Competitive Conquesting: Turning Competition into Opportunity

The Asher Team recommended ‘competitive conquesting’ as a tactic particularly effective for franchise brands with brick-and-mortar locations.

Competitive conquesting is the process of geofencing a competitor location, developing a virtual boundary at a location to trigger a pre-programmed action, such as being targeted with one of the F|S’s ads, when someone enters those boundaries.

This method of location-based mobile device ID targeting enabled us to deliver digital display ads to guests who had visited competing salons.

Using programmatic digital display competitive conquesting, we served banner ads of various screen sizes to potential or lapsed F|S guests. Programmatic display advertising provides advanced targeting capabilities, such as reaching audiences in real-time when they might be choosing a salon to visit.   Additionally, Asher’s media buyers purchased ad space automatically from the ad exchange by leveraging artificial intelligence algorithms.

These tracking capabilities enabled us to digitally follow these guests and determine if they visited an F|S location after being exposed to the campaign.

As an example of ROI for this tactic, the F|S Detroit market ran the campaign 3 months to target guests who had visited 77 competitor salon locations, i.e., Great Clips, MasterCuts, SuperCuts, Borics and SportsClips. Of the 43,838 users targeted by this campaign, 3,116 visited an F|S salon location, resulting in an ROI of 1.92x.

Since competitive conquesting proved to be such a lucrative endeavor, the Asher Team incorporates this as one of many digital marketing tactics to create brand awareness and increase new and lapsed guests bringing fantastic style to all.