Rob Duncan, owner, and operations manager Blair Wilson know a thing or two about opening and running successful McDonalds restaurants.

Together they operate five restaurants in Wellington, including two established outlets in Johnsonville, one on Lambton Quay and Manners Street and, following a successful launch of the latest, one on Bunny Street.

Two of the major tasks involved in setting up a McDonalds restaurant are recruiting approximately 50 staff and managers in one hit, and then driving future customers to experience the new location.

Both require targeted, high response advertising, and that’s where TRN’s Glen Smith’s help and experience with radio and TXT2GET’s mobile marketing system became invaluable.

Campaign strategy and results
As Wilson explains, “Glen did an outstanding job with the launch. Right from the time we started talking to him about the launch of the store he was coming up with ideas and concepts of how we could drive foot traffic for opening week.”

What eventuated was a series of radio commercials that offered listeners the ability to text in to get a voucher offer of a free McMuffin for the first one hundred people to come in to the store that morning.

At lunchtime, Wilson could log on to the TXT2GET system over the web, and change the voucher to Big Macs or McChicken meals for the same afternoon promotion each day. Listeners simply texted ‘McDonalds’ to 244, and then showed the text voucher in store to redeem the item.

“The TXT2GET system was easy” said Wilson. “You just follow the prompts and it does what it says it will do.” During the launch week, McDonald’s also ran a text to win competition to win 5 free McDonalds sundaes every Sunday for a year, generating huge weekend interest and foot traffic.

“The guest counts during the promotional period far exceeded our expectations with 11,739 customers coming to the store that week. This was more than a 30 per cent increase over an average week,” said Wilson. Revenue was also higher than expected.

McDonalds Bunny Street opening, with owner Rob Duncan, Hon Kate Wilkinson MP and Ronald McDonald himself

Staffing up
Before the launch, however, the company had a huge recruitment task, requiring the identification of hundreds of potential candidates so that McDonalds could select the best.

“He (Glen) also came up with the idea of using the TXT2GET service as a means of recruitment,” adds Wilson.

“Using this method we had approximately 600 applications for positions in two weeks. We had the same amount of applications over a nine month period at the Johnsonville store.”

Again, Wilson was able to use the mobile marketing keyword ‘McDonalds’ and simply change the text reply in the TXT2GET system’s back end to match this campaign. In this case, the text reply gave interested candidates the web address of the site with information on how to apply for a job.

Conclusion
Over a one month period McDonalds combined the best of radio and mobile marketing to successfully recruit for and launch their latest store.

The success demonstrated the power of radio as a driver of text-to-win, text-for- vouchers and text-torecruit promotions.

FOR MORE INFORMATION//

Txt2Get
Australia: 1800 898243,
www.txt2get.com.au, or text ads to 19 33 33 (SMS: 25c)

NZ: 0800 333012,
www.txt2get.co.nz, or text ads to 244 (20c)

AU service provider txt2get.com.au. Under 18 – get a/c holder’s OK.







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