Ike’s Love and Sandwiches Accelerates Brand Expansion through SOCi’s Data-Backed CoMarketing Cloud for Multi-Location Enterprises

The Challenge

In 2007, the first Ike’s Love and Sandwiches sandwich shop was opened by a “rebel with a dream”, Ike Shehadeh, in San Francisco’s Castro District. With lines around the block, the brand’s secret ingredients and inventive flavor combinations of over 999 signature sandwiches with eclectic names as tributes to local celebrities and athletes sparked a phenomenon spreading love and sandwiches across the country. 

 

As they’ve grown to almost one hundred locations, Ike’s operations team sought to enhance the brand’s star rating on Google, drive positive customer sentiment through a revamped customer journey, and enhance search results for each of its individual restaurant locations. To accomplish these goals, the team needed a comarketing cloud platform to pull data from reviews, update store hours for individual locations, and provide accurate local landing pages and efficient review response services.

“SOCi makes the local stores feel included. They receive a weekly health report for their locations for fixes and highlights of what went well. This helps increase communication between local management and helps local stores have a birds-eye view into the guest experience.” – Jacqueline Smith, Director of Marketing

The Solution

In transitioning to SOCi’s CoMarketing Cloud using SOCi Local Pages, Reviews, and Listings Advanced, Ike’s operations team optimized its local marketing efforts and implemented a data-backed strategy without adding intense workloads to the team. The team benefited from SOCi’s direct API integrations with Google and Yelp, streamlining the workload for its operation team’s already busy schedule. 

 

To ensure guests are being responded to in a timely manner, daily reports are fed to a customer service team, as well as weekly reports going to both area managers and the corporate operations team highlighting critical reviews. This has made it easier for area managers to address any issues promptly, giving Ike’s operations team the ability to make improvements in real-time. 

 

“It’s important for our operations team to feel like they have the tools they need to make improvements in the guest experience in real-time, and the weekly SOCi reports have been a tremendous help with doing just that,” said Jacqueline Smith, Director of Marketing for Ike’s. “Each report helps our team in identifying opportunities to grow ensuring all guests reach a higher level of service when visiting Ike’s. Soci has helped us in working towards that goal.” 

 

With the operations team working behind the scenes on many of Ike’s marketing initiatives, data has played a major role in fueling the brand’s local strategy. SOCi’s analytics provide actionable insights such as top guest complaints and allow for the close monitoring of new store performance. 

 

“We can pull any slice of data that the operations team wants. This is something that has been helpful to the whole team. We can clearly show how certain stores are performing, and this has allowed us to be more strategic with operational changes that need to be made. This, in turn, has helped us resolve guest issues and improve the overall health of our stores,” noted Smith.

SOCi Results

Ike’s Love and Sandwiches revamped their local visibility strategy with SOCi’s CoMarketing Cloud. A smooth local landing page rollout, time-saving review response templates, and review management support from the SOCi team were just a few of the key projects that accelerated Ike’s successful brand expansion campaign and led them to see the following results:

 

77%

Increase in total Google Business Profile views year over year, with 16.3 million views recorded

 

63%

Increase in total Google local search visibility year over year

 

57%

Increase in leads from Google Business Profiles

 

42%

Increase year over year in Google Direction Requests with 112k requests total in a quarter

 

96%

Year over year increase in Google Map views

 

52%

Increase in website visits year over year

Learn how SOCi can help take your
localized marketing to the next level.

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