Rubio's Coastal Grill

Creating Craveworthy Content

Rubio’s is a coastal-inspired restaurant chain focused on bold, unique flavors made from quality ingredients. Looking to better engage with a growing online audience, Rubio’s partnered with Red Door Interactive to elevate its social presence with a more strategic, audience-first approach.

Industry

Food & Beverage

Channels

Social Media

Brand Strategy & Creative

Explore the partnership

The Opportunity

Rubio’s brand is grounded in fresh flavors, responsible practices, and an authentic coastal vibe. As competition in the restaurant space intensified online, Rubio’s needed a strategy that could unify its brand story, increase engagement, and stand out in crowded social feeds.

The Insight

To make the biggest impact, we first needed to understand the audience. Through social audits, audience research, and competitive analysis, we identified the content audiences engaged with most and uncovered opportunities to create a more cohesive social strategy.

Social Strategy

Building an audience-first content approach

Coming out of our audit, we developed an audience-first Instagram strategy designed to increase engagement and strengthen Rubio’s brand presence. The strategy focused on diversifying content formats across Reels, Stories, and user-generated content while increasing publishing frequency. We also balanced promotional messaging with more food-focused, brand-led, and real-time content to create a more engaging and authentic experience for followers.

Three phone mockups showing Rubio's TikTok content: tortilla challenge, burrito comparison, and inspirational guest quotes.

Hand holding a tall glass of iced tea with lime garnish in front of a palm frond on a turquoise backdrop.

Overhead spread of Rubio's shrimp tacos, burrito with chips, salsas, and a shrimp bowl on a red table.

Contest Strategy

Boosting engagement through audience participation

To sustain momentum, we established recurring content themes informed by historical performance and audience behavior. We also implemented a tiered contest strategy that balanced large-scale giveaways with smaller surprise-and-delight moments to encourage participation and community interaction. Together, these efforts helped Rubio’s create a more layered social presence that consistently resonated with its growing audience.

Hand holding a plate of Rubio's shrimp tacos with chips and black beans in front of yellow tile wall.

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Key Metrics

Exceeding ambitious social growth goals

Using 2020 benchmarks as a foundation, we established aggressive growth goals focused on follower growth, engagement, and contest performance. The resulting strategy delivered measurable gains across Rubio’s social channels.

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