Article

How location-based marketing helped Cousins Subs increase sales

The chain increased app downloads by 42 percent, increased mobile ordering traffic by 63 percent, and increased limited-time-only sales online and in-store for all locations by 19 percent compared to 2014.

September 14, 2015 by Travis Wagoner — Editor, Networld Media Group

Using technology built into today's mobile devices, marketers are finding innovative ways to reach out to customers. Thanks to built-in GPS capabilities, smartphones now have the ability to determine a user's location, and businesses, including Cousins Subs, are learning to use it to reach customers through notifications.

The Milwaukee-based sandwich chain founded in1972, and has more than 100 restaurants in Arizona and Wisconsin is using location-based marketing to help its bottom line.

"We felt compelled to use location-based marketing as part of our strategy due to the competitiveness of both the quick service and fast casual segments," Cousins Subs Digital & Social Media Manager Jordan Steinert said. "We realized that in order to gain competitive advantages we needed to tap into the guest-service and marketing powers that location-based marketing provides. As a result, we focus our location-based marketing on four areas: search and discovery, guest service and engagement; paid media; and insights and reporting."

Cousins Subs chose a platform called MomentFeed, created by Rob Reed, who said he founded the company to help marketers better understand how consumer behavior and expectations have changed.

"MomentFeed enables national brands to reach the local communities that they serve in a relevant way," Reed said. "We realized early on that there was an opportunity for large multi-location brands to communicate more authentically at the local level."

Filling a need

According to Reed, there are three main areas driving the opportunity and need for localized marketing:

1. Smart devices — Whether it’s smartphones, tablets or wearables, the mobile consumer is connected to their current location and immediate surroundings through a combination of GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth signals on a 24/7 basis. These devices account for a majority of their media consumption, both at home and on the go, and they are highly personal in nature. The primary platforms are iOS and Android.
2. Social Media — The global social graph not only connects billions of consumers with one another, thereby facilitating word-of-mouth at scale, it also provides unprecedented audience segmentation and targeting. Marketers can not only know who and why but where and when with extreme precision and efficiency. The primary channel is Facebook. Others include Twitter, Instagram, Google, Pinterest, YouTube, Foursquare, Snapchat and LinkedIn.
3. Search — Mobile consumers are nearly always searching with local purchase intent, whether it’s for a restaurant, movie, or consumer good. Search via smart devices is quietly becoming the conduit for trillions of dollars in offline commerce. The primary channel is Google. Others include Facebook, Bing and Foursquare.

"The challenge for multi-location brands is that consumers are searching for information about individual locations, not the brand as a whole," Reed said. "If a location's pages are outdated, stale or not properly optimized, they will get lost in the shuffle. Localized marketing represents an opportunity to reach these consumers via a variety of channels and ensure they are receiving the most relevant and up-to-date information."

Improved local search, discovery and SEO benefits

Location-based marketing allows Cousins Subs to compete with the category and sector leaders in its industry — without a multi-million dollar advertising budget — to drive traffic and acquire new customers, Steinert said.

"We use services to optimize each location for in-the-moment discovery (address, maps, hours, menu, photos, reviews, etc.), as well as managing our brand’s identity (cover photos, thumbnails, business descriptions, etc.)," he said. "We also use these services for better guest service and engagement. The MomentFeed platform allows us to carry out our passion through local social media — putting the needs of our guests first and making sure each guest feels right at home."

Cousins Subs' surrounding communities are small and geographically convenient, according to Steinert, making it easy to connect with them on a personal level.

"By leveraging new technologies for location-based marketing and focusing on tactics and opportunities that are most relevant to each local community and restaurant, we’re able to build and maintain relationships with our local guest base in ways that bigger brands simply cannot," he added.

Metrics that move the needle

By using location data, Cousins Subs has been able to target its customers through niche interests, behaviors and demographics. It delivers restaurant-specific, localized advertising content during peak and off-peak hours to drive local awareness and in-store traffic and convert online orders.

"Social advertising through mobile is more efficient and budget-friendly for each restaurant and has improved ROI than brand-level advertising," Steinert said. "The data generated by location-based marketing is rich and abundant — more than any other platform. Not only do we get tangible ROI through order conversions, or estimated marketing ROI on customer engagement, we’re able to use that data to better our content, campaigns and future tactics."

The investment

Although the platform required a financial and human capital investment, it was well worth it for Cousins Subs, Steinert said. The chain has an annual contract that involves a monthly per-store cost to access the platform and maintain each restaurant’s presence. The cost also covers consulting from a MomentFeed "client success manager," who regularly provides stores' best practices, training, strategy development and help executing more advanced tactics and campaigns.

"The human capital investment can be extensive," Steinert said. "While the platform setup and store data configuration is relatively easy with the help of our client success manager, we also have to invest time and resources to refine our location-based marketing strategy, incorporate and cross-train departments, create or adapt policies for the company and franchisees to manage the process, and to build and maintain the amount of location data available in the platform. However, the more time you put into using the platform, the more you’ll get out of it."

What was the ROI?

Since Cousins Subs began using MomentFeed, it’s seen a significant return on investment from a campaign and brand level, according to Steinert, who said from the campaign level, targeting capabilities make it simple for the chain to deliver localized advertising across markets with a few clicks.

"We’ve used MomentFeed to launch several geotargeted localized Facebook Ad campaigns to drive online sales, mobile app downloads and in-store foot traffic," Steinert said. "In February 2015, we ran a campaign promoting the availability of two limited-time-only subs over the course of eight days across 114 locations. The ads targeted mobile users within a specified radius of each restaurant and used dynamic fields to populate the city name and street address in the copy. This location-based, personalized message directed them to their local Cousins Subs and to online ordering."

During the campaign, the chain increased app downloads by 42 percent, increased mobile ordering traffic by 63 percent, and increased limited-time-only sales online and in-store for all locations by 19 percent compared to 2014.

Since launching, Cousins Subs has also increased brand-level metrics such as organic impressions and fan growth from adding and optimizing location pages on Facebook, Google+, Foursquare and Yelp.

"Through a combination of organic and paid tactics, we’ve increased restaurant check-ins by 41 percent, local page ‘Likes’ by 1,100 percent, monthly local Page impressions by 400 percent, and unique monthly engaged users are up 254 percent," Steinert reported. "In addition, by responding to all guest comments, rating and reviews — negative, neutral, and positive — we’ve turned guest complaints into opportunities and raised our average store rating from 3 to 4 — a 33-percent lift in guest satisfaction."

By focusing localized marketing, brands can increase their engagement with relevant customers and drive in-store traffic and sales. Localized marketing is all about "search and discovery," Reed said.

"If you’re a brand with physical locations, each location should be optimized individually to fully take advantage of local search dynamics," Reed said. "Nearly nine out of 10 consumers conduct local searches on their smartphones, and 50 percent of consumers visit a store within a day of their local search. Additionally, the top three organic search results on Google get more than 60 percent of the traffic."

Reed also recommends that national brands focus on a "localized customer experience." With a growing majority of consumer experiences being shared in the digital world, the ability to respond to these experiences, whether positive or negative, has a tremendous impact on success. With platforms like MomentFeed and localized marketing, brands can get ratings and reviews from social media platforms like Facebook, Foursquare and Google, and respond individually or to multiple reviews at once.

"In the case of Cousins Subs, the company was able to deliver geo-targeted, Facebook Local Awareness Ads at scale," Reed said. "A single campaign with MomentFeed produced ads including the city names and street addresses for over 114 Cousin Subs locations, and a one-click call to action linked customers directly to their local shops' online ordering pages. It couldn't get easier."

About Travis Wagoner

---

Travis Wagoner spent nearly 18 years in education as an alumni relations and communications director, coordinating numerous annual events and writing, editing and producing a quarterly, 72-plus-page magazine. Travis also was a ghostwriter for an insurance firm, writing about the Affordable Care Act. He holds a BA degree in communications/public relations from Xavier University.