Buffalo Wild Wings and Adentro use old-school marketing technique to attract customers during pandemic

Owned by suburban Atlanta-based Inspire Brands, Buffalo Wild Wings has more than 1,200 locations in ten countries around the globe. The casual dining and sports bar franchise is known for its Buffalo-style chicken wings and over a dozen types of sauces.

The challenge

About half of the Buffalo Wild Wings locations worldwide are franchisee-owned. Prior to the novel coronavirus outbreak, Adentro’s franchisee client was running ads across Facebook and Instagram with nationwide and regional promotions. The brand’s corporate office tended to stay away from promotional offers on social media, focusing instead on television marketing campaigns around major sporting events to bring customers into locations. 

When COVID-19 struck and forced Buffalo Wild Wings to close down their dining rooms, the brand’s corporate social media accounts began running the same promotional offers as the franchise locations. This move made it difficult to attribute results directly to Adentro’s campaigns, since it was impossible to determine whether consumers were responding to the corporate- or locally-run campaigns.

The solution

In order to isolate the results of Adentro’s marketing efforts from corporate’s, we paused all of the local franchisee’s campaigns highlighting promotions that corporate was mirroring. Next Adentro created a campaign specific to our franchisee’s multiple locations and actually required customers to mention the offer on the phone when calling in to place a pickup or to-go order. Our client was then able to track the redemptions in their point-of-sale system.

“Adentro allows us to identify the customers that matter most and market to them directly through social media and email campaigns. We are then able to see exactly how this is impacting our business. It really is a step up from our prior capabilities of just sending out ads and hoping for the best.”

Nalin Chopra, Marketing Manager, Buffalo Wild Wings

The results

After 25 days of the new campaign being live, our client was able to pull transaction reports for all of their locations. Adentro worked with the Buffalo Wild Wings franchisee to analyze the orders that were associated specifically with the social campaign we ran and calculated a 4.6x return on ad spend (ROAS) for these campaigns.