Now more than ever, it’s especially critical to make every dollar count, which can make investing in marketing a challenge for restaurants that rely on physical foot traffic. However, new advancements in marketing technology are closing this gap with visit-based marketing, or the ability to measure real guest visits to a physical location from digital marketing efforts.
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Early adopter Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar began partnering with visit-based marketing experts Adentro in 2019 and hasn’t looked back.
“Marketing in the past has been placing an ad in print or broadcast and later social media, but you don’t know if it is effective at driving guests into our restaurants. With Adentro, we can track tangible results,” explains Amy Nedwell, Director of Marketing for Good Times Restaurants, Inc. (including Bad Daddy’s), on what a game-changer this has been for their business and the restaurant industry at large.
While other platforms like Google and Yelp can offer store visit measurement on ad campaigns, it’s often based on sample data and can be gate-kept with minimum spending. Adentro, on the other hand, is a visit-based marketing platform. This solution gives marketers real-time definitive walk-through attribution on email as well as paid social, programmatic, and connected TV campaigns. Bad Daddy’s newfound visibility into campaign performance led to significant success.
“We tested it, measured it, and could determine our sales driven from marketing using the Adentro platform. As a result, we saw up to a 10 percent increase in our sales,” says Nedwell. All in all, this translated to more than $800,000 driven from marketing over the past year, a 504 percent return on investment.
The first Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar opened in 2007 in Charlotte, North Carolina. By early 2020, the restaurant had launched 38 locations across North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Georgia, Tennessee, and Colorado using its recipe for success with a fun atmosphere and tasty bites.
As the business grew, so did the goals and aspirations of their marketing team. Understanding that customer data would be an essential part of their growth strategy, Nedwell, and her team leveraged Adentro’s branded WiFi portal to increase customer contact collection rates across all 38 locations. In 2021 alone, they collected almost 90,000 new customer emails.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, over 1 million restaurants, including Bad Daddy’s, found themselves unable to serve their customers onsite due to closures and quarantine orders.
Bad Daddy’s shifted their entire online marketing spend to focus on takeout and delivery and were able to leverage the customer data collected by Adentro to target their best customers: their existing patrons.
Within two weeks of shifting their ad spend, Bad Daddy’s started seeing significant results largely due to their targeting strategy. Beyond the influx of takeout and online orders, the paid social campaign achieved a click-through rate that was more than two times the industry average.
More recently, Bad Daddy’s campaigns have focused on touting monthly promotions for various menu items, in-store events, and grand openings. “Using the Adentro platform for our email program allows us to track walk-throughs to our restaurants and really helps us as part of the overall marketing plan,” says Katie Andersen, Digital Marketing Manager at Good Times Restaurants Inc. “It’s very easy to use.”
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Looking to 2022, Bad Daddy’s marketing team is anticipating applying visit-based marketing platform Adentro to other types of campaigns, as well. “We are going to start testing programmatic display ads to gauge effectiveness, especially when combined with social ads,” states Nedwell.
The robust growth of their customer database also allows the opportunity to create more personalized messaging based on guest profiles and visit behavior, a key strategy moving into 2022. “We are looking to leverage more personalization in our communication this year,” says Nedwell. “We look forward to diving deeper into the customer segmentation that’s available in the platform and as a team of three managing three brands, the efficiency the platform offers internally is so important.”
Adentro is a visit-based marketing solution for brick-and-mortar businesses that connect the in-store customer experience to online marketing efforts via WiFi, giving marketers true visibility into the impact of their marketing dollars. For more information on their platform and services, click here.
Sidebar
Bad Daddy’s performance highlights:
Advertising year-to-date was a 5-time return on ad spend (504 percent return)
Drove an additional 44,000 customers in-store, totaling $800,000 in revenue
Contact collection in the last 12 months collected almost 90,000 contacts
