April 12, 2023

Mucho Burrito Wraps Up Localized Marketing By Optimizing Listings, Online Reviews, and Social Media

Mucho Burrito Fresh Mexican Grill is one of Canada’s largest chains of premium fast-casual Mexican restaurants and lives up to its name with big goals. The marketing team needed a user-friendly way to monitor its online reputation and wanted a partner to help optimize its digital marketing and business promotions that could be an extension of the team.

Mucho Burrito’s goals were to increase brand awareness, appearance in search, website traffic, and leads from locator and local pages -- all to help garner more restaurant traffic. The brand knew it needed to improve online review response rates and decrease review response time, as well as increase its star ratings on online listings, for optimal conversions, and in return, more ROI. Brand-level and local-level reporting for regional insights were essential to the brand, along with the ability to share findings with stakeholders and be alerted and take action quickly when an issue arose. In short, they needed a way to connect easily with guests. Mucho Burrito had local pages that weren’t user-friendly, interactive, or optimized, and they wanted an updated platform -- where they could manage all aspects of local marketing with entry-level training, that was easy to use for everyone, from lower management to directors.

"The thing that set SOCi apart when looking for a platform was the connection between SOCi and its clients. Our biweekly meetings and quarterly business reviews with senior management have been super helpful. The constant touchpoints give everyone the bigger picture, more eyes on what we’re doing, and how the results we see from SOCi play back into our marketing spend. These business metrics ensure everyone understands what we’re doing and what SOCi is doing for us."

- Mucho Burrito Digital Marketing Manager, Christal Alcindor

Mucho Burrito partnered with SOCi to manage Listings, Social, and Reviews, which immediately improved the online guest experience and localized marketing involvement.

"Before SOCi, when someone searched for ‘Mexican food near me,’ Mucho Burrito often didn’t pop up. After our Google listings were optimized, more guests were able to find us, which has made an impact because guests are leaving more reviews and we’ve noticed an increase in social media reach and impressions as well as Google Map views. Because we can improve listings with more up-to-date content, restaurant information, and photos, in addition to posting more on social media, SOCi has given us much more visibility."

- Mucho Burrito Digital Marketing Manager, Christal Alcindor

SOCi has helped Mucho Burrito solve for ease of use in their localized marketing. Mucho Burrito uses SOCi to upload promotional images and share corporate content on local restaurant social pages. Local restaurants will eventually be able to create their own posts because SOCi provides the corporate team with insight into what’s being posted, improving communication between the teams. The marketing coordinator now helps individual regions with individualized campaigns and uses SOCi to connect and sync social pages and listings for new stores and updated hours. SOCi University also provides easy-to-digest training for new employees.

"With SOCi, our user experience is a lot better and has helped in getting all of our teams involved. Local leaders can now help themselves, which alleviates work for the corporate office and allows it to run more efficiently. Now, everyone manages their own groups and territories and can easily check the temperatures of their regions."

- Christal Alcindor, Digital Marketing Manager, Mucho Burrito

SOCi Results

The initial review response time goal Mucho Burrito set upon implementing SOCi was impressive at 48 hours, as it used to take them a week to answer reviews. With SOCi, the average review response time is now just over 24 hours. The Mucho Burrito review response rate is 98 percent because SOCi made it easy to make responding part of team members’ daily tasks and is now continuously monitored.

The average local ranking for "Mexican restaurant near me" has gone up from 3.8 to 2.5, meaning the average location now appears in the Google 3-pack. This can be attributed in part to improved profile completeness, including the following:

Inclusion of secondary categories up from 82.8% to 95.9%
Inclusion of merchant descriptions up from 16.2% to 97.9%
Improvement in the population of local landing pages and secondary URLs

Conversion signals are up as well, with the company improving utilization of Google Business Profile posts from an average of just 0.5 posts up to an average of 6.3 posts per location. Similarly, Yelp profile completeness has seen significant improvement, including the following:

Yelp phone numbers matching Google phones up from 66.7% to 79.4%
Inclusion of local landing pages on Yelp up from 57.6% to 97.9%
Inclusion of hours of operation on Yelp up from 74.2% to 96.9%

Facebook profile completeness also shows several areas of improvement including:

Inclusion of local landing pages on Facebook up from 87.6% to 97.9%
Inclusion of business category, hours, and merchant descriptions on Facebook up from 96.9% to 99.0%