Toppers Pizza featured in Pizza Today

Toppers Pizza was recently featured in Pizza Today in an article titled,"Winning Attitudes Motivate your staff with friendly sales contest." The article discusses the different techniques restaurants in the pizza industry implement to boost the sales. Bridget discusses how Toppers Pizza has found that friendly competition does motivate their employees and can help improve the sales of specific items. Bridget expands on a specific method Toppers Pizza used, how it was executed, and the results of the competition. Click here for the entire article or begin below.

Winning Attitudes Motivate your staff with friendly sales contest
By: Nora Caley

Pizza Antica was not selling much bottled mineral water. The servers at the four-unit concept, part of the Bacchus Management Group of restaurants in San Francisco, were not even mentioning bottled water to customers. So Pizza Antica launched the Bottled Mineral Water Sales contest. The winning server was taken, as guest, to one of Bacchus Management’s fine dining restaurants.

“The server could observe the refinement of the service there,” says Robert Smith, director of operations for Pizza Antica. “This had a great impact on why to suggest certain items.”

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Toppers featured on PizzaMarketplace.com

Toppers Pizza was recently featured in an article called, “Do you know where your customers are?” which published on PizzaMarketplace.com. The article features an interview with Bridget Keeler, marketing manager for Toppers Pizza, who discussed how the Toppers mobile food truck, the Spank Tank, relies on location-based marketing to alert customers on where they can find the truck. Bridget discussed the benefit of using Foursquare and Twitter as a means to broadcast the Spank Tank’s location as well as deals and specials that might be featured by using the location-based social media. The article also highlights the ease with which Foursquare can be implemented and the importance of training the Spank Tank staff on how to use the technology. A portion of the article is below and can be read in its entirety by clicking here.

Do you know where your customers are?

Wisconsin-based Toppers Pizza uses FourSquare and Twitter's GPS function to let its fans know the location of its mobile food truck, the Spank Tank.

"If the Spank Tank is headed to Milwaukee, we can do a search throughout the day/night on Twitter about those talking about the Spank Tank in the Milwaukee market," said Bridget Keeler's, marketing manager of Toppers Pizza. "We can then reach out to them and message them about our presence and tell them about menu items and deals."

Toppers, which has 29 locations but only one food truck, also uses Foursquare as a way to connect with customers.

"We closely monitor the trends of our core demographic, the college student, and saw an opportunity within those trends to tap into marketing the Spank Tank as a mobile venue," Keeler said. "We are able to change as the Spank Tank moves around downtown Milwaukee. This gives our fanatics an easy way to figure out where to feed their appetites at night."

(Read More)

Heating Up The Streets: Toppers Pizza ‘Spank Tank’ Unveiled

Late night hunger, beware! Toppers Pizza is gearing up to launch its latest innovation: The Toppers ‘Spank Tank.’ On June 24, Toppers Pizza will unveil its first food truck for the pizza-loving public of Milwaukee, WI to enjoy. With plans to service the late night bar scene, the Spank Tank will call the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Toppers location its home. It will sell Toppers’ world famous Topperstix and, for the very first time, House and one-topping pizzas by the slice.

“You may have heard of the food trucks craze, but I can guarantee you’ve never seen anything like the Spank Tank,” said Bridget Keeler, Toppers manager of marketing. “This will turn heads and cause complete insanity when we roll this thing out on the streets of Milwaukee. Its presence is unbelievable.”

Just like the slogan suggests, the Spank Tank will be spanking customer’s buds with “a piece all summer long.” It was an idea that hatched back in 2009 and since then, the Toppers team has developed a way to turn its brick and mortar location mobile. The truck includes a full-size oven and fully functional kitchen. At 26 feet wide and 13 feet tall, the Spank Tank is equipped to handle Milwaukee’s late night hunger pangs.

“Bar time will never be the same,” said Drew Craker, manager of Toppers Spank Tank. “Being behind the wheel of the Spank Tank will be like being a famous celebrity…all eyes on you, its show time baby.”

According to Drew Craker, he plans to be at all the hot bar spots multiple times a night in the Spank Tank selling fresh Toppers pizza to the brand’s core customer – the college student.

What else is in store with the Spank Tank? Toppers fanatics will have the opportunity to rent the Spank Tank for their events. While Toppers plans to develop several more food trucks in other Toppers Pizza markets across the country, for now, it’s just Milwaukee that will benefit from the truck promising to give you “a piece all summer long.”

“We are a 20 year old brand that refuses to stop at mediocre,” said Keeler. “At every turn, we are thinking of new ways for our customers and fanatics to interact with the Toppers brand. We believe the Spank Tank is something extraordinary that will get people talking. Now let’s hear what Milwaukee has to say.”

Toppers Pizza featured in Nation's Restaurant News

Toppers Pizza Marketing Manager Bridget Keeler spoke with Nation’s Restaurant News reporter Mark Brandau about how Toppers uses Social Media to create and drive the brand’s advertising for an article in Nation’s Restaurant News called “Collaborative Spirit.” In Toppers' latest contest, it asks Facebook fans to design a car wrap. The winner selected could potentially see a ’74 Mercury Grand Marquis driving around town with his or her design wrapped on the car. View the full article below, or click here!

Toppers Pizza featured in Nation's Restaurant News

Q&A with Toppers' Marketing/Social Media Manager, Bridget Keeler

Recently, we sat down with our Marketing/Social Media Manager, Bridget Keeler, and asked her a few questions about social media. This revolutionary tool gives us the power to consistently interact with our following and also continues to grow our brand. See the full transcript of the interview below:

Can you describe some of Toppers goals and initiatives with social media? Why and how are you using social media to accomplish these goals?

Toppers Pizza puts an extremely high value on listening to what our customers are telling us. Our goal with social media is to give customers what they want. Recently, we were looking to add another House Pizza to our menu. We developed a crowd sourcing contest, Spank Your Pizza, which challenged fanatics to come up with the next pizza for our menu – then paired down more than 100 submissions to 64 finalists who battled it out for three weeks to make it to the top two. The contest generated some delicious pizza ideas and grew our Facebook Fan page by 62% over the course of contest.

Future goals and initiatives include creating apps that will engage our fanatics and continue to build our loyal community. We believe our fanatics are truly interested in the Toppers brand and want to be a part of shaping its success. To further measure that passionate loyalty, we will also be heavily promoting our mobile food truck via social media and will be eventually looking for fanatics to dictate where it shows up to next.

The cool thing about social media is that Toppers has the ability to change the conversation in the pizza industry by engaging and listening to our fanatics. Anyone with an idea worth sharing has the ability to influence the conversation at anytime.

With over 1,000 fans per location, how do you consistently interact and engage your fanatics?

We make it our goal to engage our fanatics multiple times during the day through our posts. These posts can range anywhere from asking them to comment on their favorite dipping sauce, to posting relevant pop culture trends. We like to believe that our fanatics see our page as being similar to hanging out in a room with their friends and having a good time.

We also have a weekly promotion, called “Toppers Tuesdays”, that gives our fanatics exclusive deals on Tuesdays only at any Toppers location. These deals are only found on our social media pages and build specials bonds with us and our fanatics. Deals can range from buy one get one deals to special pricing on regular menu items.

Local Toppers stores also dive into interacting with fanatics on our pages by offering specials to fanatics in their area. Between national and local specials, Toppers is continuously thanking and rewarding our fanatics.

How do you measure social media? (Try and think Return on Engagement – ROI is difficult to measure, etc.)

Toppers is dedicated to making our fanatics happy. We measure social media through return on engagement. Measurement comes in the form of comments, impressions, @mentions, repeat posters, popular posts, and overall brand awareness. Our first and foremost goal is to post content that captures our fanatics attention and gets them talking. While it’s easy to count the measurements mentioned above, our measurement is a constant work in progress as we decipher and understand how social media engagement affects us at every level. Our ultimate goal is to find the connection and balance between social media and our P&L to help determine and set expectations to our social media strategy prior to engagement.

If you could give one piece of advice to business looking to take the jump into social media, what would you say?

If you are looking to take the jump into social media, my advice is to take a big running leap and continue looking ahead. I believe that social media has replaced face to face conversations and is quickly becoming the norm for communication, especially among Toppers’ demographic. The key is constant, consistent, engaging communication. Social media is changing the world by the hour, while you don’t need to be the star on the conversation – you at least need to be part of it.