The beauty of digital marketing is it’s accountability, and yet so few marketers truly take advantage of it. Attribution has been out of reach for many marketers because traditional tactics, such as radio, TV and print make it difficult to determine success. Marketers have had to make do by extrapolating what they can from analytics.
For QSRs in particular, determining the success of a campaign can be tough, with instore sales being the only analytic. A successful campaign means more burgers sold or more coffee poured. Customers make decisions within hours or minutes, not days or weeks, so the impact is critical. A well-informed marketing decision could mean a huge influx of sales for the week. This is even more important for the local marketer, who will have less wiggle room in their budget than the national brand marketer.
QSR marketers need to know not just which campaigns are driving foot traffic, but which touchpoints – and that’s the key difference between analytics and attribution. With accurate attribution models, marketers can optimize and allocate more budget to the creatives, tactics and audiences that are contributing to increased sales, and away from those that aren’t.
For example, it’s been historically difficult to measure the success of out-of-home advertising like billboards – never mind measuring their individual contribution to larger campaigns. With location data powering campaigns, marketers will know for certain that a mobile user has passed a billboard and then whether or not he/she entered the advertised restaurant within a predetermined period of time. Moreover, they can target those mobile users with offers on their devices that will entice them to visit that restaurant, building frequency. Not only can this help QSR marketers see whether or not their OOH campaigns are effective, it can reliably inform future OOH buys. Even more importantly, marketers can see how exposure to the billboard and how greatly the post-exposure mobile offer contributed to the consumer visit. Marketers can also understand how the two engagement points may have worked together. That’s what attribution is all about.
Blis raises the game on attribution, offering a tremendous advantage to QSR marketers. With our Cost-Per-Visit platform, marketers only pay for visits driven by their campaigns. Not only do they gain visibility into the touchpoints that performed best, but the ROI of location-based marketing can be seen more clearly than ever. Blis Footsteps Reporting delivers insights into which creatives performed best using foot traffic as a KPI. These reports also reveal how many visitors were driven to each location within a geographic region. With this granular data, marketers can plan to efficiently hit their sales goals.
Attribution is the key to efficient digital marketing. When QSR marketers know which elements of a campaign are contributing most to conversion, they can do more of those and less of under-performing elements. This allows marketers to fine tune each campaign until it’s working as well as it possibly can. The result is a campaign whose budget is well-spent, without wasted taps and swipes.
Location data – along with tools like cost-per-visit measurement and footsteps reporting – can help QSR marketers run effective, efficient campaigns that drive more customers into stores. So not only will campaigns sell more burgers and fries, they’ll do it at an incredibly high ROI.
