Maple Tree Marketing leverages PredictHQ data to elevate their strategic marketing insights

Maple Tree Marketing – based in Holland, Michigan – is a digital marketing agency founded by former hospitality leaders. It specializes in empowering hotels and restaurants with data-driven insights, strategic planning, and comprehensive marketing support to drive revenue growth and ensure long-term success. Serving over 180 clients across the U.S. and the Caribbean – including Marriott, Hilton, top restaurants, manufacturers, and nonprofits – the agency leverages predictive data and cutting-edge technology to deliver innovative, customized solutions. 

Unique, contextual data was the key for the next stage of growth 

Maple Tree Marketing has always been data-centric, using a variety of internal and external datasets for their clients, including website visits, conversions, client booking engines, paid media data, and market driver data within STR reports. However, expanding into new verticals like restaurants has been challenging due to the lack of restaurant-specific and contextual data available.

“We were familiar with STR reports and various demand generators for hotels, but there wasn't anything comparable for restaurants. We were data-hungry and needed to find ways to better support our growing restaurant offerings.”

Roger Littlepage

Founder, 

Maple Tree Marketing

In 2022, Maple Tree Marketing expanded into the rapidly growing restaurant industry, emphasizing the need for informed, data-driven strategies. As their paid media efforts saw significant changes in ad spend across markets, reliable data became even more essential for crafting effective strategies. To support their expanding client roster and shift from reactive to proactive strategies, the agency needed more granular, comprehensive data, which they found with PredictHQ. 

How PredictHQ’s event data revolutionized Maple Tree Marketing’s approach

Maple Tree Marketing first encountered PredictHQ at the National Restaurant Association Show, where they were looking for innovative technology and data to bring back to their clients. They quickly realized real-world events like concerts and sports games could have a massive impact on demand for not only restaurants, but their entire customer base. 

“We were blown away with the value that PredictHQ could bring to our strategy. We first piloted the program with a few outlets, and saw our clients get really excited about it.”

Morgan Clark

F&B Marketing Manager, 

Maple Tree Marketing

By using PredictHQ’s intelligent event data, Maple Tree Marketing saw an opportunity to optimize paid media, better understand event impact for the different industries they serve, and boost revenue and occupancy for clients. The plan was to leverage the data to drive traffic from events to their clients’ hotels and restaurants. 

Maple Tree Marketing created BI dashboards for instant value and actionable insights

The Maple Tree Marketing team integrated PredictHQ’s Event API and Features API to surface the data within both their internal dashboards and their custom built client-facing dashboards. Their Data Analyst designed these dashboards incorporating PredictHQ’s intelligent event data, highlighting key metrics for their clients’ business locations, such as predicted event spend, predicted attendance, and top events in the next 90 days. 

By providing relevant event insights to their clients using a custom interface, they empowered their clients to understand and act on strategic recommendations supported by clear, contextual data and visualizations.

By integrating PredictHQ data into their dashboards, Maple Tree Marketing has created a unique offering that clients can’t find anywhere else. These custom dashboards are instrumental in helping the team close sales and provide immense ongoing value to their clients. 

“PredictHQ has been a showstopper on sales calls because it shows the true forward-looking demand for their markets. In most of the conversations I have, I notice a heavy reliance on historical data. So many companies are still only focusing on what happened last month or last quarter. That’s great, and you need it for your decision-making, but what are you doing to plan for the next 90 days?”

Roger Littlepage

Founder, 

Maple Tree Marketing

This is where Maple Tree Marketing excels as strategic advisors. They analyze the next 90 days and make recommendations based on forward-looking demand insights. This approach equips the agency’s managers, paid media specialists, and clients to be better at their jobs and improve targeting. PredictHQ data also helps paid media specialists better define audience types and geolocations, and to allocate higher spend for key dates and locations experiencing higher demands and increased market presence. 

PredictHQ data powers successful marketing campaigns and activations around events 

So what do restaurants and hotels do with this data once they have it? One of the biggest use cases is to craft successful, relevant, and timely marketing campaigns around events. 

“Before introducing PredictHQ data, every missed event was a missed opportunity. For example, everyone knows about the widespread economic impact of Taylor Swift and prepares accordingly, but what about the other events relevant to our clients? We were missing out on critical insights our clients needed to act on.”

Morgan Clark

F&B Marketing Manager, 

Maple Tree Marketing

Event-based marketing tactics – such as themed cocktails and playlists ahead of concerts – can be replicated for any event that interests customers, such as NFL games, festivals, or conferences – whether ticketed or not. Maple Tree Marketing uses these insights to create event-based marketing campaigns and activations for their clients including limited time offering menus they design in-house, and a multi-channel marketing campaign to target event attendees.

“PredictHQ is a business-critical tool throughout each step of our process from the discovery phase, all the way up to activation day during events,” says Clark. 

Once an event is identified, an activation is planned deploying the use of paid media, social media, OpenTable Experiences, email blasts, Google Listing posts, website event calendars, and more. 

Results

Maple Tree Marketing has revolutionized their clients’ approach to event-driven marketing by providing granular, customized insights into local spending and consumer behavior around events. This transformation has significantly enhanced their marketing and planning strategies.

0

%

Since leveraging predictive demand analytics from PredictHQ, Maple Tree Marketing has seen a 15% improvement in client revenue growth.

Since leveraging predictive demand analytics from PredictHQ, Maple Tree Marketing has seen a 15% improvement in client revenue growth. They measure PredictHQ’s ROI based on client growth, engagement with marketing strategies, and results from paid media campaigns.  

According to Littlepage, “There is nothing else like it on the market. They have distilled down events from all sources into a quickly referenced, easily digested format that we can trust. The ability to sort events by category and view them on a map relative to different business locations of each client is game-changing.” 

By leveraging the predictive power of PredictHQ, Maple Tree Marketing is able to plan months in advance and anticipate events that will impact their clients. Knowing key dates for reservations influences the decisions they make around targeting and timing when it comes to paid media recommendations and enables them to stay ahead of the curve by delivering innovative, effective marketing campaigns for their clients.

“Most of our clients are completely inundated with reports in their inboxes. Many of them can’t see a week into the future because they’re in the weeds. Giving them access to information that is easily accessible and easy to bookmark gives them the ability to immediately see in the future at any given time and make decisions for themselves.”

Morgan Clark

F&B Marketing Manager, 

Maple Tree Marketing

Looking ahead, Maple Tree Marketing plans to expand their offerings to more hotels and restaurants, using data insights to drive marketing initiatives. They currently only offer the data to full-scope marketing services in food and beverage, but PredictHQ is the catalyst to show these dashboards to other existing clients and build upon the program. While they don’t aspire to be a SaaS company, their vision is to organize data in bite-sized chunks for those individuals who may not have the time to make those decisions based on the insights.