Social Listening for QSRs

Six ways social listening tools can drive engagement (and sales)

Fast food restaurants, also known as quick service restaurants, are as American as apple pie, football and the imperial system. They’re cheap, quick and beloved for their convenience and value — particularly by price-sensitive consumers who are starved for time.

QSR brands and marketers have long known what drives visitation and have focused positioning and messaging on impulse, crave-ability and value. They’ve spent years crafting conveniently-located destinations that offer delicious food at a low cost. However, as competition continues to grow from an ever-widening range of food service brands, it’s critical that QSRs understand and cater to the unique role they play in consumers’ lives.

Social Listening

One of the greatest, relatively new opportunities that exists for brands is the ability to monitor and analyze conversations on social media. This practice allows brands to reach highly-tailored audiences in highly relevant ways — an art form that can be defined as social listening.

Social listening allows marketers to fully understand the relationship that exists between themselves and their core audience. However, as social listening continues to evolve, many marketers still don’t understand the full value they provide.

In a recent study, the CMO Council found that less than half of marketing executives in North America used social listening resources in 2015. Social listening capablities can be difficult (and costly) to implement, but investing in a strong social listening strategy will allow brands to accurately analyze social conversations and identify actionable insights.

Six Reasons to Use Social Listening

The first step to social listening is to understand the benefits of implementing social listening tools. Here are six ways social listening can drive consumer engagement and sales:

1. Identify brand-loyal influencers and give them a voice.
   88% of consumers consult reviews when buying products online and “word of mouth” (especially from close family and friends) remains the best way to build awareness and credibility. Brands can rely on social listening tools to help them identify their most influential advocates and provide them with a platform that will amplify their passion. By handing brand influencers a mic, brands will allow their loyalty to impact an exponentially larger pool of consumers.
2. Measure engagement across channels and prioritize accordingly.
   It’s vital that brands understand how their target consumers behave and interact with brands across an ever-growing range of social channels. Do not make assumptions about how target audiences behave on social media using only a handful of data points or individual channel behaviors. Instead, use social listening tools to gain a crystal-clear understanding of where target audiences spend the most time and how they hope to interact with brands on specific networks.
3. Create unique brand personalities and tones for specific consumer segments and social channels.
   Social listening tools provide marketers the power to identify consumer segments within a given target audience. Based on channel-specific user behaviors, brands can create insightful user segments and generate relevant tones and personalities for each channel (see SORCERER for more).
4. Discover new usage occasions during underrepresented day-parts. This is particularly applicable for QSR brands who offer a niche product or service. Brands can and should use social listening tools to identify unique or undiscovered usage occassions and incorporate them in to their business and creative strategies.
5. Identify unique consumer experiences and make them part of your story.
   Social listening allows brands to identify unique stories and notable experiences that consumers have had with their service or product. Discovering these unique customer experiences opens up the possibility to incorporate them into marketing efforts and the overall brand story.
6. Reward loyalty and engagement via targeted and custom offers.
   According to eMarketer, 85% of U.S. Millennials — the most active cohort on social media — follow pages on Facebook to support brands, 83% to receive regular updates from brands and 66% to get a coupon or discount. It’s clear that Millennials choose to follow brands to stay informed about offers and promotions. Specific to QSRs, purchase frequency is significantly higher than other categories, and there are major opportunities to use social listening tools to offer user-specific incentives based on their visitation, engagement and countless other factors.

Because social listening as a discpline is relatively new and continuously evolving, it’s critical that brands identify and experiment with new practices and use case studies to maximize their ROI on social listening tools. Many opportunities still exist to make the most of social listening data and fostering a pioneering and “fail fast” approach is absolutely critical. Hypothesize, test and stick with what works.

Check back on our Greater Than collection for Part 2: top social listening tools and the unique benefits and opportunities they provide.

Cody Simmonds is a musician, gamer and Strategist at Struck. He’s also way too into politics. He likes Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.

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