nashville DMA level campaign came out winners based on cost-efficiency, frequency, reach and the ad creative being used. The marketing team replicated the strategy and insights gained and then broadly applied them to the setup for all 15 locations in the greater Nashville DMA. 

But, what happens when customers in Madison, TN are avid purchasers of a popular cheesy add-on but customers in Brentwood, TN didn’t respond well to those ads or impact sales at all? That creates a potentially devastating scenario in which 73% of locations in the Nashville DMA are not marketing accurately and wasting marketing dollars. 

The Secret Sauce: A Technology-based, Centralized Multi-location Marketing Platform That Can Store and Harness the Power of Local Data

Local consumer insights/data are the ingredients of the secret sauce to creating targeted campaigns for each location. 

The ongoing shift from ‘reach’ to ‘relevance’ is trending now amongst brand marketers, and the key is using your data and local consumer insights to guide smarter, hyperlocal campaigns that can produce better results. These aren’t executed at the DMA level but at the community level for each individual location or service area.

Local marketing, when done right, can help national brands with local positioning to stand out from competitors in a cluttered field. Using local insights is also crucial to avoid mistargeting, wasting budget, and keeping your brand’s reputation looking pristine. 

For every brand achieving some success, they’ve also likely experienced a steep and costly learning curve having had their regional or DMA level campaigns fail to reach or resonate with hyperlocal audiences in certain communities. 

Hyperlocology allows your team to quickly, easily and intelligently set up 100s or 1000’s of individual campaigns in each community you serve. Despite the cost-savings and efficiencies it delivers, technology by itself is limited unless you have the ability to store data, bring actionable insights to the surface, and ultimately apply the brand’s learnings from the national to the local level. 

See how your pizza franchise brand can create sophisticated campaigns with data management platforms (DMPs) that allow you to catalog data for all local service areas where you market.