What do you do when a customer-favorite campaign’s performance begins to dwindle?
The power of visitation data – also known as foot traffic data – is growing rapidly as more and more businesses understand such data’s potential to augment their own first-party data to unlock invaluable insights. In fact, insight from real-world visits is now an essential ingredient to any truly effective data-driven marketing strategy.
Visitation data allows brands to understand more about consumer behaviors by unearthing patterns in people’s movements – including the places they go or have gone, how frequently they visit, and whether they frequent competitive chains. When coupled with transaction data or other first-party data sources, these insights help to provide brands with a unified view of a customer.
Here’s a look at how Together— Wendy’s New Zealand’s media agency—utilized Foursquare’s Visits to make smarter decisions, grow business revenue, and understand customers patterns:
The challenge: Understanding shifts in customers behaviors
For the last several years, Wendy’s New Zealand’s Mates Rates deal, a limited-time offer that includes several discounts for different food combinations, has been a consistent success. But in late 2020, the company noticed a significant decline in sales, signaling a need to revisit the current marketing strategy. In an effort to attract new customers to the Mates Rates deal without increasing the media budget from the previous year, Together, Wendy’s media agency, spotted an opportunity to utilize a data-driven approach to uncover the best way to increase sales of the Mates Rates deal. Two questions remained:
- What kind of data should they seek out?
- Which company would be the best data partner?
The solution: Adapting to customers using Visits data
Together turned to Foursquare for access to the highest quality visitation data available today.
“After meeting with many data partners, we knew that only Foursquare could support & cater to this unique challenge. Foursquare’s off-the-shelf analytic product helped us to go deeper & analyze log level moment data to build market 1st high-value QSR user segments & identify key insights around offline store visits,” said Suraj Barnawal, Head of Programmable Media at Together New Zealand.
Together leveraged FSQ/Visits’ Standard Visit Feed data to understand visitation trends to each Wendy’s store, as well as competitive locations. Armed with this data, Together learned how traffic to each store differed and was able to subsequently tailor marketing efforts by creating custom targeting segments of devices. Now, instead of simply reaching out to all quick-service-restaurant (QSR) shoppers, they could engage with new segments specific to this initiative. For example, they segmented out those who visit locations with drive-throughs to deliver more relevant creative. They created segments based on the frequency of QSR visits and even segmented out those who only visit competitors or those who visit Wendy’s in addition to competitors.
The results: Surpassing business goals by targeting the right customers
Using this location-data-driven approach, Together was able to take a granular look at store visitation and visit patterns of Wendy’s customers to create an impactful, personal marketing experience. The results were incredible: While the goal was to meet past sales performance, this new marketing strategy yielded sales that exceeded previous average performance—overall sales increased 44% since late 2020 and were 17% higher than the sales goal set. Additionally, by significantly increasing sales without increasing their media budget, their analysis showed a 47% reduction in cost per visit versus the QSR norm.
The success of the campaign was hard to ignore. Recently, Mates Rates Wendy’s New Zealand was recognized by The Drum Awards 2021 for the most effective use of data. This category celebrates agencies and advertisers that show how they have utilized data to drive the success of a campaign.
Want to learn more about FSQ/Visits, or how to use location data to create custom targeting segments? Reach out using the form below.
