Toppers Pizza, a quick-service restaurant (QSR) pizza franchise known for its unique toppings and menu items, has been making mouths water since 1991. A product of the Midwest, Toppers Pizza has grown to include 65+ locations in 12 states as far afield as Virginia, Nebraska, and Texas.
This growth has highlighted the need for Toppers Pizza to put its marketing dollars and resources to work on a local level, connecting with each unique customer base. Mass media has its limitations for the franchise, so Toppers Pizza wanted to add geotargeting to reach local consumers near the brand’s physical locations. Another priority was to maintain brand standards while providing a one-stop-shop for franchise owners to manage local marketing and advertising.
Situation
Toppers Pizza was using multiple solutions for listings management, reputation management, paid local social, and other aspects of local digital marketing. As a result, very few franchise owners were proactively managing their local digital marketing and advertising efforts. And instead, franchise owners were putting their local marketing budgets and resources towards less effective traditional print and radio campaigns. Additionally, local organic search rankings weren’t as good as they could be.
Solution
To increase local search visibility, maximize return on local ad spend, and simplify marketing at the corporate and franchise level, Toppers Pizza turned to Uberall, an all-in-one platform. Uberall gave Toppers Pizza a central hub for the corporate marketing team to oversee brand and local outreach, while being easy enough for franchise owners to use on a daily basis.
For Franchise owners to buy in, it needs to be easy and it needs to be fast. With Uberall, it’s a one-stop shop for them to see everything they need to take action on — from responding to online reviews to managing their paid campaigns.
Paid Social for Geo-Targeted Advertising
Toppers Pizza has always believed in the power of local marketing by local business owners. In fact, the company requires each franchise to spend 4% of its revenue on the local advertising efforts of their choice. The company believes franchise owners understand their area markets better than anyone else.
Toppers Pizza also highly values the power of digital marketing and local paid social as a way to reach local audiences.
Well aware that many of its franchisees lack expertise or trust for paid social, Toppers Pizza turned to Uberall to simplify the process. With Uberall, franchisees can log in to the easy-to-use interface where they can select their target audience, schedule campaign launches, and customize campaigns and offers based on how local markets respond.
Uberall also makes it easy for each of the company’s 65 locations to serve different ads to meet the unique needs of their audience, all without the franchise owners’ needing advanced marketing know-how.
Uberall lets our corporate team create ad templates and post content for franchise owners. All our franchise owners have to do is select how much they want to spend, when they want the ad to run, click a couple buttons and it’s done. That frees up their time and still lets them run a targeted, customized advertising strategy.
Uberall has helped Toppers franchise owners see a return of 25 times on ad spending, compared to traditional print and radio campaigns. This success, combined with the ease of ad design and setup on the Uberall platform, has empowered franchise owners to create and launch highly successful, super-targeted local campaigns.
Many of our franchise owners were reluctant to redirect ad funds from traditional print to digital, but when they saw how easy it was to set up an ad campaign in Uberall and the immediate return on spend, they quickly changed their tune.
Driving Local SEO Visibility
To attract customers, Toppers Pizza locations must rank highly in local searches like “best pizza near me” or “pizza delivery.” To achieve this goal, Toppers Pizza leverages Uberall to manage their online reputation and maintain consistent and accurate listings, which Glendinning believes should be on every local business’s priority list.
A key reputation management goal for Toppers is to build up a solid roster of high star ratings and good reviews. By providing a central resource for review and rating management, Uberall allows franchise owners to reach their goal of responding to every review within 24 hours. This kind of response rate directly improves search rankings, particularly for searches like “best pizza” that demand a high star rating.
Uberall also makes it easy for corporate marketers to gain visibility and oversight on local listings, reviews and local social pages from a single central hub. The corporate marketing team can support the franchise owners by publishing to local social pages, updating listings across properties, and identifying which franchisees need help.
Perhaps best of all, Uberall has been so effective in achieving high local search rankings for its franchises that it has allowed Toppers Pizza to cut back on its paid search spend without sacrificing results.
Uberall has been incredibly beneficial for our local SEO and Google ratings. We do paid search for branded and non-brand keywords. But given our strong organic search performance with Uberall, we have been able to reallocate some of those paid search dollars.
*Dec. 2019 - Dec. 2020
