Digital marketing: The secret ingredient for local growth

Julie Wade
Thank you so much for having me, Justin, appreciate being here.

Justin Ulrich
You bet. So I guess it would be good to kind of start off just real quick, just tell a little bit about your journey and your career and how you ended up where you are.

Julie Wade
Sure. So I’ve always been in marketing. I’m one of the few people probably that went to school and it’s still doing what I went to college for eons ago. I’ve always loved the marketing and advertising world and really started in that vein as soon as I got out of school. And other than a ten-year stay-at-home mom stint, pretty much been doing it ever since. 

Been here in Birmingham my whole entire career and I’d been a customer of Tazikis for over 20 years and I was with another brand and heard about a marketing position and knew that this was something that really hit home with me. I had always thought that Taziki’s was really an extension of my kitchen because it was a place that I would always get takeout. 

It was an easy place to go grab dinner after those late night games at the ballpark with kids and after dance lessons and things like that. So it was definitely something that resonated with me. I’ve always loved the food. So a little over three years ago, I jumped at the chance to join the brand and really enjoyed my time being here and seeing it grow. And we’re on the cusp of 100 units and wait to hit that milestone early next year.

Justin Ulrich
That’s very cool. It’s interesting you say that you’re one of the few that actually stuck through with your career and what you did in college. When I was in, I actually finished up my degree in economics, and I was working at Dish Network at the time, and I transitioned into tax accounting. And it’s funny, you worked at Blockbuster. So as part of my role there, we had acquired Blockbuster’s assets out of bankruptcy at the time. 

They had 1700 locations that I had to register all the licensing within the municipalities, like business licenses for. And it was at that time I realized I need a career shift and shifted into marketing.

Julie Wade
Yes. Tax accounting. Yeah. That doesn’t sound too fun.

Justin Ulrich
It was not. Well, at least not for me. I’m sure there’s some folks out there who think it’s fun, but I definitely like the marketing side of things that allows you to interact with people and you do the engagements, all the activations and stuff, especially at the local level. It’s a ton of fun.

Julie Wade
Yeah. And the part about marketing that’s really very satisfying for me is to see a promotion or a creation. I was in product development for a while as well with Yogurt Mountain, and it was very fulfilling to see things, especially like dessert flavors, that we would come up with. There was especially one that I did that was Aunt Ida’s pound cake. And it was my aunt Ida’s pound cake recipe turned into a frozen yogurt flavor. 

And seeing that come to fruition from an idea and then see customers enjoy it and it resonate with them and then actually ask for it, that was very fulfilling on a professional level. And seeing things like that now with Tazikis, that we take a concept from conception and then see it all the way through in the stores, see customers really just love it and just really enjoy it. 

And whether it’s a new food item or something that we’re doing on the tech side, that’s really fulfilling. And that’s one of the things that I really enjoy about marketing as well, is just getting that, the feedback and seeing what customers really respond to.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, seeing the satisfaction from your customers, it adds a new level of, I guess, importance or just enjoyment to what you do. If you don’t love what you do when you’re coming to work, like you’re doing something wrong. So it’s definitely something I look for and what I do as well with this stuff that I create from the marketing side, I like to think that people like listening to episodes of the podcast, but maybe that’s just me.

Julie Wade
I think they do.

Justin Ulrich
I appreciate it. It’s because we have awesome guests like you that take the time to join us. I guess you talked a little bit about engaging with your customers and making sure you’re developing products that resonate with them. What are some things that you think you’ve seen done really well or maybe you’ve tested that worked really well from a local marketing standpoint that really engaged with local communities?

Julie Wade
Really lately, everything has been moving toward those digital channels. It is really more and more we’re seeing a lot of engagement both with Google and Meta, doing a lot of ads with them. We also have a new lead generation company that we’ve engaged with for some markets as far as our catering leads, and that’s been quite successful. 

That’s a new thing for us. We haven’t really dabbled in that before. So all of that together, we’ve seen really some exciting growth in some markets where we’d kind of been stagnant for a while. So that’s really something that we’ve been excited about. And I think that’s really where 2024 is going. A lot more digital. Digital, digital up and down.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, exactly. That’s something that we help our clients do. What’s great about digital is you can see kind of end-to-end. You could track the results, which is awesome. A lot of times, like in just traditional marketing tactics, historically, some teams still do, they just kind of throw stuff at a wall to see what sticks. 

And there’s nothing wrong with testing, but if you have the ability to actually track effectiveness and ROI to your tactics, not only do you accelerate your learnings, but you’re able to attribute your ROI and then really have more of a knowledge base as to what actually works as opposed to just a gut feel. And you can put dollars toward the right things once you kind of find that lever to pull.

Julie Wade
Oh, yeah. We just started in the past couple of months with a new, it’s an email and all communication platform, and we tested an SMS campaign back about a month ago, and it was in conjunction with an overall LTO that we were doing. And we had done an email campaign. And for our first SMS campaign, we took the people who had not opened their emails. 

This is the first time we’d ever had the technology to be able to say, okay, who had not opened their emails. And we sent 50,000 text messages to just those folks and we had over 300X ROI on that particular text message. So we’re like, okay, we’re going to do a whole lot more of that. That’s a really good thing. 

Being able to see that follow through is just phenomenal. It’s not something that when I started my career, I thought we would ever be able to do because we were still doing things by rating books and hoping that the people that said they’d build out their little diaries for radio and tv actually had news programs that they said that they did.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, it is super interesting. Just the immediacy of the feedback is incredible. I’m not marketing restaurants, but just on the marketing side, though I’ve leveraged tech for years just because of that reason, and I’ve kind of overlooked certain tactics, although I might think they may work just because I don’t have the immediate feedback as to whether or not it does. And if I do have that, I know exactly where to put my dollars and to test the right things. That SMS is an awesome example.

Julie Wade
Yeah.

Justin Ulrich
What are some things that you might suggest to someone out there who maybe they might not have the right solutions in place, or maybe they are just kind of getting their legs back under them after Covid, what are some things that you could suggest to them to do maybe today or sometime this week to start driving traffic, driving sales, driving online orders, whatever it might be?

Julie Wade
Well, one thing that I would encourage them to look at are – Within Meta, a lot of people think that you can’t really advertise on a local level. We have, in our ecosystem of our social media, we have a brand feed through Instagram, and then every single location has their own Facebook page. And that’s the way a lot of brands are set up so that you have a very localized Facebook, but then the Instagram is more of a brand level. 

And I think there’s a lot of misconception out there about, well, if the brand level side is controlling Instagram, then you can’t advertise on a local level. And that’s not true. You can go in through Meta and you can target and really focus on all of the Meta customers, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook, and get just localized folks that you want. 

So that is something that I would definitely encourage people to do. Even if you think, okay, my customers are not on Facebook, I’m not going to reach them, they’re really more Instagram people. Well, you can advertise that way and still get to them. Even though you may not have control of your own brand page, you can still advertise that way as well. Look at that. 

And then your third-party stuff, that’s one of those things that we’ve heavily leaned into in our brand, and you have to look at it as a growth tactic and we’ve definitely done that. We’ve gotten our brand in front of people who would probably never, ever walk into one of our restaurants. 

And I did a demographic study the other day of one of our third-party partners, and about a third of those customers don’t show up at all in our demographic study of our dine-in customers. So there’s a good bit of non-crossover there. Definitely lean into those third-party platforms and take advantage of those as much as you can. Yes, you’re going to pay those commissions, but it’s a new way to get your product into those people’s hands, stomachs eventually, and do your best to convert them to first-party purchasers.

Justin Ulrich
Yes, absolutely. What I’m hearing you say is, data, data, data. As much as you can leverage that data, do it. You talked a lot about audience segmentation. How are people engaging with your brands over which channels are they coming in? Have they ever been in? Have they been in multiple times? Have they logged into your wifi? 

There’s all sorts of activity that your customers are creating. They’re leaving this vapor trail with how they engage with your brand. So kind of sniff that stuff out and drop your guests in the buckets, what we call segments, and then market to them with appropriate messages on the channels that they’re on that you know that the messaging is going to resonate with them and that really helps you create lookalike audiences and really go to market at scale, which is incredible. That’s why I love the tech.

Julie Wade
Yeah. Oh, that stuff’s so hard, though. It’s taken us close to a two-year journey to get to really where we are today. And we’re not done by any means. If you look at like a crawl, walk, run, we’re barely crawling, trying to get up to a walking stage. There’s so much more that we know that we can do. 

We got our CDP set up about six or seven months ago, and so now we’re able to segment our customers into audiences, which has really been able to help us on some fronts. But we know there’s so many more things that we can do. The more that we have our data, the longer that we have the data. It all depends, too, on what you have on the back end. 

How good is your data when it’s coming in? Because that’s right, how you’re ingesting it to begin with. Excuse me, if you don’t take it in well and it’s all a mess coming in, then that makes it very difficult to do something with it on the back end.

Justin Ulrich
Exactly.

Julie Wade
To look at as well. We’ve been struggling with that from a multitude of systems. One system intakes people’s names one way, and the online system intakes people’s names in a different way. So, it’s been a challenge. 

Justin Ulrich
What you are saying, it just is further, like testament and evidence to me that you are a marketer because these are the exact challenges that marketers face across the board. 

Garbage in, garbage out. If you’re taking in data incorrectly, or even it may not even be incorrectly, it’s just how you’re compiling it is going to differ across each system in many instances. In most instances, tying that all together, cleaning it up, it’s tough, it takes time. And many times you need kind of a tech company or a solution to help you kind of tie all those systems together and clean everything up so that you can actually make it actionable data.

Julie Wade
Yeah. And sometimes it doesn’t take just one. It’s a multitude of partners to get it into a really good, usable place. One to clean it up, another one to kind of display it in the way that you need it to be. We don’t have a business intelligence tool right now, and that’s kind of a big missing piece for us to be able to take all the data that we have and then see it in a usable format that allows us to really make good business decisions based on what we’re seeing.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. A good tool will not just package the data up, but it’ll give you actionable insights. Like, things just show exactly like, this is where you need to take action in order to fix XYZ. Very cool. Yeah, a lot of typically, I don’t put plugs in for what we do on the podcast episode, but literally everything you’re saying, Julie, it’s like, we can help clients do that. So if you are struggling with that as a know, hit us up. But that’s as deep as I’ll go into that on the show. 

So do you have any examples, Julie, of folks you’d like to give a shout out? Who other than Taziki’s? We know Taziki’s does local marketing well, but who else is doing local marketing really well?

Julie Wade
I’ll have to recognize one of our sister brands. Waldo’s Chicken is an up-and-coming brand as part of the fresh hospitality family, and we actually share a building with them here in Birmingham. 

They don’t really have much of a centralized marketing effort right now, so they’re still pretty small, so they’re forced to do everything on a local level. And I think they’re taking advantage of some of the things that they’re given and really doing some of the hyper local stuff in a pretty good way. Doing a lot of that grassroots, boots on the ground kind of stuff to get their name out and get started and really just starting to do some of the digital things. 

And they’re one-off situations here in Birmingham. I see some of the Facebook and Meta and Google things that they’re doing from here as well. So think they’re just getting started and have a long road ahead of them, but doing a pretty good job to start with.

Justin Ulrich
No, that’s awesome. Yeah. The grassroots stuff is super important and should never be overlooked. It’s like no matter how good of a digital strategy you have in place, local community in-person, in the places that they are, is so important to growing your brand. It all starts at a local level. 

Going to games, going to, like you said, when you’re going to your kids games or their soccer matches or basketball games or whatever, there’s lots of brands that actually partner with schools nearby and churches and different organizations to actually get their brand in front of the attendees and get their food in their hand, as well as just create solid experiences that they can associate that good feeling with their brand.

Julie Wade
Yeah. And that’s really how Taziki’s grew from its origin days. Keith Richards, our founder, was very involved in the Birmingham community and really instilled that sense of community and connection. Connection is one of our brand values, and that was something that was very important to him and to the rest of the company as we grew. 

And it’s something that when we’re seeking out new franchisees and new operating partners, that’s something that we are certainly looking for and making sure that we do have somebody that’s connected to their community. We don’t want absentee owners. We don’t want people who are just going to stick a manager in a store and they’re going to be very removed from the business. 

We want people who are very ingrained in the community and very much part of what’s happening anywhere that we’re putting it to Taziki’s, because we know and understand how important that community connection is in any of the locations we have.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, it’s the foundation for success. Yeah, for sure. Origin stories, that’s interesting to me as I think about who does local marketing real well. I know Taziki’s come to mind and I did kind of dig into the origin stories. And Julie, I can’t help but to realize, like, you were there at the very first location, Athens, Greece. I think it was about, correct me if I’m wrong, is this about 250 AD?

Julie Wade
Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. That is pretty funny, Justin.

Justin Ulrich
Obviously you’d need a time machine.

Julie Wade
Yeah. Taking me back.

Justin Ulrich
Awesome. Taking you back. That’s right. I was working on this image this morning and I just laughed out loud when I had AI drop the crowd of people in the background. The concept of having a restaurant like this in Athens, it was just so funny to me.

Julie Wade
Oh, yeah, look at Taziki’s teal seal in the back. Yeah, that’s.

Justin Ulrich
Just gold. Anyways. Well, Julie, how could listeners follow you? Follow your brand?

Julie Wade
All right, we’ve got, of course, our website, tazikis.com. We’ve got tazikisfranchising.com. We’re on LinkedIn, and I’m on LinkedIn as well. Julie Wade, CFE so, yeah, we’re out there available and would love to have y’all check us out.

Justin Ulrich
Absolutely. I highly suggest checking out both Julie, her profile as well as Taziki’s. Follow them, subscribe. And it’s Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafe. Hit them up on social. Stop in. You guys are everywhere, especially southeast. Huge volume of locations. I would say pick up a like a gyro, I know you guys have a lot of good stuff, but I love the gyros and they do not disappoint every time. Fantastic.

Julie Wade
What’s your favorite kind, Justin?

Justin Ulrich
I just like, I love the lamb. We did a, as part of my MBA program, we went over to Europe and I got a lot of schwarma over there. And I was like, man, I love this stuff. And then after that, I discovered Tazikis when we were in Denver and just love it. Yeah, well, awesome. Check them out. Julie, it was a ton of fun having you in the lab today. Thanks so much for joining us.

Julie Wade
Thanks for having me, Justin.

Justin Ulrich
As always, thanks for joining us in the Local Marketing Lab. This podcast was sponsored by Evocalize. To learn more about how Evocalize can help you grow your business, visit evocalize.com. 

If you learned something from today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook at evocalize. That’s Evocalize and on X at Evocalize. 

And remember, keep innovating and testing new things. You’ll never know what connects with your customers best unless you try. Until next time. Thanks for listening.