Long Range Systems (LRS) increases brand awareness while gaining industry leader status by repurposing content
LRS is a leading global provider of on-site paging, guest management and surveying tools. The company gained traction in the restaurant industry in the 1990s when it invented the first guest pager. Today, LRS is still known for waitlist management solutions as well as a number of other tools that enable increased operational efficiency and a better guest experience.
Challenge
LRS chose to work with Idea Grove because of the agency’s reputation as a leading inbound PR and marketing firm in the southwest United States. Idea Grove has found success thanks to its unique business model, which combines traditional PR tactics with modern marketing techniques. The agency drives awareness, engagement and conversion for its clients through the unique best practice of integrating content-driven PR, social, search, web and email marketing as a holistic and highly efficient organic marketing process.
LRS challenged Idea Grove with executing a campaign that would raise awareness of the company’s diverse offerings, promote thought leadership and generate buzz in conjunction with LRS’ rebranding and new website launch.
The best way to do this was to efficiently repurpose content across multiple mediums, maximizing reach without maximizing workload. In order to make the campaign truly effective, Idea Grove knew it needed to use original and compelling information that would resonate with LRS’ target audience and relay that data across multiple channels for the largest reach. To accomplish this, Idea Grove developed a campaign that leveraged the results of an LRS proprietary study on restaurant wait times into company visibility using social media, blog posts, byline articles, media placements and an infographic.
Execution
Idea Grove started with the content of an LRS-sponsored survey of restaurant managers analyzing wait time trends and patterns across the country. LRS had conducted the study but was unsure of how to best relay the results. Idea Grove knew this subject was valuable to LRS’ target audience of restaurant owners and managers. Used correctly, the agency believed this could be a great piece of content to position the company as a thought leader while simultaneously highlighting LRS’ solutions for better wait time management.
Once the survey results were finalized, the design team met with LRS subject matter experts to identify the most important information. After the featured statistics were chosen, Idea Grove’s designers coordinated with the LRS account lead to create a compelling infographic. The graphic went through a series of edits to ensure it displayed the data in the most interesting way possible.
Once LRS approved the infographic, the agency’s social media manager began working with the account lead to create a targeted social media campaign around the infographic. The account lead created a list of top industry influencers on Twitter, and the social media manager drafted multiple copies of social media posts to share across all of LRS’ channels. The content team also wrote a blog post about the infographic and published it on LRS’ corporate blog.
With the social media campaign in full swing, it was time to go to the media. The LRS drafted a press release about the survey results, highlighting their importance for restaurant owners and managers and the uniqueness of the delivery, and distributed the release on a news wire. The brand then put together a media list of top publications in the restaurant and hospitality industry. The account lead personally reached out to a contact at each publication by phone or email to ensure he/she had seen the release and to answer any questions about the release or the survey results.
Knowing this kind of information would generate substantial industry buzz, the content team wrote a byline article based on the survey results. The account lead pitched this byline to the same list of influential industry publications, maximizing the chances of coverage.
Impact
Results were swift. Six top Twitter influencers targeted in the social media campaign retweeted the infographic to their more than 5,000 combined followers. Online industry publication Food Service East featured the byline the content team wrote, and eight industry publications picked up the press release, including:
- Wall Street Journal MarketWatch
- Motley Fool
- San Francisco Chronicle Online (SFgate)
- Sunbelt Foodservice
- Pizza Marketplace
- Hospitality Technology
- FSR Magazine
The eight publications that ran the press release had more than 9.4 million unique visitors combined. The press release resulted in more than 35,000 headline impressions and nearly 540 full page reads.
Nearly a year later, the results of the study are still popping up in news articles as reporters search for statistics on the subject of restaurant wait times. The success of the infographic campaign also inspired ideas for additional studies LRS can do to raise awareness of their other products and generate buzz in the different industries they serve.
Michelle Strong, VP of marketing at LRS, explains: “Idea Grove helped position LRS as an industry leader, and our relationship with the agency has been key to growing awareness of our brand and driving engagement with prospects.” 
