Best case competition: O'Tacos Vavin

Gaining a large and above all qualitative audience on Instagram is the dream of many restaurateurs. But succeeding in quickly gaining real followers, likely to be real customers seems complicated, especially if you want to achieve this in a short space of time. But it's possible if you know your targets, the way they consume visit social media and what motivates them to choose one restaurant over another. We've done it for O'Tacos Vavin: gain notoriety, acquire new customers and build loyalty. We share our recipe with you.

The power of Instagram to generate awareness and new customers for a restaurant is no longer in doubt. But how do you go about it? How do you build an audience of qualified subscribers - that is, subscribers who are likely to actually be customers? How do you generate interactions on your restaurant account? How do you convert subscribers into real customers? And then: how do you retain them to ensure recurring and growing sales?

Franchisee Eric Leboucher turned to us to find answers to these questions and boost sales at his O'Tacos store in Vavin. In just one week, thanks to a well-crafted competition mechanic, we succeeded in making the company's Instagram from 300 to almost 4,000 followers. With the majority of followers being students from schools within 2 km of O'Tacos, we reached real potential customers. We explain our approach in detail here.

1) The obvious O'Tacos success story is not a foregone conclusion for every franchisee

March 2019, the 229th O'Tacos opens its doors in Neuilly-Sur-Seine. Founded 10 years ago in Grenoble, France, the French taco chain has posted impressive growth rates. This development has even been recognized by the Leaders Club France, which awarded the brand a " Palme de la Croissance ". social media. On the parent company's Instagram account, a "food porn" image of dripping tacos manages to generate thousands of interactions. Here's an example:

The O'Tacos brand is undeniably strong, enabling franchisees to generate a certain volume of sales. But as the number of outlets grows, some of them find themselves in direct competition with one another when they're located close to one another. Within a radius of less than 2 km between the 5th and 6th arrondissements, there are already 3 O'Tacos (Jussieu, Saint-Michel and Vavin). social media Parisian O'Tacos is also very uneven. At the beginning of April 2019, the O'Tacos in Paris Bastille had fewer than 200 followers on Instagram, the one in Colombes 800, and the one in République almost 2,000.It was in this context of inequality and competition that Eric, the manager of the O'Tacos establishment on rue Vavin in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, called on Malou.

Beforehand: an O'Tacos that is struggling to emerge on Instagram and struggling to meet its sales targets.

At the end of 2018, the establishment's online presence was weak, with 11 publications and just over a hundred subscribers.

O'Tacos Vavin is located in a high-student area (many high schools and universities surround the establishment), and some students have already been customers because they spotted the establishment during one of their journeys. But many don't know it, or if they do, have never been customers, so we thought of a way to get in touch with them on the Internet. social media.

2) A competition mechanism to reach customers in close geographical proximity

Choose relevant targets who will show commitment to the competition

We began by identifying our partner's potential customers (socio-professional category and location). Given O'Tacos' offer, price range and positioning, we chose to target local students, and used a map to identify high schools within a 5-minute walk - assuming that students wouldn't travel much further for their lunch breaks.

We have identified two factors that could motivate the clientele represented by high school students: free admission and rivalry between establishments.

Formulating the rules of the game

We then defined a set of rules to help us achieve our objectives, which were to increase O'Tacos Vavin's audience and generate buzz among students at nearby high schools. We launched "La Bataille des Lycées" (The Battle of the High Schools), and the rules were simple: students from the 6 targeted high schools had to..:

• Follow the O'Tacos Vavin Instagram account
• Like the publication dedicated to your establishment

For every taco purchased, a taco was offered to the students of the winning high school in the Battle of the High Schools:

Launch the competition

At the same time the next day, 6 publications - one for each lycée (Lycée Notre-Dame de Sion, Lycée Saint Sulpice, Lycée Privé Carcado Saisseval, Institut Sainte Geneviève, Lycée Montaigne and Lycée Stanislas) - were posted on our customer's Instagram account.

For 1 week, high school students were mobilized, following the O'Tacos Vavin account, liking the publication dedicated to their school and sharing it with their classmates in the hope of winning the contest. In just one week, awareness of O'Tacos Vavin among these young people exploded.

Communicating it to key stakeholders

To make sure that high school students knew about the launch of our contest, we did several things:

• Sponsored (10 euros only) the publication launching the operation. To make it effective, we targeted young people under 20, within 2 km of O'Tacos Vavin.
• Searched the "Instagram locations" of the schools we wanted to see participate and located the publications and people who had published content from that location, example with the Lycée Montaigne :

• From the O'Tacos Vavin Instagram account, we liked the latest posts shared "from" each high school, the origin of which: high school students intrigued by O'Tacos Vavin's interest in them then visited the Instagram account and discovered the contest.

3) The result: from 300 to nearly 4,000 subscribers in 1 week and a strong link with thousands of potential customers.

O'Tacos Vavin reached 4,000 subscribers after just 1 week of operation. High school students got involved and interactions on the school's page exploded, as shown by the statistics below:

The contest and the O'Tacos Vavin account were shared in more than 500 high school stories to mobilize their fellow students and win as many points as possible for their school. Some 50 students from schools close to O'Tacos but whom we hadn't involved in the contest also wrote to us, asking us to organize similar contests for them!

What can we learn from this operation?

• To gain a large, qualified audience, it is essential to understand who his target really is.
  • socio-professional and demographic category - for O'Tacos, high school students for whom a 5 euro taco can replace the school canteen
  • location - in this case, a very close geographical perimeter, as the lunch break is limited. Moreover, since students live close to their high school, they can also be customers in the evening, as long as the distance is moderate.
  • motivation to consume - the price and abundance of an O'Tacos menu
  • engines to interact on social media - rivalry between neighboring establishments
• Then you need to find the smartest way to reach it: a competition, a well-thought-out collaboration with influencers, a special event, participation in the launch of a new menu or simply a new dish?
• The best operation will never work if it doesn't plan how to reach its targets. You have to put mechanisms in place to let them know about the operation and engage them.
• Once the mechanics have been identified, you need to define the performance indicators to measure its effectiveness (number of subscribers, number of views, number of interactions, evolution of sales...).

By respecting these principles, it becomes easier to build a qualified and numerous audience on Instagram for your restaurant. By iterating on what works and improving where necessary, you can then go further and build a truly engaged community that will not only become customers, but also loyal if the service follows in the dining room!