KAE Sushi
KAE is a fusion restaurant that blends flavors from traditional cuisines — Heyday drove awareness and foot traffic from day one.
About KAE Sushi
KAE is a fusion restaurant that blends traditional Japanese cuisine with local Miami flavors — a concept that resonated deeply with South Florida's diverse dining culture. With locations in Coral Gables and South Miami, KAE had the product and the ambiance. What they needed was a marketing engine to match.
The Challenge
Before working with Heyday, KAE faced two core problems that were limiting their growth:
• Reaching new customers — limited visibility beyond their immediate neighborhood, with no consistent paid acquisition strategy
• Retaining current customers — no structured follow-up system to bring diners back for repeat visits
They had a great restaurant. They needed a great marketing strategy.
Direct Mail: Reaching 10,000 Homes
We sent a targeted coupon mailer to 10,000 households in the area to build awareness around the opening of KAE's new location. The campaign achieved a 10% customer return rate — well above the typical restaurant mailer benchmark — proving that a physical touchpoint can still drive real-world foot traffic when paired with the right offer.
Influencer Marketing
We invited top local food influencers and content creators to exclusive media dine events at KAE, then activated them across Instagram to grow organic reach and social credibility.
Influencers featured:
• @elgeorgeharris — 1.4M followers
• @lifestyle_mia — 977K followers
• @roxanagarciatv — 55.5K followers
Their authentic content introduced KAE to hundreds of thousands of South Florida food lovers who otherwise may never have discovered the brand.
Social Media & Google Ad Campaigns
Instagram: Retargeting campaign with coupon offers aimed at users who had previously liked or commented on KAE's posts — rewarding engaged followers and converting them into customers.
Facebook: We produced a chef cooking video and ran a retargeting campaign targeting users who watched 50%+ of the video. To redeem their coupon, users had to submit their email — simultaneously building KAE's list. A second retargeting layer reached website visitors with expiring weekly coupons to create urgency.
Yelp: Hyper-local ads targeting customers within a 5-mile radius of each KAE location.
Google Ads: Targeted high-intent search terms ("sushi near me," "sushi restaurant"), sushi in-market audiences, and past website visitors — with a remarketing list running in parallel across Display and Search.
Delivery Platforms & Digital Coupons
We activated promotional campaigns on UberEats, Grubhub, and Postmates to capture the growing delivery audience and drive incremental order volume beyond the dining room.
We also placed digital coupons on Google and Yelp to intercept customers in the research phase — converting intent into action at the exact moment they were deciding where to eat.
Email Marketing
The emails collected through ad campaigns became a powerful re-engagement channel. We deployed weekly eblasts to both potential and current customers, achieving 2× the industry average for open and click rates. A direct line to the customer base — built entirely through the ad strategy itself.
Results
The results speak for themselves:
• 400% revenue increase since campaign launch
• 1,066 new Instagram followers in 60 days (16,821 → 17,887)
• 200,642 people reached organically | 594,966 impressions
• 451,212 paid impressions | 70,799 video views at $0.02 per view
• 60 leads at just $4 cost per lead
• 32% of followers based in Miami — the exact target market
• 2× industry average email open & click rates
Frequently Asked Questions
Heyday executed a full-channel restaurant marketing strategy: a targeted 10,000-household coupon mailer to build opening awareness, exclusive influencer dine events that created social proof, Instagram and Facebook retargeting ads with coupon offers, Google Ads targeting local dining intent, UberEats/Grubhub/Postmates promotional campaigns, and a weekly email marketing program. Each channel reinforced the others, driving a cumulative revenue increase of 400% since campaign launch.
We used Instagram retargeting campaigns targeting users who had previously engaged with KAE's posts — a warm audience already familiar with the brand — with coupon-based offers to drive first visits. Facebook similarly targeted local food enthusiasts within a tight radius of each location. By focusing on retargeting rather than pure cold prospecting, we kept cost-per-click low and conversion rates high, achieving a $4 cost per lead.
New restaurants benefit most from local micro and mid-tier food influencers who have genuine trust with Miami dining audiences. Heyday organized exclusive media dine events at KAE, then amplified the resulting content through paid promotion. This combination delivers both authentic social proof (organic influencer posts) and paid reach (boosted content) — creating the sense that KAE is the restaurant everyone is talking about.
Targeted direct mail remains one of the highest-response-rate channels for new restaurant openings in Miami. By sending coupon mailers to 10,000 nearby households, we reached a captive, geo-qualified audience with a tangible, action-driving offer. When coordinated with a simultaneous digital campaign, direct mail creates multi-channel brand impressions that significantly increase conversion — KAE's grand opening generated 1,066 new social followers in 60 days partly attributable to this strategy.
