Marketing Strategies for Pizza Chains That Work

Pizza sales in the United States reached $45.73 billion in 2018, with the top 50 pizza chains making up more than 58 percent of those sales. The top 50 pizza chains sold $26.59 billion in sales, while independent and small chains sold $18.78 billion. The opportunity to be a successful pizza chain owner in 2019 exists, but the landscape to create a marketing strategy that impacts your customer base can be challenging.

Below, you will find tips to creating a great marketing strategy for your pizza chain, from direct mail, optimizing listings, and concentrated marketing efforts around LTO rollouts, our advice will set you up for success.

Direct Mail

Reach your key demographic within a 15 mile radius of your pizza restaurant with a targeted direct marketing campaign. You don’t need to have a huge budget to successfully conduct a direct mail campaign. All you need is to take your customer data, like estimated age, home value, family demographics, and use it to target your customers in a mail campaign. Direct mail campaigns are one of the best ways to market your pizza restaurant. And you should remember to keep all your marketing materials properly branded.

Tips for a Better Pizza Direct Mail Campaign

  • Target a specific radius around your store. A hyper-focused, targeted list with fewer households is better than a general and larger audience grouping.
  • Use coupons! – Yes, they still work!
  • Don’t cut corners with your design and artwork.
  • Keep track of the analytics! Use a call tracking phone number for the mailers and a specific coupon code to measure results.
  • Use a vetted mail house

Optimize Your Online Listings

Think about how your customers will learn about your pizza restaurant. Likely, they will find out about you online, on websites like Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, and search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Keeping information about your restaurant accurate on these websites and more is crucial to the success of your pizza restaurant.

Best Practices for Optimizing Online Listings:

  • Update store hours around holidays
  • Ensure your name, address, and phone number is accurate
  • Add images of your pizza shop and food
  • Be sure to use the right business category! Pizza Takeaway, Pizza Delivery, or Pizza Restaurant would all be good primary business categories
  • Ask customers for reviews and give incentives to do so

Rollouts

Planning on having specific marketing rollouts throughout the year that are consistent are a good way to develop customer loyalty. Creating LTOs around festive celebrations and holidays is one of the best ways to make your customers feel at home in your pizza restaurant. Whether you are a large chain or a small mom and pop store, focusing special offers around national pizza days and seasonal events and holidays is a marketing tactic that will keep your customers coming back for more. Consider creating an LTO around one of these pizza holidays:

Sept. 5 – National Cheese Pizza Day – Offer a promotion where you customers get a free slice of cheese pizza for purchasing a slice of pizza with at least 1 topping.

Sept. 20 – National Pepperoni Pizza Day – Offer a promotion where all pepperoni pizzas are half priced. You customers will be sure to stop by your pizza restaurant to capture this deal!

Month of October – The month of October is National Pizza Month. For the entire month, you should come up with either a month long promotion, or a new promotion every week. Consider making a special or unique slices of pizza for each week of October, something that your customers have never tried before.

(Use our LTO rollout checklist to better prepare for launch.)

Use Your Instagram

Reach new customers by keeping your Instagram up to date with great pictures of your pizzas. Don’t underestimate the power of mouth-watering food photography. A great Instagram account can help you build a robust online following that will lead to more sales of your delicious pizza pies.

What marketing strategies have worked best for your pizza chain? Share in the comments below!