Driving QSR Foot Traffic Through Digital Campaigns

In the dynamic world of Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), it's never a one-size-fits-all situation. Every market has its own competitive landscape, customer behaviors, and brand recognition levels. Operating across diverse markets, this QSR chain faced varying levels of brand penetration and adoption. Some markets were performing well, while others needed a significant boost in brand awareness.

The mission was clear: drive foot traffic into their brick-and-mortar locations through a robust marketing campaign. A blanket marketing approach wouldn’t cut it. Each market needed a tailored strategy to effectively drive foot traffic.

However, an inconsistent tech stack posed an additional challenge: how to attribute direct results of ad exposure without consistent data? We couldn't answer our client's ROI question without finding a new approach for them.

So, we provided a solution to both challenges. We crafted a digital ad campaign with compelling calls-to-action (CTA) coupled with a measurement tool to directly link store visitation to online digital ad exposure.

“Demonstrating the impact of digital media becomes far more complex when working with a constrained corporate tech stack. But we didn’t let that stop us. Our resourcefulness and innovation enabled Brandience to deliver powerful results supported by data,” Danyelle Horrillo, VP Digital & Programmatic Media.

The Campaign

The campaign included digital display, online video, connected TV, and digital audio. Consumers who were served an ad and visited the restaurant were measured and classified into two groups: those who would have likely visited anyway, and those who were influenced solely by the digital ad.

The Results          

The campaign delivered impressive outcomes:

• 53% of customers visited a restaurant within two days of seeing the ad.
• 23% visited on the same day.
• 650,000 incremental visits directly attributed to the digital campaign’s influence and exposure.
• $8.5 million in additional sales.
• 31.2% uplift, far surpassing the QSR benchmark of 5%.

Capturing valuable data created a strong blueprint for future brand initiatives:

• Enhance Campaign Strategies: Leverage in-store measurement results to refine and enhance future campaign tactics.
• Precise Budget Allocation: Use insights from in-store data to create more accurate and effective budget breakdowns.
• Optimize Creative Approaches: Determine the most impactful creative executions based on in-store performance metrics.
• Laser-Focused Targeting: Identify and target the most qualified audience segments using in-store visitation insights.

“A limited corporate tech stack is no match for ingenuity, resourcefulness, and creativity. We are always raising the bar for our clients!”