If you’re using, or will soon be using, contactless digital ordering as part of your foodservice operation — congratulations! You’ve taken a significant step towards generating more revenue for your operation while providing a safer, more comfortable customer experience.
However, defining your marketing strategy to drive customer adoption is crucial for both a successful rollout, and sustaining long-term growth. Choosing the right assets and messaging is just as important as the back-of-house operational piece of any on-premise mobile ordering service.
Among the nuts and bolts of any promotional push you’ll do, there is a real “science” that goes into the marketing; what makes customers aware of the service, how do they use it, and what gets them started?
Fortunately for you, our team has already done this heavy lifting 😉
In this guide, we’ve outline a variety of marketing tactics and materials (many of which we have readily-available) that are proven to generate first-time orders. We also explore creative ways that different businesses currently drive customer adoption of their mobile ordering service, and what combination of assets is most necessary for different types of operations entirely.
Feel free to jump to the section you’re most interested in:
- Foundations: QR Codes and Customized URLs 🔗
- Marketing Mobile Concessions Ordering at Events 🏈🎥
- Driving Adoption of Contactless Dine-in 🍽
- Reaching Hotel Guests and Building Residents 🌴
- Going Freestyle 👀
- Using Social Media and Email Effectively 🚀
Foundations: QR Codes and Customized URLs
You want to make it effortless for your customers to access your digital storefront to place orders. Two incredibly important components that deliver such customer action are QR codes and short links. QR codes are gaining traction globally. Foodservice operations can use QR codes to provide instant access to their web-based mobile menu. Just one QR code can remove a multitude of physical interactions, including the exchange of cash entirely, adding to your safer, more convenient end-to-end ordering experience. Every FanFood partner can take advantage of complementary order.fanfoodapp.com short links, too. Instead of dealing with a lengthy, convoluted set of characters, your digital menu can be accessed by a simple, unique URL featuring the name of your location, organization or team.Marketing Mobile Concessions Ordering at Events
Whether you host sporting events, movies, concerts or festivals, our approach to marketing is very consultative. You get the dedicated attention you deserve to ensure your rollout is optimized for your location. We can equip you with the necessary standard assets, or you may choose to create your own. Either way, here is a rundown of the most popular asset types among our partners.
A banner at Oregon Trail Park Stadium in Gering, Neb., and an a-frame with a QR code deployed at the University of North Texas’ Apogee Stadium (via Twitter).
High-visibility materials, such as banners and a-frames, are great to make customers aware of your mobile ordering service. Banners and large posters can be placed along walls, tied down to fences, or hoisted from above. These assets feature scannable QR codes, which your customers can use to instantly access either a specific menu (for pickup, the nearest location), or view all concession stands at your facility.
A Pick Up Here poster at a high school’s concession stand, and a Pick Up Here flag at Williams-Brice Stadium, home of University of South Carolina football.
Posters and a-frames can also be positioned strategically near your concessions area to capture the attention of those waiting in line. Flags are great ways to boost visibility of your FanFood service and order pickup locations, as our partners at the University of South Carolina use them to mark non-permanent pickup areas active on game days.
AutoZone Park in Memphis, Tenn. uses a strong combination of large and small assets to reach their game day attendees. These tactics include seat stickers, posters and even overhead TV monitors.
You can also deploy smaller materials such as flyers, seat stickers and tabletop QR codes around your venue. Memphis 901 FC fans at AutoZone Park in Memphis, Tenn. are able to order concessions for contactless delivery via a QR code from any stadium seat or patio table throughout the venue.
To view our entire library of in-venue marketing assets, feel free to check out this rundown of our On-site Marketing Capabilities.
Driving Adoption of Contactless Dine-in
Customers are becoming more and more familiar with touchless QR code menus, but the industry’s quest towards finding a better way to do things shouldn’t stop there.
Contactless mobile ordering has already emerged as a much more economical solution for dine-in at restaurants in the long-run. Consumers are becoming increasingly familiar with the technology, which opens the door for an entirely new model of dine-in service to emerge; one that is more convenient for customers, and more cost-effective for restaurants. That is why we’re working with restaurant operators today to explore dine-in mobile ordering, first in a limited state, to prepare their business for a fuller, more efficient operation tomorrow.
Rizzo’s Bar & Inn (RBI) in Chicago partnered with FanFood to roll out contactless ordering directly from their FanFood digital storefront interactive menu ordering, where customers can not only view the menu, but also order and pay without the need for wait staff.
Reaching Hotel Guests and Building Residents
Contactless ordering can be used in many different ways at hotels for on-premise ordering. First identify which areas you will be serving: the pool area? A spa or lounge area? The lobby bar? What about on-premise restaurants? Are these dine-in only, or can they also serve rooms? Based on the requirements of each use case, our team can help you develop the most suitable marketing strategy.
One pair of properties we’ve worked closely with are the SLS Brickell hotel and the SLS LUX residences in Miami, Fl. At the Brickell, every welcome letter includes small QR codes at the bottom which link to the property’s Fi’lia restaurant and in-room dining service. At the SLS LUX residences, guests receive direct mailers in their mailboxes that also feature QR codes to access the menus for poolside dining and room delivery.
In Chicago, many residence buildings participate in FanFood’s rotational food truck program, called BuildingEats. The program brings new and exciting food options directly to the doorsteps of buildings each week.
To market the arrival of participating restaurants and food trucks, schedules are communicated to residents by email and elevators flyers, updated weekly to reflect the upcoming options that residents will get to order from for that week.
Going Freestyle
On top of our recommended assets, we’ve seen that businesses and organizations that go above and beyond to further personalize their customer experience enjoy even higher order frequencies. The Newark Moonlight Cinema drive-in, which constantly serves a packed house of movie goers with FanFood contactless pickup, raffles off $100 gift cards nightly, with the winner selected from the pool of customers that ordered on the app. During the 2019 football season, students at Wheaton-Warrenville South High School in Illinois even got involved in their school’s FanFood promotion, helping raise additional funds and donations for their athletic boosters!
Using Social Media and Email Effectively
Your existing digital marketing activities are the perfect place to promote your new service; just add your location-specific order.fanfoodapp.com link, and you’re good to go!
What goes into an effective social media post to promote your FanFood service?
✅ Including either a photo of your FanFood pickup area, or one of our pre-built graphics in your post.
✅ Tag us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!
✅ Include your short link to your FanFood web storefront so customers can access it instantly.
For sports properties, reach out to your season ticket holders, or ticket purchasers day-of the game. Hospitality properties can reach their rewards members or most frequent customers, communicating what steps the property has taken to make their stay as safe as possible (and contactless ordering most certainly should be a piece of that). Restaurants can inform customers of the opportunity to try out a new, innovative way to order.
Consumers will become only increasingly familiar with mobile ordering’s place in on-premise F&B operations. Here and now, we’re constantly observing trends in the space and applying our learnings towards new tools which help our partners acquire more customers with technology that’s more convenient, easy to use, and cost-saving for businesses.
We hope you have a better picture of what mobile ordering can look like at your location. Whether its a stadium, a theater, or a hotel, we bring 6+ years in expertise to every customer looking to offer mobile ordering. If you’d like to learn more, you can get in touch here and our team will reach out to you 🙂
