North Star Digital
In central Japan there is a mountain shrouded in legends, mysticism, and the magic of the natural world. It is named Tenjo, and it represents an abundance of green nature.
In Thailand, Tenjo Sushi & Yakiniku Premium Buffet represents the abundance of wonderfully prepared, high quality, fresh food served at this excellent chain of buffet-style restaurants!
Nowadays, most restaurant owners are well aware of the fact that, whether their business is active on social media or not, their customers are tagging, posting, and reviewing their restaurant online. Facebook continues to be the most important social network for restaurants to market their menu, and their story, because of the ability to reach the largest scale, most highly targeted audience, and retain followers.
Tenjo’s owners were already investing in Facebook ads, yet their revenue had been declining for 3 months in a row. They could see they were missing out on business growth and sustainability by not leveraging Facebook effectively.
They understood their Facebook marketing was a vital ingredient in growing their restaurant chain sustainably, recognizing that if they could get it right, it would be a key driver of their revenue. This is why they approached us about exploring an engagement.
With Thailand having tens of thousands of restaurants competing for the attention of consumers, it’s a massive achievement that, since we started working together, we were able to drive major monthly increases to Tenjo’s revenue with Facebook ads.
In other exciting news for Tenjo, since January 2018, when we added our Facebook content marketing package to their ads management package, we were also able to drive a massive increase in their audience & engagement:
Facebook content marketing has led to Tenjo now being ranked in the top 10 restaurant pages on Facebook for engagement, performing better than major brands such as MK Restaurants, Domino’s Pizza, McDonald’s, and nearly every other major restaurant brand in Thailand:
The best part? Tenjo’s revenue, brand awareness, and engagement has grown — and continues to grow! This means it can be done for your restaurant or chain too.
Now, let’s check out how we achieved this and several other big wins for Tenjo Sushi & Yakiniku Premium Buffet!
After being referred to us by another client of ours, we conducted several detailed consultations with the Tenjo team to determine if we were the right fit for each other, and to see if our values were aligned, so we could effectively communicate those values to Tenjo’s audience. Once both sides were confident an engagement made sense, we defined the initial primary goals as:
After 3 months of successfully growing revenue with paid ads, we advised to leverage Facebook content marketing in order to ensure sustainable growth, maximize Tenjo’s potential online, and dominate the restaurant market in Thailand:
1. Understanding Tenjo’s story, their offering, and why consumers should choose them over every other option in the market
After a deep dive into the brand and the target audiences, our challenge was to generate effective paid ads strategies for reaching massive, on-the-go audiences at their “point of hunger”, in the few hours leading up to when they make decisions about where and what to eat.
2. Drive reservations, restaurant visits, and in-restaurant sales
We had to find a way to connect with Thailand’s food community on Facebook to drive consideration and demand for Tenjo’s buffet experience.
3. Understanding Tenjo’s audiences on the deepest possible level & understanding what type of content resonates with them
It was vitally important to understand the audience’s values, align them with Tenjo’s values, and generate strategies in order to drive increased awareness, engagement. and for sharing Tenjo’s offerings with a highly targeted and hyper-engaged food community on Facebook.
4. Express Tenjo’s brand personality, give people a taste of the restaurant experience with attention-grabbing content, and promote all of this to an engaged audience
We aimed to boost brand loyalty by communicating personalized value, offers, and convenience to Tenjo’s audiences through top quality content marketing.
How did this understanding help us develop campaign strategies?
From our previous experience in growing restaurant chains, we knew the key to bridging the gap between the online and offline worlds, helping Tenjo achieve their end objective of driving customers into their restaurants, was to start with highly refined plans to set ourselves up for success in achieving each of Tenjo’s goals.
1. Strategy
Simply put, people want great food, and great dining experiences, at great prices. Tenjo offered all of this, yet was not effectively communicating it online. We started with a comprehensive Facebook paid ads strategy that would provide us & Tenjo with the strongest possible foundation for near-term success, measured by return on ad spend (ROAS).
2. Facebook Paid Ads Management
Leveraging our agency’s best practices for campaign setup & targeting, along with ad formats including image, video, and carousels, we generated instant consideration and demand for Tenjo, as well as effectively providing our audience with info on promotions and how the customer needs to get there. Daily monitoring and optimization of everything from audiences to ad copy, to imagery, were required to maximize impact.
3. Content Marketing Strategy
Tenjo’s content marketing strategy was created to underpin the long-term content marketing approach.
4. Facebook Content Marketing
Next up was to engage in long-term ongoing content marketing, showcasing the uniqueness of Tenjo, the experiences on offer, the menu, and then creating conversations with our audience around all of that.
As you can see on the graph below, Tenjo’s revenue has steadily increased month-over-month since we started their paid ads campaigns, and made even more significant jumps once we began content marketing as well:
Within only 6 months of work we were able to:
Here are some examples or our ads for Tenjo:
The future is very bright for Tenjo Sushi & Yakiniku Premium Buffet, both online where they are dominating their competitors by growing an even larger and more loyal community, and offline where they can exponentially grow into new markets with new branches.
For us, we look forward to executing and improving our repeatable process for deploying Facebook marketing efforts that continue to drive Tenjo’s awareness, engagement and growth.
