Looking for some new marketing ideas for your QSR? Quick-service restaurants (QSRs) thrive on convenience, so location-based engagement (LBE) can give your marketing efforts a big boost.
Using GPS, geofencing, or beacons, you can capitalize on foot traffic and send targeted, relevant messages to hungry people in your area.
Traditional marketing and location-based marketing share some similarities, but they follow different rules. If you want to get it right, you’ll need a solid strategy.
So let’s look at what location-based engagement is, its advantages for QSRs, and how to take advantage of it without violating your customers’ trust.
What is location-based engagement?
Location-based engagement (LBE) is a marketing strategy that leverages customer proximity to your restaurant to encourage sales.
With traditional marketing, you might use a combination of digital and physical media to advertise your brand and its latest promotions. With location-based marketing, you send targeted messages via social media, mobile apps, or SMS that instantly tempt a customer to swing by and grab a bite to eat.
With location-based customer engagement, you’re less concerned with how many touchpoints you have with the customer. Instead, you rely on the immediacy of the customer’s needs. By sending a reminder or offer at the right time, LBE can boost conversions and promote brand awareness.
How does location-based engagement work?
Location-based engagement pulls location data from a digital asset to pinpoint a customer’s location. Customers can choose to share their location data via the QSR’s mobile app or interactive marketing materials, such as QR Codes or digital displays.
LBE strategies use smartphone, Wi-Fi, and GPS data to identify a person’s location before triggering a specific action based on a set of rules.
For example, if you use geofencing, you create virtual boundaries around each QSR location. When a person steps within the perimeters, you can send them a push notification with a discount offer or ad.
You can also implement beacons for more precise targeting. You set these small wireless transmitters up in-store, and they send a continuous signal to your restaurant app. Once a downloaded app is in range to receive the signal, the customer can get targeted information or promotions.
Advantages of location-based engagement for QSRs
QSR owners face a lot of pressure in the restaurant industry, particularly in saturated areas. Location-based engagement offers a one-on-one experience for the customer, also known as the Gold Standard in modern marketing. Here’s what LBE can bring to your restaurant:
More foot traffic
Location-based marketing relies on proximity to the restaurant. The customer doesn’t need to make a special trip or remember when a promotion ends—they just need to make a quick detour for a quick refreshment.
This convenience is a win-win. The customer gets a fast, delicious treat, and the establishment enjoys revenue growth and increased customer loyalty.
Corporations like Starbucks constantly tweak their LBE strategies to meet their busy customers’ needs. For example, if a Starbucks customer wanders into the vicinity of a cafe, they might receive an offer for 10% off a new menu item via the mobile app.
Restaurant and franchise owners can also reverse engineer LBE based on their competitors’ locations. Burger King famously offered the Whopper for just a penny whenever a customer wandered within 600 feet of a McDonald’s. This promotion led to 1.5 million mobile app downloads for the fast food chain.
Personalized customer experience
QSRs can use location data to tailor offers based on customers’ preferences and past behaviors. For example, if a customer usually orders a single item on weekdays and a family meal on weekends, you can pull that information to provide a targeted offer via the app, social media, or SMS.
You can also directly interact with customers via mobile app, QR Code, or digital display for a better user experience.
Let’s say you run a bench ad with a QR Code at a busy intersection to promote a QSR location a block away. When a customer scans the Dynamic QR Code, they receive a customized offer based on their purchase history. These kinds of personalized deals can lure in customers who may not have planned to stop by.
Enhanced loyalty
Customers crave a personalized experience. When they get it, they’re more likely to come back for more. But the opposite is also true—if a customer has very specific buying patterns, they may become frustrated if a QSR continues to send irrelevant offers or notifications.
However, if your marketing strategy acknowledges the customer’s habits and location, it can spark lasting brand loyalty. The customer feels seen, and they receive offers and promotions that speak directly to their needs.
That’s why folding your customer loyalty programs into your LBE strategies is an excellent approach. When you blend QSR loyalty programs and location data, you can offer better rewards and exclusive deals to customers in the area.
For example, you might offer 50% off any menu item to your most loyal customers and 20% off to customers in lower loyalty tiers.
How location-based engagement can transform QSR operations
Location-based engagement challenges the tenets of traditional marketing, pushing back against the need for endless repetition and instead prioritizing an omnichannel, one-on-one experience. As you consider how to best apply LBE to your current marketing tactics, consider the most important aspects of this marketing strategy:
- Relevance: Location-based engagement helps you tap into the power of hyper-relevance. Instead of issuing blanket ads for the general public, you send special promotions to the most receptive patrons in the area.
- Real-time: With so many distractions and notifications, it’s easy for people to forget the marketing messages you worked so hard to craft. With LBE, time is on your side. The notifications may be more short-lived than your larger branding tactics, but the immediate impact is arguably far greater.
- Interactive: Digital assets, like mobile apps and QR Codes, provide memorable interactions and a unique customer journey. LBE tempts customers to spend more time with your brand, whether it’s answering a quick question or determining the fastest way to get to your location.
- Immediate conversion: Whether a customer stops by for a single drink or places a large order for an impromptu party, LBE encourages more foot traffic and impulse purchases on a regular basis.
Tips for creating a QSR location-based marketing strategy
When developing your QSR location-based marketing strategy, you’ll need to consider your location, target demographics, and individual customer buying patterns.
Identify the target audience
Whether your audience is teenagers cruising around at night or professionals on their lunch break, demographic and behavioral analysis metrics will help you put together your LBE marketing strategy.
For example, you might run offers for half-priced late-night bites to appeal to a younger audience. But a free kid’s meal offer will entice young families who are watching their wallets.
You can use analytic tools to glean important insights about your target demographic. For example, when you use Bitly’s QR Codes, you can track the total number of scans, number of daily scans, mobile device type, and location data.
You can use this information in combination with your mobile app and loyalty program data to determine who’s most receptive to your brand in any given geographic area.
A strong QSR customer feedback management strategy will deliver further insights that you can use to measure your success and better connect with your ideal demographic.
Create personalized promotions and special offers
Your mobile app, surveys, quizzes, short links, and QR Codes can appeal directly to your local customer base. For example, a fast-casual restaurant owner might draw location data from a user’s mobile app to provide walking directions to the nearest establishment.
As with traditional marketing, feel free to stretch your creativity, drawing on everything from the weather to local events to customer trends.
If it’s a particularly rainy day, adjust a Dynamic QR Code’s marketing offer and tempt customers to warm up, dry off, and grab a pick-me-up. Pairing the promotional text with a tantalizing photo of a hot drink could be all you need to seal the deal.
Choose the right platforms for deployment
Digital marketing tools, like mobile apps, social media, and SMS, can all be effective for LBE strategies. However, the right platform depends on who your customers are.
The key to tailoring your incentives and platforms is putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. For example, you might use SMS sparingly for your most exclusive offers and rely on your mobile app for more general promotions.
If you’re looking for a tool that easily integrates with your most widely used platforms, Bitly’s solutions are highly adaptable to fit your QSR marketing strategy.
Whether you want to shorten landing page links or leverage QR Codes, Bitly’s extensive integration marketplace makes it simple to connect your apps with powerful marketing analytics tools.
You can also combine Bitly’s tools with Google Analytics to dive deeper into your customers’ habits and preferences and further hone your incentives.
Track and measure the success of the strategy
Tracking and measuring your strategy leads to both short- and long-term campaign improvements. For better analysis, set metric benchmarks for things like conversion, retention, average table occupancy, and customer satisfaction, and then track how your audience responds to your strategy across each category.
Bitly’s analytic tools can break down campaign success, whether it’s a one-time promotion, long-term loyalty incentives, or A/B testing during local events. With sleek, easy-to-read dashboards, you can evaluate the immediate response of your campaigns against the larger ROI of each tactic.
Use Bitly for smarter QSR location-based engagement strategies
As with traditional marketing, you’ll need to iterate your LBE strategies to maximize your success. With Bitly, you can measure how customers engage with digital assets and then adjust them to meet their needs.
With Bitly, you can track where your customers are, what devices they’re using, and which offers would appeal to them the most if they’re in the area. When you implement data-driven outreach strategies for your QSR, your marketing is that much more impactful to your most loyal customers.
Regardless of your current challenges, whether it’s low foot traffic or disappointing ticket sizes, our suite of short linking and analytics features can help you understand which notifications and messages resonate with whom based on where they are and when you send them.
If you’re ready to test out location-based engagement for your QSR, get started with Bitly today.
