Rossopomodoro

Rossopomodoro, the largest chain of Neapolitan pizzerias in the world, started 25 years ago as the dream of three Neapolitan entrepreneurs. Today, the brand is made up of more than 3,000 people, including 400 pizzaioli and chefs, who aim to deliver an experience of renowned Neapolitan hospitality across 100+ pizzeria restaurants in Italy and abroad. Rossopomodoro has locations globally, and, in particular, has established locations in major Italian cities, train stations, and airports.

Rossopomodoro restaurants are run in a mixed model: about 35 percent of their restaurants operate under their main parent brand, and the remaining 65 percent are operated by franchisees. As a result, the brand faces the unique challenge of maintaining brand consistency across its franchisee restaurants while simultaneously driving growth in foot traffic for every location.

Data quality is a cornerstone of Rossopomodoro's digital strategy, but keeping all of their online information up-to-date requires immense effort from each individual franchisee. Rossopomodoro knew they needed to put a system in place to streamline restaurant data management while ensuring that they increased discoverability for their brand and individual restaurants across all digital channels.

Additionally, Rossopomodoro wanted to enable its franchise network to create personalized, tailored messaging within the companys standardized brand voice while communicating offers and news at the local level.

Rossopomodoro also had a goal of increasing geo-localized support to their restaurants. "We don't expect a customer to travel 90 kilometers to eat a pizza," explains Giada Copersito, Marketing Customer Service Analyst at Rossopomodoro. "We wanted to strengthen communication and our digital presence for people in proximity to our restaurants."

By ensuring that their restaurants listings were optimized and included accurate information about each and every location, the Neapolitan brand took a location-focused strategy that would turn online traffic into offline, in-restaurant footfall.

After defining their goals, Rossopomodoro chose to partner with Yext to kick off their digital transformation journey. After gathering an internal committee, explaining project needs to their franchisees, garnering buy-in, and collecting key information across each individual store, Rossopomodoro started to engage their franchise network.

Franchise affiliates received training to understand the Yext platform and learn how to keep data within the platform up-to-date. Roles were defined according to the user profile so that each affiliate could keep their store data up-to-date easily, independently, and autonomously. After updating business critical information, including addresses and phone numbers, the team moved on to richer data. As part of their SEO strategy, Rossopomodoro added menus to help each individual location stand out in search.

"Local menus for us are critical to reach customers who are looking for a pizza, gluten-free pizza, or another menu item they are craving," states Giada Copersito. "By streamlining and adding all of this data into the Yext platform, we were able to start our program and our project."

Thanks to the partnership with Yext, Rossopomodo has been able to update their information seamlessly across 200+ publishers, most notably Yelp and TripAdvisor. These channels are critical since they are widely used by tourists or customers looking for a restaurant or pizzeria nearby — whether they are making a branded search for Rossopomodoro, or an unbranded search for "pizza". Additionally, when search engines crawl the web and see that all of the brands data is consistent everywhere, this has a positive impact on their SEO performance — strengthening the brands organic presence for various types of customer searches.

On top of managing listings, Rossopomodoro was able to use the same data in Yext to power their store locator and location pages. Location pages powered by Yext are search-optimized, allowing Rossopomodoro to show up and capture more traffic when people are searching for events such as pizza school, masterclasses, broadcasting a soccer game, or even a specific menu item.

In the last phase of the project, Rossopomodo looked to unify their review management strategy and improve their online reputation. For Rossopomodoro, brand reputation is of critical importance, and they recognized the need to be timely in responding to reviews and implementing customer feedback. Thanks to their partnership with Yext, affiliates or network management directors can see reviews on a single panel, search for negative feedback based on the number of stars or keywords defined, and take immediate action to respond or correct situations that arise to increase customer satisfaction.

In the first six months of the collaboration,* Rossopomodoro has made more than 4,500 changes to point-of-sale information and shared more than 28,000 updates with third-party platforms and search engines, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon Alexa, Maps, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. In addition to delivering more information to customers, that adds up to 354 person-hours saved per month on the operational side.

Over the same period* Rossopomodoro noticed a 56% increase in map views, and a 36% increase in get directions clicks. These are important metrics that demonstrate Rossopomodoros capability to capture high-intent customers who are looking for lunch or dinner restaurants near them.

The brand also saw an uptick in local page views. Rossopomodoro's Store Locator and local pages showed a 66 percent* increase in views and a 57 percent increase in call-to-action clicks.** These metrics are closely monitored by Rossopomodoro's franchise base, as each franchisee tracks the performance of their store.

As our partnership turns one year old, I am very happy to have launched this beautiful project. In the first six months, we have already seen results with strong growth and a real return on investment both at the individual store level as well as at the brand level, Giada Copersito says. Its a testimony to what can happen when an innovative solution is adopted in a coordinated way.

* in the first 6 months of the Yext partnership (Oct 2022-Mar 2023 vs. Oct 2021-Mar 2022)

** comparison of data in Yext platform between Apr 2023-Sep 2023 and Oct 2022-Mar 2023