Written by Kyle Bergthold on July 14th, 2020
"I want a billboard on highway 10 coming into town on the south side and I want to make a commercial too."
Why do my clients always want to waste money on brand awareness and general marketing and why do I have to sound like a broken record preaching the benefits of a predictable direct response campaign!?!?
Obviously I'm biased because I build direct response Food Funnels for restaurants for a living but seriously, if you're a smaller brand swimming in the big ocean (which most of my clients are) then branding sucks!
Having a cow as the icon for a chicken place is pure genius and they had no idea that those Cows would enter pop culture and become a bigger strategy idea that would propel their marketing campaign to places they never imagined.
That's not to say that there isn't a place for branding because there is, but only if you have a ridiculous marketing budget in the tens of millions of dollars and years to dedicate to building it.
Buffalo Wild Wings, T.G.I Friday's and Chili's all spent close to $100 million each on general brand awareness marketing last year alone.
Now look, I get that the brand is the business. Whatever you do with marketing, advertising and public relations constitutes the brand. The brand is everything that makes up the customer experience with your business.
This means menu, restaurant design, cleanliness of the bathroom and parking lot, your advertising, your offers and promotions, your staff and their culture and even their uniforms are part of the brand.
There have been restaurants that have succeeded in creating a brand without having a hundred million dollar marketing budget to start; the most notable of which I've studied intently and fervorously is Chick-Fil-A.
They knew they were never going to be able to outspend their well established competitors like McDonald's and Burger King because their competitors had hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to marketing campaigns.
Chick-Fil-A on the other hand committed most of their capital to opening new restaurants. They believed in story telling to build their brand, and they believed that it was less powerful for a brand to tell its own story than for customers or members of the media to do it for them.
So they focused on building up a perception in pop culture by getting other people, mainly the media to understand key stories that captured why the Chick-Fil-A brand was unique.
Why were they closed on Sundays? Let's tell our story.
How did S. Kathy Truett create his simple chicken sandwhich? Story.
They share half of their profits with their owner-operators? Story.
Chick-Fil-A built a brand around their stories and because they had such a strong Operator model and company Culture that always did what was best for the customer; they were able to deliver the maximum brand value.
What Chick-Fil-A did amazingly well with their marketing, thanks to The Richards Group, was differentiate themselves from everything else in the market, and make people smile while doing it. For example, their first billboards were a campaign with the tagline:
Chick-Fil-A
We Didn't Invent the Chicken.
Just the Chicken Sandwhich.
Pure genius. It says it all... If Chick-Fil-A invented the Chicken sandwich then they must be pretty good at it. They're chicken sandwich experts. If you want something different than a burger, you better go to Chick-Fil-A and get yourself the "original" and it must taste pretty darn good.
Plus, being the first to pioneer 3-D billboards with the "Eat Mor Chikin" campaign is to this day one of the greatest feats of branding, marketing and advertising I've ever seen or studied.
Having a cow as the icon for a chicken place is pure genius and they had no idea that those Cows would enter pop culture and become a bigger strategy idea that would propel their marketing campaign to places they never imagined.
Now, Chick-Fil-A had some of the best of the best to make this campaign and it shows.
It's Funny. It's Clever. It's Memorable. It's Enduring and Endearing.
They've been running this campaign for 25 years now.
Even then, while they didn't start with millions of dollars in their marketing budget, they've now spent millions of dollars and years to establish themselves as a big player in the game with their nonburger message in a burger world.
Chick-Fil-A knows that you're not gonna look at this billboard and go, "Oh crap, I better get off right now and get a chicken sandwich." They flash these messages to you called "impressions" multiple times so that after 17 or so impressions, one day you're feeling hungry and you think, "Man, I could really eat a delicious Chick-Fil-A sandwich!"
You see, all of these big Restaurant brands are throwing millions of dollars at their branding campaigns and general marketing to try to stay in the forefront of everyone's mind.
Chick-Fil-A knows that you're not gonna look at this billboard and go, "Oh crap, I better get off right now and get a chicken sandwich." They flash these messages to you called "impressions" multiple times so that after 17 or so impressions, one day you're feeling hungry and you think, "Man, I could really eat a delicious Chick-Fil-A sandwich!"
This is the problem with branding.
It's not trackable, or traceable, or measurable, or predictable.
They don't know which impression they served to you that was "the one" that brought you in. It's just a combined accumulative effort that keeps their brand first and foremost in your mind.
Take Coke, one of the strongest brands ever created, for example. They have tons of memorabilia, cardboard cutouts and posters, billboards, commercials, murals, radio ads, end caps, digital media and just about every type of advertising medium you can think of.
They've spent billions of dollars now trying to tie coke with their brand image of "Happiness" and "America". This is why they use Santa Clause in their advertising; who's happier than Jolly Ol' St. Nick?
It ties the coke brand to happiness.
Green Meadows, Lady Bugs, Sunshine. Or this one...
AMURICA! This is strong branding at it's best. And it takes years and millions or billions of dollars in this case. And again the problem?
It's not trackable, or traceable, or measurable, or predictable.
You know how I know? Think of the last time you bought a coke. Even you can't tell me what impression they served you that caused you to buy a coke. Was it the billboard you saw? The pen? The blimp? The commercial? The end cap? The truck?
This billboard is General Brand Awareness Marketing. Its Organic. But it's the same way they would have advertised in the 1990's!
It's not trackable or traceable or measurable or preditable. You can't tell how many people drove by it, or how many of those people were "unique" eyeballs, how many of those people actually read your billboard, or how many of those people who actually read it, came in to your restaurant.
There's gotta be a better way! And there is, Kevin! (Sorry I'm a Friends Nerd.)
Let's take a look at a Free App Campaign I ran for a client. This is what I like to call a "digital billboard." It serves the same purpose as the billboard above but it's better in every way because it's digital.
Because this is a "digital billboard" we are still accomplishing the same effect of a "branding campaign" by serving thousands or even millions of impressions to everyone who lives within 20 miles of your restaurant.
But we gain the added benefit of it being trackable, traceable, measurable and predictable.
Because we've made an offer and are giving our potential guest a "call to action" we can track everyone who clicks our link and takes us up on our offer. We immediately know if we get a return on our ad spend. (ROAS)
We served 60,168 impressions.
That means that 60,168 people drove by our billboard. 21,432 of them were unique. 33.4% of them looked at our billboard for an average of 4 seconds. 449 people clicked and 376 of them took us up on our offer. 21% of them come in and redeem their offer. That's 74 guests (and their families) in 14 days. Would you like 74 new or repeat customers in your restaurant in the next 14 days?
Plus, we spent $324.76 to add 376 “guest avatars” to our CRM database. We own these potential customers data and we can continue to send them offers and market to them for FREE forever. (or until they unsubscribe.)
Meet Kim.
Kim is one of those 376 "guest avatars" we added to our Customer Relations Manager. (CRM) As you can see, we know quite a bit about Kim because once she accepted our offer we "pixeled" her and are able to track every interaction she has with our Chatbot.
This means we know what food she likes, how often she comes in, how long it's been since her last visit, how much she spends on average and a number of other metrics including her satisfaction on multiple service points and her own personal feedback.
This means we know what food she likes, how often she comes in, how long it's been since her last visit, how much she spends on average and a number of other metrics including her satisfaction on multiple service points and her own personal feedback.
We also have her Facebook Id, email, phone number and address so we can choose any medium that suits us when we want to send Kim future offers!
Because we can track the guests interactions and decisions at every point of our funnel, we know our cost to bring someone though our door down to the dollar, day and cent. And because our CRM automatically exports the data to an easy to read spread sheet, we always know exactly what our Return on Investment is. (ROI)
Now let's compare these two forms of marketing.
Questioning Guy: “Hey you with the billboard! How much does it cost you to get someone to come into your restaurant?”
General Marketing Billboard Guy: “Ugh, I don’t know, I pay $1400 a month for my 3 billboards and I’m sure they bring in some amount of people...”
Questioning Guy: “Hey you with the Food Funnel! How much does it cost you to get someone to come into your restaurant?”
Food Funneler: “It cost me $1.64 to bring Kim through my Food Funnel and into my restaurant and she spent $52.56 for a gross ROI of 3,204%! After Food Cost and Labor my net ROI is over 1,400%! After paying my brilliant Ad Guy (that’s me) and all expenses I have a machine that I feed $1 into and it spits more than $3 of net profit back out!
Plus, we can run all kinds of retargeting campaigns and send our offers directly to the phone in Kim's pocket; for next to nothing because we now own her data and have added her to our huge list of regulars.
Thanks to our CRM we know Kim likes Queso and comes in once a month. Our goal is to take Kim from a guest we see once a month to a guest we see once a week!
We do this by making personal offers suited to her based on her past decisions.
We do this by making personal offers suited to her based on her past decisions.
This is just one of the many campaigns and extremely useful benefits using a Food Funnel offers. Fully trackable, traceable, measurable and predictable.
So if you're tired of "Blimp and Hope" Marketing from 1990 like this...
Flying over the city in a blimp with a big bag of 10,000 $5 off coupons and dropping them randomly hoping that someone who’s interested in your offer will take your coupon without throwing it in the trash, get some scissors, cut it out, put it in their purse or wallet, and bring it into your restaurant to redeem it before they lose it...
And you're ready to start using Direct Response Marketing that's digital, trackable, traceable, measurable and predictable down to the dollar, day and cent.
Then reach out to me today at kyle@kylebergthold.com and schedule a FREE Strategy session where I'll share with you strategies that are currently working like magic for my clients right now; and how they can be used to build a list and grow sales in your business!
Kyle Bergthold
Kyle Bergthold helps companies dominate online with Facebook Ads. He's an expert at helping businesses get customers using online methods and making things super simple to understand. If you're interested in creatives that grab attention, copywriting that sells, funnels that convert, and Facebook Ads that get a high return, then definitely reach out and request a free strategy session today.
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