Pizza Hut's Canadian and U.K. divisions were looking for a digital marketing approach that would help them grow their online sales in a hyper-competitive environment.
Pizza Hut is one of the largest pizza companies in the world, with more than 19,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. The company delivers more pizza, pasta and wings than any other restaurant worldwide.
Because Pizza Hut is a franchise organization, each of its locations has a franchisee owner who is responsible for the success of their local business. To help their franchisees be successful, Pizza Hut required a digital marketing campaign that would achieve the following objectives:
This is the first year of the campaign. Historically the company had pursued a "national" online advertising approach. Pizza Hut found that this new localized strategy performed 500 percent better than typical "national" campaigns.
The brand's target audience focused on people interested in ordering pizza, which includes a number of demographic and socio-economic groups. This meant that Pizza Hut required different creative executions to appeal to different pockets of our diverse customer base.
A key part of this approach was that Pizza Hut was looking to target pizza buyers at the moment where they were considering where to buy from. So not only did Pizza Hut need to consider "typical" factors when defining its target audience, Pizza Hut also needed to consider when they were buying.
As a franchise organization, Pizza Hut has local owners in every store who know their market and customers better than anyone else. They know their most popular products, best offers, and optimal days/times for sales. Tapping into this local market knowledge to match creative and offers to specific markets provided the brand with an opportunity to gain an advantage over competitors.
In addition, people have a lot of choices for ordering pizza, so it was critical that Pizza Hut was able to break through the social media clutter to reach and engage people at the moment where they are making their buying decision. Buying pizza is an inherently local activity, so Pizza Hut saw a major opportunity to differentiate itself by creating an authentically local experience to engage prospective customers. This meant including local terminology in ad copy and serving Facebook and Instagram ads from local social media pages.
To achieve the objective of providing real-time flexibility to capitalize on local market opportunities, Pizza Hut's social media and creative teams developed different sets of messaging and imagery which were aligned with the company's overall marketing objectives and messaging.
This included different offers and creative executions featuring Pizza Hut products. Because the target audience is very wide, Pizza Hut included different creative executions within the campaign that would naturally appeal to different audience segments.
Pizza Hut differentiated itself from "generic" competitor ads by:
Pizza Hut deployed the campaign using proprietary software platform called the Brand Amplifier. Through the platform, local franchisees can choose from a variety of pre-built, customizable campaigns that have different creative and messaging based on their local needs. They can view the ads prior to activating them and set their own local budget which is automatically charged to their credit card.
The Brand Amplifier programmatically localizes ad copy by inserting information such as city name, store name and other details, while also serving the ads from each location's Facebook and Instagram page to further increase local relevance.
More than 50 unique ad creatives were developed over the campaign period, which when programmatically localized provided over 54,000 potential local ad variations. This provided Pizza Hut with the ability to create an "authentically local" experience at scale.
Based on in-depth analysis, Pizza Hut found that its "authentically local" approach increased advertising performance by more than 500 percent compared to a non-localized strategy. The ads were found to be more relevant to people, which increased engagement, click-throughs, and sales.
Online pizza sales are an extremely competitive business. Pizza Hut simultaneously competes against other large, well-known brands and local independent restaurants.
Because of the plethora of choice available, customers often make a spur-of-the-moment choice based on price or convenience.
It is very common in franchise systems that local franchisees independently create their own advertising that is not aligned with brand messaging and objectives, so Pizza Hut was also looking to better engage its franchisees in the advertising process to align national and local advertising efforts.
Overall, the campaign was a huge success. More than 50 unique ad creatives were developed over the campaign period, which when programmatically localized provided over 54,000 potential local ad variations.
Pizza Hut franchisees invested $1.7 million in advertising during the campaign period. With that investment, the brand achieved the following social media advertising results:
The ROI for the campaign increased by 16 times. This figure was arrived at using actual sales data from the Pizza Hut website.
The campaign was very well received by customers and Pizza Hut franchisees. Through its innovative strategy, franchisees were able to select and fund social media advertising campaigns that worked for their markets. The campaign achieved all its objectives, quickly making a massive number of sales at an incredibly low cost-per-sale of only $1.29.
