How to Evolve Field Marketing at QSR Brands
Let’s address the elephant in the room: what’s going on with QSR Field Marketing? Over the past few...
Whether your franchise has 20 or 2,200 locations, the brand experience strives to be consistent, from food to the ordering process. While consistency is key for franchise brands, there are lots of local factors that can impact your brand on a per-location basis. The ability to quickly adapt your franchise marketing for every single location is a necessity in a digital-first world.
New or Temporary Locations
Opening new locations is a core part of the franchising model. Whether your brand is entering a new market or increasing the number of locations in one city, successful grand openings are paramount.
The same is true for temporary locations, from one-day special events to month-long holiday pop-ups. Local customers need to know about these new locations in order to give you their business.
For example, growing Macaron brand Woops! opened two pop-up locations for the winter holidays in two different major metro areas. They launched local marketing campaigns targeting specific customers in those areas, featuring local holiday gifts and offers, just for the duration of their pop-ups.
Highly targeted local franchise marketing plays a critical role in the opening of new locations, permanent or temporary.
Responding in Times of Crisis
As we all experienced during the pandemic, how brands respond in times of crisis is critical.
In 2020, JINYA Ramen Bar had many temporary closures due to local Covid policies. Our franchise marketing platform enabled the brand to pause ads for certain locations or change the language in specific ads to update customers with timely information. These changes could be made immediately, on a per-location basis, without disrupting the running campaigns for locations that were unaffected.
Sudden weather crisis situations like tornadoes, fires, and hurricanes also have a major impact on local communities and require the ability to quickly change ad messaging or completely turn off digital advertising for locations in peril. Weather is so unpredictable, it’s not uncommon for one part of a town to be affected by a weather event, with minimal impact just a mile or two away. The ability to customize local messaging at that granular level helps communities stay connected and shows your brand cares about their locations.
Giving Customers What They Want, and Where They Want it
In response to local community preferences, ads should be customized per location to promote the most relevant offers for each location’s customers.
A major burger franchise that we work with has noticed that bacon menu items are huge sellers in certain communities. Our platform enables them to customize ad creatives to promote bacon-specific products and offers for the locations where they are sizzling.
Not only does the right message matter (bacon!), but where you connect with customers online also plays an important role in the effectiveness of local advertising.
The ability to quickly add or remove certain digital advertising channels is a huge benefit. Say, for example, search ad volume is low for a certain period, brands can quickly redirect budgets or add new channels, like paid social, to be more visible where their customers are online.
Effective local advertising requires new levels of agility than ever before. Having the right franchise marketing technology in place will enable your brand to pivot quickly when needed to maintain up-to-the-minute relevancy in every brand location.
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