Whitbread
A target breaking summer for Whitbread
The challenge
We’ve been working with Whitbread for over 10 years, helping them drive performance for their restaurant brands across digital (think Beefeater, Brewers Fayre…you’ve probably been to one).
In Summer of 2022, as the cost of living rose, we needed to ensure that our messages resonated with relevant audiences as their desire for affordability, value for money and positive experiences grew. If we could perfect this, it would help position Whitbread brands front-of-mind for families during the busy Summer season.
The Solution
Whitbread’s objective was to increase bookings as well as to drive awareness and walk-ups. With hundreds of restaurants across the UK, we focused our strategy on selected restaurants that were considered operationally excellent (the chef’s recommendation of sites, if you will). We then targeted our activity in those postcodes and utilised other local opportunities to drive new audiences to visit.
We ran our activity across multiple channels to build a greater sense of awareness in our targeted areas. We ran Organic Social activity, Paid Search and Paid Social, but this was an excellent opportunity to test and learn from a new channel for Whitbread - Programmatic Display.
Our Programmatic strategy, which came to be known as the “All in the Grill” campaign, focused on building prospecting audiences from competitor conquesting and historical location data. We built hyper-personalised ads through data signals. For our creative, we developed a number of rich HTML5 banners that promoted seasonal offers, Summertime brand USPs and even a dynamic “store locator” unit which served users with the 3 most local sites to their location.
The campaign did a little bit of everything but ultimately highlighted why Beefeater and Brewer’s Fayre made the perfect family restaurant. After all, it’s all in the grill.
The Results
This campaign was cooked to perfection.
We both hit and surpasses our booking targets, generating 41.5K conversions for Beefeater and a further 18.6k conversions for Brewers Fayre. We succeeded in our awareness objective too, driving a total of 28k clicks at a Click Through Rate (CTR)of 0.21%, which is well above the benchmark for the channel.
And as for walk-ups? These are tricky to track via digital means, but the “store locator” unit drove over 1.5K clicks to the Google Maps booking page, indicating that many users did search and book on the go!