Truluck’s
Crafting Connections: Building Brand Love & Loyalty
the situation
Truluck’s is a privately held chain of fine-dining restaurants with 10+ locations across the nation, including Chicago, Houston, D.C., and Miami. Committed to sustainable sourcing, and known for pushing boundaries on traditional flavor profiles, Truluck’s needed a creative refresh and digital content strategy to build loyalty among current patrons (M/F 45-64) and awareness/trial among younger, more diverse prospects (M/F 24-36).
the acceleration
Our creative and content teams combined forces on a refreshed strategy that would include paid and organic digital content, refreshed quarterly, with executions covering both enterprise and location-specific campaigns across a variety of digital platforms. Recurring campaigns include an expansive mix of tactics including social posts, stories, reels, videos, carousels, and UGC, with an average of around 150 unique pieces of content per month.
In addition to quarterly digital campaigns, Motion manages the company’s loyalty and customer outreach communications, sent regularly to 150,000+ “TRU Insider” members. The initiative includes mapping out a monthly series of email communications, including concepts, copy, design, development, and deployment.
To make it easy for patrons and prospects to book a table, and to better understand how much revenue was being generated from the emails we were deploying, Motion integrated the OpenTable platform with our marketing automation platform. The integration allows us to monitor open rates, click-through rates, and bookings, as well as track customer spend via on-site POS systems once someone has dined.
Thematic email communications highlight limited time offers, chef stories, “fresh catches,” and concept dishes with multiple conversion points. Ongoing optimizations have resulted in a 28% average open rate, with an 18-22% conversion rate to OpenTable reservations – both metrics well above industry benchmarks.
With ongoing strategic support and guidance from Motion, each step in the Truluck’s customer journey is designed with purpose, whether it’s keeping the Truluck’s name top of mind, driving reservations and gift card purchases, or encouraging more visits to their website for authentic brand content on the blog.
the results
Truluck’s continues to see tremendous results from our integrated team’s efforts, from online brand engagement and media impressions to increased foot traffic and sales.
$1MM in incremental revenue
month-over-month driven by our paid digital campaign
8 of 12 restaurant locations experienced double-digit increases in sales following omni-channel approach to marketing efforts from 2023-2024
7.2MM media impressions for the launch of the Rosemont, IL location
1MM new users to the reservation portal for all 12 US locations in just one year
343K views across 19 influencer-sponsored posts, reaching nearly 250K unique users across multiple platforms
7.7% average Engagement Rate across all influencers in 2024, exceeding the industry benchmarks of 1-3%
1.23 ROAS based on Estimated Media Value of influencer partnerships and total investment in 2024
3X boost in average social media engagement time across 3 social media platforms in 2024
9.7% audience growth across all marketing channels (email, social media) in 2024