Customer Story
How PJ’s Coffee executes per-location advertising to increase same store sales by 49%
PJ’s Coffee is one of the fastest growing retail coffeehouse chains in the United States. They’ve experienced rapid growth as a result of building warm experiences and lasting relationships with their local communities. With over 170 locations, ensuring brand marketing is customized for every location at a hyper local level is key to their strategic mission and unlocking increased sales.
The Challenge
As the brand continues to grow beyond 170+ locations, the marketing team wants to provide enhanced per-location ad fund transparency in regards to spend and results. When it comes to local store marketing spend, franchisees were executing their own local promotional offers and campaigns. Additionally, many franchisees' local marketing efforts were stagnant or non-existent, leaving potential marketing dollars on the sidelines that would help grow brand revenue and awareness.
Without a centralized platform to manage brand and local marketing per location, with the ability for collaboration and involvement with franchisees, the brand team was unable to understand what worked and didn’t work at the local level, which also lends concern to brand safety, as franchisees executed marketing efforts independently and/or without approval.
Leslie Monson
“We pride ourselves on the support we provide our franchisees, and understand that a locally relevant brand message that connects with the consumer, drives more sales. With Hyperlocology, we’re able to address each location uniquely, and also provide collaborative options for our franchisees - from creative selections to features like Brand Match that incentivize franchisees to invest alongside our national ad fund brand budgets. We’re excited by the results, and thrilled with the trust and transparency we’re building with our franchisees.”
Centralized local advertising
The marketing team knew that local was core to driving customer awareness and sales. Customer preferences vary by each franchise location., Franchiseeshave valuable local knowledge that can be leveraged to help drive brand advertising results. However, the brand team had no easy way to collaborate with franchisees on location-level marketing campaigns across the board.
They needed a centralized solution to manage their digital marketing spend and localized marketing strategies in a collaborative and cost effective way across the top channels.
The Solution
PJ’s Coffee selected Hyperlocology as their multi-location marketing platform of record to execute their digital brand marketing strategy customized per location and streamline their local franchisee marketing efforts, all on a single platform.
Working with a dedicated Customer Success partner backed by a local strategy team of Hyperlocologists, PJ’s Coffee is able to maintain the role of strategic driver for all paid digital marketing, and create a holistic marketing strategy that simultaneously addresses the unique needs of the individual franchisees. The strategy spans ad fund marketing budget and local store marketing budgets and includes multiple channels - Google Search, Display and Video, Facebook, Instagram, and Waze - in order to create awareness, consideration, and purchase intent for every location.
Franchisees have real-time access to the Hyperlocology dashboard to view spend and results per location, and the marketing team has reporting and analytics on spend and results across the top channels where their franchisees spend on marketing.
“In order to provide a best-in-class experience to our franchisees, we needed advertising options to be streamlined. With Hyperlocology we’re able to drive strategy while providing our franchisees with cross channel, full funnel programs and campaigns that they can invest in, and get location-level reporting, all in a few clicks - and in one place. It’s been a game changer for us!”
Reid Nolte
Launching campaigns went from a lengthy approval processes, to a few clicks
With Hyperlocology, the brand team executes marketing campaigns custom for each location. Franchisees can launch custom advertising across multiple channels in a few clicks. The brand team and Hyperlocology meet weekly to discuss strategy and new campaigns. When a new campaign is to be made available to franchisees, the brand team needs to only provide creative assets once - the rest is taken care of by Hyperlocology technology.
- Custom audiences are developed per location and leveraged for local targeting
- Brand creative assets are localized per location, with a local image or copy
- Each ad drives to the location-specific landing page (no need for consumers to use a location finder which increases conversion rates)
- Custom keywords are implemented per location
- Budgets are set and dedicated per location so each franchisees gets their equitable share
Franchisees can address their business priorities with a variety of digital campaigns - Competition Crusher, Catering, Hiring, Product Awareness, and multiple LTOs like Birthday Cake or Southern Wedding Cake.
This streamlined approach to local advertising has increased the amount of local dollars in-market and has resulted in a reduction of time needed from 14 hours a week to 10 minutes.
It has also meant increased speed-to-market. Launching a location-specific campaign used to take franchisees weeks to launch, now a new ad campaign can be live the same day.
Communicating with franchisees is now streamlined
The first area of communication that needed to be upgraded was reporting on spend and results. Franchisees needed to know how their ad fund contribution was performing, and the brand team needed a better way to communicate this information out to franchisees.
With Hyperlocology, franchisees can log into their dashboard at any time to see spend and results for their location(s). PJ’s Coffee leverages the Hyperlocology technology to provide AI powered recommendations for franchisees and to automate monthly emails providing a recap of the previous month’s advertising results to every franchisee.
The brand team also required a better way to communicate with franchisees about upcoming marketing campaigns they’ve been enrolled in (via the ad fund) or additional campaigns they’re able to launch on their own. With Hyperlocology, these tactical communications are automated, ensuring every franchisee is alerted when it’s time to select their preferred creative for an ad fund campaign, add more budget to an existing campaign, or launch entirely new campaigns with their credit cards.
The automated communication has improved trust and transparency with the franchisees as a result.
The Results
After 6 months on the Hyperlocology platform, the results were clear.
Through high quality LTO Campaigns and the ever present Search and Retargeting Program, new potential guests with similar online attributes of PJ’s Coffee’s most valuable guests have been introduced and guided through the marketing funnel.
The priority to drive 1) new guests and 2) create loyal guests has yielded positive results:
+49% Increase in same-store revenue YoY
+53% Increase in transaction volume YoY
3,027,762 new potential guests have been exposed to PJ's branded offerings in their town!
By taking a per-location approach to brand advertising and streamlining the franchisees’ local advertising, PJ’s Coffee is now set up to scale and win local marketing battles. The marketing team maintains their role as the strategic driver of all advertising, and empowers their franchisees with local advertising options, access to more channels, faster turnaround times for advertising campaigns, per-location transparency into ad fund spend and results, and lower costs than working with a traditional agency.
It’s what we call brand directed, locally perfected.
