Just Falafel CEO Fadi Malas said the franchise-led company invests heavily in promoting the brand through online and social media.
According to Malas, who was speaking at the Food Franchising Conference at Gulfood, Just Falafel’s digital media strategy is largely responsible for the fast-food franchise’s success.
“Our budgets in advertising and digital media are probably more than 90% of everything that we do, and out of that 90%, 95% is used for Facebook. Facebook is not a multi-billion dollar company for nothing. Over the last 12 months, we have been able to achieve 1.5 billion impressions for our brand name through Facebook,” revealed Malas.
“If I were to go buy these impressions in digital media at $40 per minute, it’s like I’ve subsidised US $60-70 million of advertising in digital itself. If I were to get these impressions in traditional media, it would probably be $600-700 million. So it’s very prohibitive,” he added.
According to Malas, Just Falafel receives up to 50 franchising requests based on advertising through the social media platform.
“With the little that we have in digital, we are able to achieve 50 requests for franchising per day, from markets where we would like to go. So if we start advertising in Kenya, that we want to sell franchises in Kenya, we can target a certain category of people that we think would be interested in setting up their own business and it will cost between US $10-100 to achieve one request for franchising, and we keep repeating it until we get enough response rate to saturate the market that we want to sell into,” he said.
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Malas also explained that the company’s digital advertising budget, which accounts for $500,000, is more efficient than larger brands which did not adopt a digital media strategy early enough.
“We were extremely lucky to be early adopters of digital media. Today, technology is a big contributor when it comes to communication. Our marketing budget is peanuts if we compare ourselves to our neighbours in the food court who spend billions of dollars on advertising in a year, and we probably spend around $500,000 or something,” he said.
“In some markets, we spend $100,000 and we’ve had a return of $3 million, so it’s a return of 30 times ROI,” he added.
While the company is still heavily invested in building its social media profile, Malas said Just Falafel was also trying to ensure the Facebook numbers stay in sync with store openings.
“We have around 1.8 million fans on Facebook. We know how to go to 10 and 20 million – we know how to do it very, very well. But we don’t want to grow our fan base quicker than we are growing our stores because what good is it to have a high ratio of fans following you when you don’t have enough stores open?
"Even today, we have 40 times the fan per location, compared to a McDonalds or Subway. So we have too many fans per location, we are too advanced in terms of communication with a wider audience compared to those who have tens of thousands of stores. We would like to retain this communication edge, but we want to grow it as we roll out stores,” he said.
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