Role
Duration
Year
Location
Honey Belly, a local restaurant in San Luis Obispo, needed increased visibility and a comprehensive marketing strategy to reach diverse customer segments and educate the broader public about Korean BBQ. Working as a team, we developed an integrated marketing campaign utilizing variable data printing to create personalized experiences across multiple marketing communication pieces, combining data-driven personalization to effectively reach audiences while maintaining Honey Belly's brand identity across all channels.
1. Problem & How Might We Statement
Honey Belly lacked a structured marketing strategy to attract new customers, retain existing ones, and educate the broader market about what made them stand out. Without a defined approach to reaching diverse customer segments, they were overlooked in San Luis Obispo's restaurant scene despite having a strong product worth discovering.
HOW MIGHT WE help a local Korean BBQ restaurant build a personalized, data-driven marketing campaign that speaks to segmented customers while strengthening brand recognition to drive measurable growth in both new and returning customers?
2. Campaign Workflow
With the campaign objectives established, we developed 3 customer personas to better understand the distinct audiences (by level of familiarity) Honey Belly needed to reach and mapped out a workflow guiding the campaign through five key stages: awareness, consideration, activation, nurturing, and expansion.
Using XMPie's variable data printing software, we identified print and digital marketing pieces across the campaign where personalized messaging must be applied, collecting customer data through forms and QR code surveys. The result was a system that could deliver tailored experiences across both print and digital channels, from personalized coupons and birthday postcards to segmented emails and a loyalty punch card.
3. KPI Metrics
To measure the campaign's impact, we established baseline metrics and KPIs across each of the four objectives, giving us a clear picture of where Honey Belly stood and where we wanted to take them.
From there, we set realistic but ambitious targets, growing weekly new customers to 300, daily revenue to $5,000, repeat visitors to 200 per week, and brand awareness to 300 surveyed respondents, all within a four month window.
4. Data Collection
Data collection was built into two key touchpoints across the campaign, each designed to gather the information needed for the personalized messaging.
The first form is promoted through social media and an in-restaurant flyer, invited customers to join the Honey Belly Grill Circle with an incentive of 20% off their next meal. It collected email addresses and asked them to self-identify their level of familiarity with Korean BBQ, whether beginner, intermediate, or advanced.
The second form was triggered by a QR code printed on the physical receipt after a visit, capturing visit frequency and a mailing address, giving us the data needed to send out segmented print materials like birthday postcards and punch cards as customers moved further along the campaign workflow.
5. Final Pieces
The final campaign pieces spanned both digital and print channels, each designed to work together as a cohesive, personalized experience. On the digital side, social media posts promoted consumer interactivity through giveaways encouraging customers to tag friends and use the hashtag #HoneyBellySLO, driving engagement and expanding Honey Belly's reach into the expansion phase of the campaign.
For the print materials, we used XMPie's variable data printing alongside Adobe Photoshop to produce personalized postcards and coupons that pulled directly from the data collected through both forms, dynamically generating each recipient's name and segmented messaging. The Photoshop work added a layer of realism that made the personalization feel tactile and intentional, placing customers' names directly onto soju bottle labels and into the smoke of a Korean BBQ grill, making every piece feel like it was made specifically for that person.
Reflection
This project culminated everything I have learned as a Graphic Communication student, pulling together design, print production, digital marketing, and data-driven personalization into one cohesive campaign. Working with XMPie revealed just how efficiently you can reach mass audiences while still making each piece feel individual, and Adobe Photoshop proved to be a silent killer in that process, placing a customer's name on a soju bottle or written into the smoke of a grill in a way that makes them stop and look twice.
More than anything, this project made me fall in love with the holistic, all-encompassing process of building a marketing campaign from the ground up, and it is exactly the kind of work I hope to keep doing.
