Drive-to-store is the ultimate goal for any restaurant with an online presence! This term covers all online methods and solutions for attracting customers to your restaurant or store. As a specialist in customer loyalty, Pongo has its own take on the subject: we've put together for you everything you need to know, with 8 examples of drive-to-store campaigns, 4 strategies in detail and the ultimate tip for boosting traffic to your restaurant or store via the web.
Drive-to-store refers to online marketing solutions designed toattract customers to your restaurant or physical point of sale (store, boutique...).
How does it work in practice? Drive-to-store solutions can involve online advertising (with geolocation), SEO visibility strategies, social networks, online loyalty programs, booking platforms, online reviews, click and collect, store locator websites, Waze advertising, etc...
In fact, drive-to-store brings together an infinite number of methods! What they all have in common is that they use the web to bring your customers into a physical store. The essence of drive-to-store is to generate footfall in the salesroom or in-store, and it's essential if you want to increase your sales.
Drive-to-store solutions concern all those who have a physical point of sale: stores, but also restaurants, gyms, boutiques, cafés, galleries, clubs, etc...
It's not just about winning new customers, it's also about keeping those who already know you coming back! This includes connected loyalty programs, such as those set up by Pongo for its restaurant customers.
One constant: drive-to-store tends to target mobile customers first and foremost. Indeed, it never works as well as when customers are on the move, looking for the right tips. Today's technologies (Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi, NFC, etc.) enable campaigns to appear on smartphones at the best possible moment, whether through Google Maps, Waze, loyalty SMS messages, location-based ads, etc.
As is often the case, the marketing buzzword is in English. Drive-to-store, as the name suggests, consists in driving the customer to the store using connected methods. It is similar to web-to-store, with some confusion between these two closely related concepts.
The main difference is that web-to-store is aimed at Internet users wherever they are, including at home. This is based in particular on the practice of click-and-collect.
Drive-to-store focuses on customers on the move, who pass by your premises, and relies essentially on geolocation. But these two concepts can overlap in certain campaigns!
As we've said, there are a huge number of drive-to-store solutions to activate for a restaurant (or a store). So many, in fact, that the concept can be a bit confusing! Here are 8 real-life examples of drive-to-store campaigns, to inspire you.
1. Launch an online loyalty program and target customers who haven't been to your restaurant in over a month with a special gift via SMS.
2. By developing its local SEO, for a Thai restaurant to appear first in the Google Maps insert as soon as someone searches for "Thai restaurant" in their town.
3. On Instagram, Promote a new restaurant to everyone within 15km of it, with Story-style ads between 10am and 12pm.
4. Boost your customer reviews to rank among the top Italian restaurants in your city on Tripadvisor and La Fourchette.
5. For a large chain of franchised restaurants, create a mobile advertising campaign featuring the nearest restaurant for each Internet user.
6. Create a Waze advertising campaign aimed at drivers for a fast-food restaurant, with call-to-action generation of the route to the restaurant's doors.
7. Deploy a targeted advertising campaign to a seasonal audience near your restaurant, with a discount coupon or free dessert on presentation of a QR code.
8. Display a " store locator " page (how to find and get to a store) in a prominent position on your website (on the homepage or less than two clicks away).
All these strategies are based on the fundamentals of drive-to-store. Here are the four pillars of this type of campaign, to effectively boost your restaurant's traffic using online methods:
It's impossible to talk about drive-to-store solutions without mentioning Maps. Appearing in your city's Google Maps insert is a sure-fire way to drive traffic to your restaurant via the web. It allows you to promote your table to customers in your neighborhood, who are looking for the services or menu you offer.
The advantage of a good Google Maps listing for a restaurant is that customers are already close to you. They only have to walk a few dozen meters to visit you. The other advantage is that it's free!
To be visible on Google Maps, you need to be visible to Google, quite simply. This requires good natural referencing, or SEO (more on this later in the article). In particular, local SEO allows you to be clearly identified as a local business in your neighborhood.
To optimize your restaurant's local SEO, you must also :
- Fill out your Google My Business page with opening hours and photos
- Have a minimum of content on your website
- Good ratings and customer reviews
- Put your best photos in your profile on the Google Street View app (they'll appear directly in Google Maps).
The other pillar of drive-to-store is location-based advertising. Thanks to smartphones (and if geolocation is enabled), you can offer ads based on your customers' location, for campaigns that are more effective than ever.
Many advertising services offer this kind of service, which is extremely profitable for generating restaurant and point-of-sale traffic. They enable you to get your promotions in front of customers who are already in your neighborhood.
For maximum efficiency, the geographic criterion should be crossed with the demographic criteria of your target clientele, their consumption habits, preferred time slots, etc...
Waze ads are highly effective in reaching motorists for drive-to-store purposes. Whether you're a restaurant or a store, your ad appears as a pin, directly in the Google GPS interface. The app then suggests an itinerary to get you there. It's the most literal drive-to-store application!
For all other customers (walking, cycling, taking the metro...), social networks are an inexhaustible source of qualified leads. They'll enable you to create geolocalized drive-to-store ads to reach your potential customers in a precise geographical area (within a few kilometers of your table).
In particular, ads on Instagram allow you to target your customers' profiles with great precision. Facebook Ads offers the same kind of service, with enormous potential for increasing your flow of restaurant customers.
Loyalty programs are a major source of in-store traffic. Gone are the days of loyalty cards : loyalty has moved online, thanks to a new generation of drive-to-store solutions.
Online loyalty programs are much more effective: our customers say so! They allow you to personalize messages, profiles and rewards. What's more, they offer a solution for communicating directly and effectively (via SMS) with customers who already know your address.
Loyalty is based on targeting profiles, behaviors, time slots, etc... All effortlessly and with a great deal of automation, as with these loyalty programs designed for restaurateurs by Pongo.
Finally, all the levers usually used to generate online visibility can be directed towards drive-to-store solutions. This obviously includes SEO, as mentioned above.
This also includes social networks: for restaurants, this is a powerful lever for generating in-store traffic without spending a cent. Last but not least, online review platforms are perhaps the most effective: boosted by your customer reviews, you can climb to the top of the rankings on sites such as La Fourchette, Tripadvisor or Google, with online reservations and restaurant traffic as a result.
There are many other strategies for increasing web traffic to your store or restaurant. It's impossible to list them all! In conclusion, however, we'd like to reiterate a key principle for a successful drive-to-store campaign: the importance of customer data!
In fact, customer data is vital for finding out what made your customers come to you in the first place. In particular, this will enable you to determine the contribution made by the drive-to-store campaign, but not only that... The number of visits, the average basket, loyalty, lifetime value: all this is valuable customer data for boosting both your traffic and your sales.
When setting up drive-to-store solutions, an RGPD-compliant customer file is vital to know what worked, how to improve it and make your campaign profitable. This will enable you to assess the return on investment in an impartial way, and generate a sustainable customer flow.
