Boosting franchisee communication and market expansion through top-of-funnel awareness.
The overriding goal was to quickly raise awareness through promotion bursts while maintaining top-of-mind awareness through story-telling dialogue. Along with the Kneaders’ marketing team, Avocet developed three areas of external focus, including product quality, community outreach, and customer experience. Additionally, an internal emphasis was placed on our “boots on the ground” approach with multiple franchisors.
Avocet implemented local growth strategies through earned, shared, and paid initiatives, including event marketing, public relations, social content, community outreach, social advertising, search, radio, and a broad display advertising program that included pre-roll, keywords, and retargeting.
The paid advertising approach highlighted promotions while PR, media relations, and content supported the brand outside of the promotional windows.
Just as important was to establish one-on-one relationships with each franchisee, a strategy that allowed us to bridge corporate brand compliance and drive local campaign management through weekly on-deck reports and quarterly team meetings.
Through leveraging behavioral customer data and analytics, we were able to pinpoint the amount of marketing activity an individual customer needed each month to drive repeat visits.
Our PR and media relations efforts were proactive and creative. They centered around seasonal, holiday, promotional, and how-to-recipe-themed pitches geared to drive customers into the stores to purchase items and specific ingredients. Over two years, our Earned Media Value exceeded investment 3.25X. Additionally, we orchestrated several promotional events – supported by digital strategies – including the All You Knead is Love and the Hope Fight Childhood Cancer campaigns.
During a period where fast casual restaurants were experiencing an annual declining revenue average of 6%, Avocet, the Kneaders’ internal marketing team, and local franchisees maintained even growth. Considering Kneaders was a “new” brand in an over-saturated marketplace, the results were considered phenomenal.
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