Case study · Hospitality / Franchise
From 4 locations to a national following, social for a restaurant chain
A monthly content engine that turned each restaurant location into its own creator, with paid social layered on top to push reach beyond the immediate neighbourhood, and a national brand following to match.
The challenge
What we had to solve.
Each restaurant location had a half-active Instagram account, posting whenever someone remembered, with photos taken on the manager's phone after the lunch rush. The brand looked smaller online than it was in real life.
Head office didn't want a one-size-fits-all corporate feed, the whole point of the chain was that each location had personality. But they did want a consistent look, a coordinated calendar, and a way to scale without hiring a content team per location.
Our approach
How we tackled it.
We built a content system, not a content factory. Monthly sprints: a half-day shoot per location every four weeks, with a shot list that captures both evergreen brand content and the location's own seasonal specials, staff stories and customer moments.
Each location got a personal content track inside the system, their reels, their staff, their dishes, while sharing the chain's broader templates, captions and hashtag strategy.
Paid social ran on a hyper-local layer: geo-fenced ads around each location, plus a brand layer for the chain that ran nationally on TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
We instrumented store-level attribution as best we could, promo codes, branded landing pages, in-store mentions, so leadership could see which content tied to which foot traffic.
Deliverables
What we built.
Specific, named outputs, not vague "strategy".
Brand-wide content systemTemplates, calendar, voice guide, hashtag strategy and shot list per location type.
Per-location content tracksPersonalized reels, photography and posting cadence for each restaurant.
Paid social programGeo-fenced local layer + national brand layer across IG, TikTok, YouTube Shorts.
Community managementDaily DM and comment response, with escalation rules for customer-service issues.
Monthly reportingFollower growth, engagement by location, paid CPM/CTR, store-level attribution where possible.
Outcomes
What it returned.
- Combined Instagram and TikTok followers up 412% across 9 months.
- Best-performing location grew from 2k to 38k followers and now drives organic foot traffic from outside its immediate neighbourhood.
- Two new location openings hit their first-month revenue target on opening week, partly attributable to a content runway before the doors opened.
- Paid CPM stayed under industry benchmark because organic content quality kept ad creative fresh.
The takeaway
What we learned.
Multi-location brands don't need one big corporate account, they need a system that makes every location feel like a creator. The brand becomes the sum of the locations, not a top-down dictate. That's also why the work scaled when they opened new restaurants.
Services used
How we got it done.
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