Ad Spend Blueprint: QSR + Fast Casual | 250K, 500k and 1M

Jarrel (Jay) Sylvers
May 4
8 min read

Updated: 7 days ago

This is for QSR and Fast Casual marketing leaders looking to stand out and “stand in.” That means helping you rethink the fundamentals, while being more present in your communities. I offer guidance on restaurant franchise marketing and advertising budget spend across 3 different scenarios.

I’m going to share some thoughts that you might not see everywhere. This is for the marketer that is hungry (pun intended) and ambitiously looking to build intimacy with their audience. It’s about creating an almost unshakable reputation with customers that lends itself to LTV more than instant ROI.

But first, who am I?

About Me

My name is Jarrel (Jay for short) and I’ve been an advertising professional for 12 years. I got my start at arguably the top ad agency in Chicago at the time, working on the McDonald’s account. Since then, I’ve worked for about every type of agency possible and in-house for 3 Fortune 500 companies.

Oh, and that’s me posing with a colleague from my first agency job at a McDonald’s 10K in 2015 below. (I’m always down for a good run)

Jay posing with co-worker at McDonald’s 10K in 2015.

Budget Scenario 1: 250K

Success at this budget could look like solidifying the creative direction of your campaign and a sales lift at 1 or 2 locations. I call it “community lift.” This means winning more of the market that surrounds those stores and speaking to consumers in a thoughtful, localized way.

Have a struggling store? Have a new location? This could be the perfect plan to implement.

This is my approach to spending a 250K budget, the tactics to emphasize and why.

Hot Takes

I would spend about 20% of this budget giving food away
I would develop a small piece of physical media to share with select fans
I would judge success by creative sentiment, net promoter scores and target location(s) sales

Suggested Spend

Invest 60% into advertising (I.E. Strategy, creative, production, experimental and testing)
Invest 20% into giveaways
Invest 20% into media

Tactics

Build a Local Strategy: Target the neighborhoods around your stores to increase revenue by location. Work with your advertising partners to research and flush out a plan.
Personalize Your Story & Creative: Find the “fit.” Use your strategy to develop creative that meets your customers where they are.
Create and Test: Host local focus groups and test creative out in the wild. Scale in with your media buys and increase media on creative that gets a good response.
Go With Guerilla Marketing: Build a local street team and arm them with coupons. Treat them well and they will be future brand advocates.
Sample Your Food: Find innovative ways—and lots of them—to have your target audience taste your food wherever they are. Work with your agency partners for some fresh ideas.
Make More Meaning: Create a piece of exclusive physical media for select customers. This will help you drive lifestyle penetration, brand affinity and word-of-mouth.

Why?

Local Strategy: Restaurants are places first. This means they are all located somewhere. Gaining community buy-in is a sure-fire way to connect with the people closet to your food.
Personalized Story + Creative: The goal is what I call “lifestyle penetration.” This means presenting your stories and products in an informed way that lends itself to a native fit. If it makes sense for them, people will embrace it.
Create and Test: This prevents waste and drives down costs.
Guerilla Marketing: Hiring people from the community will help drive local word-of-mouth and show that you are authentically investing in the neighborhoods.
Free Food: I’ve attended brand tastings and it’s a great way to get familiar with a brand and eventually become an advocate.
Physical Media: Physical media is in – I’ve personally been trying to de-digitalize my life in different ways. It’s a great way to market in a unique way.

The Goals

Solidify Your Approach: Find out what stories, messaging, and creative works for the markets around your stores and use this information to advise future campaigns.
Drive Word-of-Mouth: Create an offline viral effect. If enough people talk about your brand, you’ll experience inbound growth.
Increase Single Store Sales: By isolating your marketing to the communities around your target stores, you hone in on increasing revenue in an intentional way.

The Wrap Up

Don’t forget the basics. Invest in your base campaign visuals, influencer marketing, earned and paid media. Work with your agency partners to develop your campaign and find the product/brand marketing fit that feels authentic to the communities you’re looking to reach.

*Marketing Sidenote: Try to have your store managers greet people that visit based on your tactics and set up a process for an in-person touch base to build community rapport. Think of it like a chef coming to your table at a full-service restaurant. A handshake and a smile goes a long way.

Budget Scenario 2: 500K

You can pull off a small integrated campaign to target more stores or reach more neighborhoods around your existing target locations at a 500K ad spend.

This assumes you followed a lot of the advice from working with the 250K spend above.

This is my approach to spending a 500K budget, the tactics to emphasize and why.

Hot Takes

I would spend about 20% of this budget on digital media
I would develop some small community events to drive in-person interaction
I would judge success by awareness, medium engagement and target location(s) sales

Suggested Spend

Invest 50% into advertising (I.E. Strategy, creative, production, experimental and analytics)
Invest 30% into media
Invest 10% into events
Invest 10% into giveaways and testing

Tactics

Widen Your Reach: Now is time to target more of the zip codes surrounding your 1-2 target stores or expanding your target list of stores. Your strategy could include neighborhoods around more stores or a cluster approach focused on your original 1-2 target stores.
Expand Your Platforms: Things like connected TV, Local TV and radio can come into play here. Start integrating your creative behind messaging and visuals that you’ve seen success with in the markets you’re looking to reach.
Localize Your Storytelling : What are the narratives behind the people that you serve? What stories could you tell around the people doing the serving? See what your ad partners have to say around ideation and themes.
Event Something New: Invite potential customers around your stores to hosted events. Utilize your local channels like direct mail to make the invites feel special and work with your ad partners to make the events feel unique.
Pay Mind to the Press: Work with local press to get the word out. This can be a great vehicle to storytell around your locations, campaign, events and more. Lean on your PR partners for ideas and execution.
Track Your Progress: See what channels are performing the best and double down on those as you go along. Work with your ad partners to build monthly analytics and insights reports.

Why?

Expanded Reach: More investment means that you can drive more impressions and awareness. A cluster approach strategy will help you target more stores or people in other zip codes closet to your locations – think reaching people in driving distance or adding a completely new target store.
More Platforms: More budget also means more media. Higher priced platforms and platforms that require higher ticket creative (like Hulu, etc.) are in-game for this budget.
Localized Storytelling: This could help drive closer connection and build increased brand affinity. If people feel like they know you and that you know them, they’re more likely to shop with you.
Community Events: Who doesn’t love a great event. This is a great way to ensure local connection by driving face-to-face interaction with the community surrounding your target stores.
Public Relations: This could be a great vehicle for driving awareness. A series of great local pieces can put you on the community radar quick, neighborhood-wise and city-wide.
Tracking: Performance marketing is all about driving sales. At this budget you can definitely see some sales lift through implementing conversion-tracking and keeping up with stats like engagement.

The Goals

Expanded Local Reach: Developing a strategy that captures more communities.
Tracking and Breaking Mediums: This means finding out which mediums and messages work best through expanding your platforms and integrating your creative executions.
Spurring Sales Lift: Getting bang for your buck – this budget is great for seeing single stores sales lift across multiple target stores.

The Wrap Up

Invest in developing a localized video commercial, digital media and deepen your influencer budget. See what and who your community is responding to and build upon that.

*Marketing Sidenote: Don’t get caught up in performance only, go for brand recall and product recall to build strong positioning. See my thoughts on a 250K ad spend for more unique ideas.

Budget Scenario 3: 1M

This is where we combine everything that I covered in the first two topics at the 250K and 500K budgets above. I would prioritize “lifestyle penetration,” “community lift” and being present around your target city.

At this budget, I believe you can achieve city-wide appeal, lifting sales at all of your local stores throughout their municipality.

This is my approach to spending a 1M budget, the tactics to emphasize and why.

Hot Takes

I would spend 50% of this budget on advertising creative
I would make some original music, an interactive piece of media and get a booth at as many local events you can for the year.
I would judge success by awareness and target location(s) sales

Suggested Spend

Invest 50% into advertising (I.E. Strategy, creative, production, experimental and analytics)
35% media
10% events
5% giveaways/testing

Tactics

Go Big With Your Creative: Create a series of commercials using cut downs and creative production to engage people at each stage of the funnel. Think storytelling.
Try a Few More Things: Consider activations and alternative executions around your target messaging. Expand your photo shoots to be more lifestyle-oriented for use in ads, social, email, online and in designs. Invest in something interactive, make some music, get out to local events and let your ad partners guide you on getting this done.
Make a Media Run: Use this budget to double down on platforms that are already producing but stay community-first. That means hyper local ads and press around your city and locations - trust your ad team for expanding the targeting.
Get Them In-Store: Think about conversion-based ideas to drive performance. Tracking ROAS is more important here so get people going to those locations. Work with your partners for inspiration and ideation.
Get the City Involved: Have some strong in-person components to drive word-of-mouth. Do something fun at your locations: turn your parking lot into a petting zoo, a carnival and get kids and parents to buy food and redeem pony rides with their receipt. Lean on your team for ideas.
Have Fun: This budget is a good amount to work with. Make it live, make it a celebration, make it fun.

Why?

Big Creative: The budget gives you the ability to invest more into your creative executions. This is a terrific opportunity to go big and splashy with what worked from your testing.
Try More Things: You don’t want to do exactly what worked or consumers will get bored. Try to do what worked at earlier investments in new ways to see if you can uncover more things to double down on.
Media: This budget will unleash more opportunities to invest in media throughout your target city.
Performance Marketing: At 1M you can start to focus more on performance marketing and tracking more conversions. Try to implement this in ways throughout your campaign to advise optimization and pivots when needed.
City Involvement: You have to maintain face time with your communities to continue to drive word-of-mouth.
Have Fun: There’s a lot you can do at this budget!

The Goals

City-Wide Reach: Developing a strategy that gets people all over the city to your target stores.
Conversions: This means getting people to do the desired actions of your campaign – visiting the stores, redeeming a coupon, attending an event and more.
Spurring Sales Lift: Going beyond “community lift” and creating “city lift.” This is the opportunity to get everyone that you can reach into your target stores.

The Wrap Up

What do you think? Reach out to me on LinkedIn with any questions or comments. I’d love to hear from you!

*Marketing Sidenote: Gaining consumers is about growing with them over time, not being an overnight success. Go for changing your audience’s mind more than you go for getting paid.

If you can change minds, money usually follows.

A core following is better than a mainstream one. Long after the heat and the commercials and ads they are usually the communities that stay. This article was made to help you build and maintain that connection to hopefully create lasting customer relationships.

There are no magic bullets, just weapons to fight the good fight.

Thanks for reading,

Jay

Fun Fact: None of this was written with AI – just human intelligence – thoughts straight out of my brain.