24 Sep McDonalds sees 5x results through owned media
In the US, fast food chain McDonalds have been reaping the rewards of a 3 year investment in building owned media channels like digital screens, digital menu boards, a mobile app and leveraging customer data.
The organisation has not stopped advertising on paid media but have doubled down on improving their customer understanding and focused on communicating via the media channels they own and can completely control. For example, having rolled out a digital menu board network, they can now serve up tactical messages (like weather triggered products) on a store-by-store basis. Thereby engaging with their 26 million daily customers in a more relevant way.
Utilising their sophisticated CRM platform, they have also been able to build multiple customer segments which allows them to send tailored offers based on a customer’s taste profile, either via the app or email. A technique they call ‘mass personalisation’, which is presumably somewhere in between mass communication and personalisation.
The strategy would appear to be paying off in spades. According to the US CMO, McDonald’s is seeing a 5x lift in engagement and restaurant visits from its owned media channels versus results from paid media.
It is not rocket science, simply by addressing the basic fundamentals of delivering on your customer’s needs and doing so in channels that are either highly relevant (in-store) or opted-in-to (app/email), can reap significant rewards.