Dining brands are experiencing a boom in business as more Americans (unsurprisingly) eat out during the holiday season. In fact, Foursquare data reveals that 57% of Americans are dining out during the holidays. Therefore, it’s imperative for these brands to understand who their customers are and how they are influenced by the media in order to stay ahead as fall approaches.
To start, dining brands have ample opportunity to drive lift with audio channels. In 2021, lift was seen 83% of the time among Foursquare-measured holiday dining audio campaigns, while holiday dining social campaigns drove 65% of lift. Additionally, research indicates that 67% of gift-givers could be influenced by streaming audio or podcast ads in their holiday spending. This presents a targeting opportunity in which dining brands can reach consumers where they consume media by using Foursquare Audiences to target across audio and social channels. In terms of measurement, Foursquare Attribution can help dining brands understand the role each media channel plays in converting consumers by optimizing top performing channels and targeting tactics. Using data-driven tools like these give brands a competitive advantage – if companies neglect to understand how their media investments are impacting and driving consumer behavior during the holiday season, they risk wasted media dollars and inefficiencies.
Increasing loyalty among returning customers is also important, specifically those low and medium frequency consumers. Foursquare data shows that low frequency consumers drove the highest lift at 10%, followed by medium frequency consumers at 9%. Our data also reveals that restaurants saw the biggest uptick in traffic on December 23rd 2021, a +24% increase compared to visits on the average day last year. Dining brands should consider heaving up media in the days leading up to Christmas, especially among low and medium frequency customers, which can be done with Foursquare Audiences. Another approach is to utilize Foursquare Attribution to create custom cuts to measure performance across loyalty cohorts to understand what resonates with customers.
Lastly, dining brands can drive lift among key demographic audiences like Gen Z, Millennials and Gen X diners based on their behaviors and preferences. According to our data, consumers ages 35-44 drove lift 47% of the time but only received 17% of 2021 holiday dining impressions. Furthermore, while restaurants continued to see the most 2021 organic holiday traffic from people ages 35-54 (44%), the biggest shift in YoY behavior was observed among Gen Z. This means that dining brands can leverage insights like these generated by Foursquare Audiences to increase media allocation specific to Millennials and Gen X, while additionally measuring the performance of demographic audiences and optimizing in real time with the help of Foursquare Attribution.
With the holiday season approaching, it’s never too late for dining brands to implement the aforementioned strategies. We created Foursquare Audiences so that brands can accurately target across their entire digital ecosystem in order to effectively reach customers in relevant moments during the holiday. Meanwhile, Foursquare Attribution works in tandem, allowing brands to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and ultimately deliver on key business objectives. With Foursquare’s comprehensive reporting dashboard and real-time optimization capabilities, brands can more acutely understand how each campaign impacted their customers’ path to conversion and lean into high performing tactics by demographics, visitation frequencies and media mix.
Learn more about Foursquare Audiences and Attribution, and contact us to get started with a demo today.
