THE CLIENT

Founded in 1977, Bojangles is a southern-style quick service restaurant concept. Known for their famous chicken and biscuits, this North Carolina favorite has grown to an authentic southern powerhouse with approximately 750 locations in 15 states. With a dedicated Franchise Development Team and a surge of growth in recent years, Bojangles now offers franchise opportunities from Colorado to Maine.

THE CHALLENGE

Bojangles needed a full-service marketing partner to support their internal franchise and business development team in creating, implementing, and tracking a multi-channel sales-driven strategy. With a combination of print and digital paid advertising, email marketing, and trade show participation, Bojangles sought improved search engine optimization, increased lead generation, and a better ROI.

RESULTS

In less than a year (and despite a global pandemic along with a reduced marketing budget), CGR proved to be a capable and effective marketing partner for Bojangles Franchise Division. Onboarded in Q4 2019, CGR’s data-driven approach and implementation continued to deliver results even when COVID-19 turned the franchise marketing world upside down.

Year-over-year, CGR strategies helped site visits grow by 490% and conversions nearly doubled, at 90% growth.

Additionally, monthly reporting showed CGR’s ability to quickly adjust the pre-pandemic marketing plan. Originally leaning into trade shows with supporting print ads for brand awareness, CGR helped reallocate 40% of the print budget to digital efforts, which provided a better ROI to boot! As digital spend increased, CGR was sure to update keywords and ads for increased performance. It worked, with 115% growth in qualified leads from November 2019 to June 2020, a mere six-month period. 

Building on campaign successes and lessons learned in 2020, CGR developed a data-driven, campaign-based, and highly digital marketing plan for 2021.