How I Launched a Co-Marketing Product to Support National Expansion
Scenario
In 2021, after a static expansion period due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, the leadership team for ghost kitchen company Kitchen United announced an aggressive expansion plan – X new ghost kitchen locations open in X months. In addition to streamlining real estate, construction, operations, and technology efforts, for the initiative to be successful and unlock future growth, the restaurants inside each location would need to have access to individual success.
Challenge
Due to the new, lightweight operating model of a ghost kitchen, restaurants large and small were lacking virtual restaurant marketing experience (alt: access to proven virtual restaurant marketing strategies, their own proven virtual restaurant marketing strategies), dedicated hyper-local marketing resources, and substantial marketing budget.
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#1 Seeing clear opportunities in ambiguous, dynamic environments
As the partners with proven virtual restaurant marketing strategies, dedicated hyper-local resources, and our own skin in the game, I saw the opportunity to bring restaurant partner marketing in-house – building a co-marketing product which would give restaurant partners a simple way to invest in marketing our location and would give us the ability to ensure restaurant marketing activity, increase the overall marketing budget, and gain visibility into new learnings and success metrics.
#2 Building the relationships that lead to coalitions of support
In the process of building the Co-Marketing pilot program, I leveraged existing relationships I had with restaurant partner marketing teams, internal stakeholders from Finance, Operations, Customer Success, Sales, and executive leadership to shape the initial scope and ensure I had their buy-in. I also worked with our internal Marketing team to understand the workload implications of the new program and secured an outside digital agency to fill initial gaps and ensure quality performance.
#3 Securing & scaling strategic partnerships
To secure pilot restaurant partners for the Co-Marketing Program, I pitched the CEO, CMO, or owner of target companies and worked through each question and point of friction until I had secured six pilot partners at an initial three locations. To scale, I translated this custom approach into SOPs, customizable pitch decks, and training sessions for the Sales and Customer Success teams to integrate into their existing sales and upselling processes.
#4 Mobilizing teams to make sh*t happen
I built onboarding and campaign workflow management tools in Asana, partnered with our data analytics resource to create reporting dashboards in Google Data Studio, and led the ongoing cadence of internal and external meetings that together created the operational infrastructure our small in-house team needed to lead X campaigns across X locations simultaneously.
#5 Creating compelling content that connects with the right audience
Within the Co-Marketing campaigns we leveraged influencer partnerships to create compelling hyper-local content such as the “Secret X Location” TikTok video which resulted in X views and a % increase in sales for an underperforming national brand. On a more macro level, we were also able to use collective learnings to produce case studies for the Sales team to use to sell future locations and webinars as marketing content for prospective customers.
Results
increased marketing budget by X, achieved average ROAS of X in comparison X% higher than owned campaigns
