Are you a QSR marketer wondering how to incorporate location intelligence into your marketing plan? Well, then you’re not alone. It turns out that 69% of QSR marketers plan to increase their use of location data over the next two years, per a study we (Cuebiq) commissioned with 451 Research. Yet 64% of QSR marketers admit that they are barely past the planning stages of integrating location intelligence as a routine part of their marketing efforts. To bridge that gap, we’ve compiled four ways QSR marketers can benefit from using location data.
1. Enhance Loyalty Programs
According to Oracle, a growing proportion of US internet users are signing up for restaurant loyalty memberships — more than 65% of them are members of food service loyalty programs. What’s more, 46% of consumers said that loyalty programs would entice them to visit restaurants more often, according to eMarketer. Given this stat, it’s more important than ever that QSR marketers make use of loyalty programs and understand how to optimize them in order to drive visits.
Location data offers QSR marketers a new source of consumer insights that they can leverage to refine their loyalty programs. Traditionally, loyalty programs have rarely gone beyond a system of reward points based on purchases. Yet through location intelligence, QSR marketers can see which other services their consumers value. This opens the door to more effective loyalty programs that can vary by locale and merge with co-branding, shopper marketing, and other partnership arrangements.
For example, a QSR might learn from location data that their consumers also tend to shop at Ikea. This insight presents an opportunity for the QSR to partner with Ikea, perhaps developing a joint loyalty program that awards points for purchases made at both the QSR and Ikea. By developing informed partnerships that cater to consumers’ other interests, QSR marketers can better tailor their loyalty programs to consumers and ultimately increase loyalty to their own brand.
2. Gain Competitive Intelligence
On the topic of loyalty, location intelligence can also enable marketers to measure the loyalty levels of consumers to their competitive set. This means that brands can identify the most and least loyal consumers of their competitors, and then target the least loyal — or most vulnerable — segment for competitive conquesting. For example, a leading taco brand might learn through location intelligence that a certain segment of competitor customers tends to visit many different fast-food joints, and then target that segment heavily with promotions for their own brand.
While competitive intel is still a nascent use case for location data, there’s widespread curiosity in that application. Of the QSR marketers surveyed by 451 Research, 58% said they were likely to use location data to improve their competitive intelligence. Location data can help QSR marketers unlock key insights about their competitors — such as consumer dwell time and visit frequency. QSR marketers can then analyze these competitor trends over time and compare them to their own, to determine how their own brand is performing in the QSR market.
3. Plan Social Media Campaigns
Another way QSR marketers can leverage location intelligence is to inform their social campaign planning. Through location intelligence, marketers can understand how their efforts on social media are changing consumers’ offline behavior. They can determine whether a specific social media ad drove consumers to store — aka whether it resulted in uplift or not. In this way, uplift acts as a direct metric for the success of a social media campaign.
By analyzing location data, marketers can better gauge how their social media campaigns performed compared to campaigns they deployed across other channels. This allows them to determine the ROI of their social media spend and compare it to the rest of their media investments. If their social media efforts did not effectively move the needle on driving visits, then they might need to reassess their social strategy.
4. Manage the Relationship between Promotions and Visits
Gaining insight into the relationship between promotions and visits is extremely valuable for marketers. They can see how their promotions are performing in-flight and then optimize them accordingly, based on how many visits the campaigns are driving compared to the QSR industry standard.
What’s more, location intelligence can help marketers understand how their own promotions are working compared to their competitors’. For example, if you’re a QSR marketer and know that one of your competitors is launching a buy-one-get-one-half-off deal on combo meals next Tuesday, you could launch your own promotion that day. Then after the promotions run, you could analyze foot traffic patterns between you and your competitor, to gain insight as to how effective the respective promotions were in driving visits.
From consumer and competitor insights to campaign planning, location intelligence can help QSR marketers in many ways. To learn more, check out our white paper here.
