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There’s no doubt that hospitality marketing has come a long way: shifting to adapt to the everchanging needs of diners, there’s been a growing trend of teams adopting technology to facilitate broader strategies. From personal experience at Pacific Concepts as Marketing Head, I found that utilising technology can go a long way in uplifting brand awareness and generating customer interest, particularly in a market with such stiff competition.
With 8 casual brands and 44 restaurants across Australia and New Zealand, Pacific Concepts is one of the large hospitality groups in ANZ. As Account Director of Marketing Advisory Partners (MAPS), we took over the marketing function at Pacific Concepts and became its dedicated in-house team in March 2022. Working alongside agencies and tech vendors, we Cindy Li have initiated various successful projects for our portfolio of brands.
Organic SEO Uplifting
After noticing a dip in SEO rankings post our paid Google ads running, we engaged an experienced agency to improve SEO performance sustainably. A multifaceted approach was employed to enhance our online presence; after our preliminary 3-month trial brought us significant success we then decided to span across all brands.
Central to our success is the data-driven approach to keyword optimisation. We conduct meticulous research to target the most relevant and high-performing keywords for each of our brands. This ensures that our websites appear prominently in search engine results, attracting a steady stream of organic traffic.
While we do create a lot of content for our restaurant website, it isn’t to solely to appease search algorithms: we prioritise user intent. Crafting content that aligns with what our audience seeks, we engage visitors effectively, nurture a positive user experience, and encourage longer stays.
To complement our efforts, we adhere to website best practice, including mobile responsiveness, intuitive navigation, and user-friendly layouts. Such optimisations enhance user satisfaction and contribute to improved search engine rankings. In the meantime, we diligently track user behaviour: understanding our customers and interpreting data insights allows us to make more strategic marketing decisions.
What we realized is that with a little creativity, persistence, and out-of-the-box thinking, AI can help you open up new marketing avenues you had never considered before
Optimising for organic rankings, understanding user intent, adhering to best practice, and leveraging data-driven insights has led to significant growth in organic traffic. The organic search volume for our Italian brand Fratelli Fresh has increased over 150% in a 3-month period, with top positionings on Google (page 1- 3) increasing by 40%
Introducing Interactive Games for Brand Engagement
Nowadays, it’s harder than ever to truly connect with consumers and drive measurable results. In an increasingly crowded attention economy, younger generations have justifiably tougher decisions on whom they share their information with, and businesses have reduced capabilities to track user behaviour. We therefore partnered with a gamifying platform to build our own games for our Tex-Mex brand, El Camino Cantina
With a demographic of young, fun margarita and party lovers, we created 3 games to engage with them, including a “Which Margarita Flavour are You” personality quiz, Spin the Wheel and This or That. Prizes are given to each player for a limited time, creating a sense of urgency for people to take action.
The benefits are twofold: first, by using proprietary data sets we are creating engaging digital “moments” that drive the collection of rich zero and first-party data, feeding into our registered customer database for marketing communications. In the meantime, we are also enhancing brand awareness by promoting this game to our existing database and on social media, encouraging customers to come into our venues and redeem their prizes. This not only fosters loyalty with return customers, but also attracts new customers to explore our brand.
Geo-fencing Mobile Digital Display Advertising
Geo-fencing advertising is nothing new, for example, social media marketing is now a given for almost all brands. But what about those demographics that are not that engaged in social media, but more into news, sports, fashion or industryrelated mobile apps?
To tap into these groups, we partnered with an agency that specialises in mobile digital display advertising. Utilising attribution marketing tactics, we can tag individuals we serve digital ads to within a radius of our restaurants, and track if they physically walk in or make a booking online. This has provided us with complete transparency on the effectiveness of our digital advertising: we can now measure exactly how many conversions one of our campaigns generate. This also enables us to adjust our ads in terms of location, budget, demographic, and mobile app channels based on real-time results.
The campaigns we ran using this channel have had great results, with some of them achieving an impressive 1,200% ROI over 6 weeks.
Adopting AI in Marketing Content Creation
After extensive research and discussion within the marketing team, we started to use AI platforms to create marketing communications content, such as website and EDM copy, as well as to analyse content for social media performance. AI platforms can even produce videos with your preferred voice over in a few seconds. This has dramatically improved output efficiency, as well as allowed us to keep on top of trends within our competitive set.
Though a powerful tool for marketers, AI is certainly not a magic wand. The quality of the end product depends on the quality of the information you provide. Our team went through several trial sessions to learn how to give specific, accurate instructions to achieve the best possible results. What we realised is that with a little creativity, persistence and outof-the-box thinking, AI can help you open up new marketing avenues you had never considered before.
Within the ever-advancing tech field, there are a multitude of tools and strategies to be explored, and I encourage all our hospitality marketing peers to do so. It will not only benefit sales, but also maintain brand awareness in a much more sustainable, relevant way. After all, this is where the world is going, and there is no better way to win than getting ahead of the game.
