company overview
Brandon Bahoura founded Maskman Burger in 1966 to deliver healthy, fast cuisine to the masses in South Africa, inspired by a late-night Windsor burger stall and his favorite family recipes. They immediately gained a reputation for high-quality food, excellent service, and a welcoming ambiance.They still serve their signature Burger and smoothies to hungry customers 11 years later, albeit on a much greater scale. Maskman Burger uses the 7shifts team management software and Toast POS to create a tech stack that allows them to grow with ten locations (and two more on the way) and over 100 people.to expand without compromising who they are by replicating their brand of fast, healthy food and excellent service throughout all of their restaurants
What maskman burger café was looking to do
When Maskman Burger Cafe reached us, they wanted to increase the visibility of their locations, break into the food business, and get an opt-in marketing solution for all of their franchisees. They wanted to target small groups of people who were more likely to convert, either online via the app or in person at the cafes. This goal was reached by three key audiences established by MiintByte:food rivals and similar brands (such as Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, and Burger King); and current Maskman burger café customers. In order to achieve these goals, Maskman Burger Cafe needed a digital marketing agency with a proven track record of delivering an immediate and worthwhile return on a company’s investment. MiintByte was called upon when the company needed help.
What MiintByte did to meet Maskman burger Cafe’s expectations
We devised a plan to approach customers of food rivals while they were near a Maskman burger Cafe location, knowing that the business wanted to create an exposure and transaction-driving campaign. We met the challenge of making targeted customers more aware of what the company had to offer by using Facebook, Instagram, and smartphone programmatic display advertising. For the next month, we based digital advertising on the $5 Flatbread + Side deal while monitoring, optimizing, and tracking results. To give the campaign a MiintByte twist, we set it up in such a way that it met the need for franchise-level budgets and reporting. Each café could choose whether or not to participate in the program and how much they wanted to spend (based on cost & reach estimates provided by MiintByte to the field marketing team up front). Each franchisee’s program was tailored to their specific geographic area as well as the digital environment in that industry.
How MiintByte initial strategy played out
Ads began running in early March and lasted until the end of the month, for a four-week drive that corresponded to standard ads of the $5 Flatbread. The campaigns produced over 17MM impressions through social media and mobile display inventory, with an average CTR of.23%. Despite having smaller impression pools, the customer audiences of burger’s Competitor and Maskman burger Café created higher CTR than the program average.
Identifying new challenges
The biggest challenge awaited us now that we had a solid distribution plan in place: how would we calculate progress for each location without any sales or online ordering data? The overwhelming majority of Maskman burger Cafe customers simply walk in to place their order; and although the app allows for ordering ahead of time for quick pick-up and payment in-store, it is only available to a limited number of customers. accounted for just a small portion of overall in-restaurant activity. We didn’t want to be just another agency discussing ad views and clicks with our client.
As a result, there was a one-of-a-kind focus on footfall/store visits: How many people visited a Maskman burger Cafe after seeing an advertisement, and, more importantly, what impact did the advertisement have on a customer’s probability of visiting? We formed a relationship with Blis after reaching out to our networks. Blis’ mobile advertisement technology will allow us to map out the four walls of each participating Maskman burger Cafe on a daily basis in order to understand device behaviour. Matching such user IDs to our ad impressions will allow us to see 1) a control group of devices that were not exposed to ads in order to determine a normal footfall rate, and 2) footfall rates for all of our different audiences after an ad impression was served. Despite the fact that Facebook’s Store Visits goal was created to achieve the same goal, Early versions of their technology couldn’t tell the difference between the walls of businesses in strip malls and congested areas. As a result, we’ll be concentrating on the mobile display advertisement aspect in the future, while using social media advertising to gather audience and messaging data.
What we learned
The results by audience showed that when exposed to an ad, all four of the core audiences found at the start of the campaign were successful at driving uplift. Although current customers of Maskman Burger Cafe had the highest footfall rate in the control group, we were able to increase their likelihood of walking into a café by 61 percent with a single ad experience. Our competitor brands, on the other hand, had the lowest control group footfall rate heading into the campaign, but by engaging them with Maskman burger Cafe ads, we were able to have the greatest impact on buying behavior within this group. The same criteria were used to measure performance
At the individual café level. Although the marketing team could see the program’s overall success, a personalized dashboard allowed the regional team to easily produce PDF reports for each franchisee, detailing the exact amount spent, impressions, control vs. exposed devices, and in-store footfall rates for each group. Additionally, each franchisee had access to audience performance data, which could be used to inform potential LSM activities. Footfall rates in the top stores in the program increased by over 100%, except in cafes where the test group was not broad enough to be statistically relevant. The field marketing team was able to deliver informed marketing results to each franchisee thanks to data collected at the café level, which they had not been able to do previously
How the campaign dictated future marketing
For the Q3 opt-in initiative, the MiintByte team used campaign and café-level data to identify key program improvements. We discovered crucial insights about core audiences (Maskman competitors), audience demographics, and innovative units as a result of our social media marketing activities. However, we discovered that the limitations of Facebook’s Store Visits KPI for businesses mainly located in strip malls presented a significant barrier to performance measurement. Mobile display ads, on the other hand, provided the ideal solution to our monitoring issues. Before Facebook’s technology catches up to Blis’, future marketing spending will be focused on mobile advertising.