How Point Black helped Pizza Hut exceed sales projections by over 300%
Background
Pizza Hut is an American restaurant chain and international franchise founded in 1958 by Dan and Frank Carney. The company is known for its Italian- American cuisine menu including pizza and pasta, as well as side dishes and desserts. Pizza Hut has 16,796 restaurants worldwide as of March 2018, making it the world’s largest pizza chain in terms of locations and the second largest in terms of revenue generated. It is a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc., one of the world’s largest restaurant companies.
In December 2017 Pizza Hut Zimbabwe recruited the services of Point Black to handle the marketing campaign for the inaugural Pizza Hut restaurant in the country.
The Challenge
Pizza Hut Zimbabwe was planning on launching during 2017’s festive season into an already competitive and constrained fast-food market. The company faced competition from fast-food behemoths like Simbisa Brands, the Slice Food Group and several smaller restaurants with a dedicated customer base and established market presence. The pizza franchise had decided to launch into a completely new market with only one location via a partnership with Ster Kinekor cinemas. A similar strategy has been adopted with success in South Africa. As a result of the limited launch, the franchise had a minimal budget to reach its potential audience. Coupled with this bottleneck the launch had to be pushed back on several occasions due to administrative red tape in securing import permits. With all these factors working against them, Pizza Hut approached Point Black to design and implement a marketing strategy for their launch within a week.
“There was no way we could outspend our competition on traditional above the line marketing channels. We also had an incredibly short window to produce results. Using my experience with digital marketing I designed a multichannel digital campaign to drive awareness and sales once Pizza Hut launched” - Phil Chard . Point Black Managing Director
The Action
Dedicating time to in-depth consumer research and insight was not an option for this campaign. Already operating within an incredibly tight window, Pizza Hut needed a solution that would produce immediate results at launch.
The social media strategy utilised both paid and earned media while also implementing a comprehensive influencer marketing strategy for awareness.
Relying on several different tools and tactics that gave Point Black insights on their potential audiences’ behaviours and perceptions. These tools informed who was interested in the brand, where they could be reached and why they would buy Pizza Hut over other options.
Display and search ads were hyper-targeted to key market segments that were defined by Point Black
These insights would provide key information that would set Pizza Hut apart from the competition and give them far more impactful insights to run with.
Content was shared with clear Calls To Action that drove interested prospects to a Pizza Hut landing page where they signed up for updates.
A digital campaign that focused on developing relevant marketing content for the Zimbabwean audience based of these findings was rolled out. The content was distributed via social media, display ads, search ads and an email newsletter.
With the assistance of Influencers, key marketing messages went viral on social media via native content.
The Result
Using the exclusive insights and data, Pizza Hut was able to surpass its sales targets by 300% in its first month of operation.
Using our marketing stack tools we were able to quickly identify our target audience who could easily be moved down the sales funnel and not only become Pizza Hut customers but also brand advocates. For the price of a newspaper ad, we were able to reach hundreds of thousands of prospects and convert 12% of those prospects into members of our customer database. We are able to do more in less time with fewer resources by focusing on a digital strategy.
Download a copy of The Marketer’s Association of Zimbabwe Magazine that featured in this campaign
