ARCHIVES: This is legacy content from before Marketing Dive acquired Mobile Marketer in early 2017. Some information, such as publication dates, may not have migrated over. Check out the new Marketing Dive site for the latest marketing news.

Hard Rock boosts geotargeting with behavioral data to reach vacationers

Hard Rock Café increased bricks-and-mortar traffic by 220 percent through the use of behavioral data and geotargeting, manifesting the potential these tactics have for restaurant chains.  

The restaurant chain focused on increasing visits and broadening awareness for its World Burger Tour, and tapped into a DSP in an attempt to streamline ROI through a system of geo focused advertisements on mobile. The retailer also tapped into consumer data through mobile to draw in individuals more likely to dine out while traveling and saw 234,000 exposed bricks-and-mortar visits. 

?The key finding from these results is that mobile media is uniquely capable of driving ROI for restaurants of all sizes,? said Emily Del Greco, vice president at Adelphic. "This was achieved using two powerful signals to inform the advertising: location and audience. 

?Given the highly configurable nature of Adelphic's platform, Hard Rock was able to determine the ideal target radius for each location, opting for smaller radii in urban areas and wider reach in the suburbs where prospective diners are more likely to travel by car,? she said. 

Adelphic is the developer behind the DSP. 

Fencing in mobile possibilities

The latest mobile campaign of Hard Rock Café exhibits this through its significant increase of traffic, directly correlating to the campaign. The campaign targeted nearby customers through rich mobile advertising, and directed them to the closest Hard Rock Café location. 


Rich media ads on mobile focused on promoting the World Burger Tour in which it determined the best local burgers from U.S. cities, and brought them to every store nationwide. 

Mobile relevancy 
Hard Rock Café is following suit of many other restaurants with highly targeting advertising based on location and consumer behavior. This strategy is likely to be highly pertinent in the next year. 

Retailers looking for mobile success in 2016 will need to focus on geo-targeting to provide in-store customers with more relevant experiences, an EKN Research analyst said during a Mobile Marketer webinar (see more).

Unilever?s ice cream brand Magnum also saw significant success in driving local traffic to a store in Ecuador through a mobile banner campaign that leveraged location and interactivity to enable users to invent their own ice cream bars and pick them up (see more). 

?Additionally, Hard Rock knew that a key audience for the event would be people vacationing domestically,? Ms. Del Greco said. ?Using Neustar data, Hard Rock was able to zero in on this all-important intersection of domestic travelers within ideal distance of a restaurant. 

?The lesson learned here is that audience data, long known to be the core targeting of any good media plan, is enhanced and even improved using the mobile-only signal of precise location,? she said. 

Final take
Brielle Jaekel is editorial assistant at Mobile Marketer