SAN SEBASTIAN: Looking at individual restaurants as a local business was an “aha” moment for Pizza Hut India, according to its chief marketing officer.

“Actually, 80 to 90% of all our business happens within a 3km radius of where our stores are located, and what we’ve learnt the hard way is that consumers are searching more for information near them,” Prashant Gaur told the recent I-COM conference. “The buzzword is ‘near’,” he stressed.

Previously, people looking for a Pizza Hut had to go to a central site, where it emerged that lots of the information they were getting was out of date, which not only led to lost potential sales but also widespread dissatisfaction.

A campaign, a finalist in the I-COM Data Creativity Awards, aimed to increase discoverability of nearby Pizza Hut stores to digital audiences when they were in buying mode – thinking of buying a meal, but not necessarily with the Pizza Hut brand in mind – by creating a digital presence for each outlet as if that was the only location Pizza Hut had.

These were then optimised for local SEO parameters, search, social, apps, maps, local directories and even optimised for voice search. (For more, read WARC’s report: Hyper-local marketing boosts Pizza Hut.)

The campaign delivered 57 million search impressions, all of them organic, none paid.

More importantly, it led to an extra 1.2 million phone calls to Pizza Hut restaurants, while 1.5 million users checked directions on how to get to their nearest outlet, and about half a million orders were placed through these pages.

The search results are also being used to see where hungry people are when they’re searching for meal options, and therefore guiding decisions on where new Pizza Hut locations should be launched.

Sourced from WARC