Toast’s recipe for growth: How brand building won 20% more customers

Hospitality is a fast-moving world where service, experience, and profitability must align seamlessly. For restaurateurs, every day is a balancing act: managing operations, delivering memorable guest experiences, and staying profitable in a highly competitive space. Toast, a cloud-based, all-in-one digital platform, built its services to meet these challenges. Its mission is simple yet powerful: to empower restaurants to thrive.

While Toast had solved the “how” of its offering, we needed to scale and define our edge as the competition closed in.

In 2023, the category shifted under our feet. New entrants crowded in, price wars broke out, and features started to look commoditized. At the same time, we raised prices. We knew Toast was worth a premium, but buyers didn’t always see why — and that disconnect was dangerous.

That reality sharpened our ambitions. With roughly 875,000 U.S. restaurants still up for grabs, we saw enormous headroom to drive growth. But, in such a crowded, commoditized market, reputation alone wasn’t enough to secure the future.

Raising the bar on brand building

Toast’s buyer is the restaurant owner, whether it’s a single proprietor or a multi-unit group. They’re time poor, often juggling dozens of urgent tasks before service even begins. And, unlike many B2B categories where buyers typically research five or six vendors, restaurant owners mostly consider just one or two. The sales cycle isn’t months; it’s often just 16 to 20 days.

This decision-making speed created opportunities and challenges for us. Historically, Toast had focused on winning once restaurants were already in the evaluation stage. But in a fast-moving market, that approach was starting to fall short. Brand trackers and Google insights showed us that perceptions of differentiation were eroding, and Toast was missing chances earlier in the journey.

Reaching buyers earlier

Toast met the challenge of a short sales cycle by merging brand-building and performance marketing into a single AI-powered strategy. We leaned on YouTube for emotional storytelling that emphasized everyday details that matter to restaurateurs, and Demand Gen campaigns to deliver ads alongside the trusted content that restaurant owners turn to for advice. We also used Performance Max campaigns in Search to capture intent and convert interest into qualified leads with real-time optimization.

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Margot Koehler, senior director of global brand marketing at Toast, shares how the cloud-based restaurant point-of-sale company drove a 20% lift in new customers by using Search, Performance Max, and Demand Gen.

A key ingredient? Partnering with finance

To scale this approach, Toast’s marketing team saw an opportunity to bring finance onside, sparking a new kind of collaboration.

Measurement was the unlock for internal buy-in. As a marketing team, we positioned ourselves on the brand maturity curve, and showed how patience, tools, and testing could shift perceptions in measurable ways. Match-market testing isolated incremental traffic lift, while Google insights revealed the impact on search volume.

We moved from “marketing vs. finance” to one cross-functional team, solving the challenge together. That flipped measurement from a debate into a collaborative discovery process.

Then we went further by developing a decision-economics model that reframed the conversation around business impact, not marketing metrics. Finance leaned in so much they embedded two members directly into marketing to co-run incrementality testing.

Serving up results

Toast Internal Data.

The results confirmed this approach was a recipe for success. We saw a 10-point lift in consideration — 5X the average B2B benchmark — along with significant gains in brand attributes like, “Toast is a brand that drives value.”

With YouTube and Demand Gen, we could reach restaurant owners earlier and tell our story more holistically. That shift helped us lift consideration and drive thousands of new decisions in our favor.

Most importantly, the strategy delivered business impact: a 20% increase in new customer wins, hitting a new growth goal, and reinforcing our mission to help restaurants thrive.

4 ways to drive growth in competitive markets

1. Create demand, don’t just capture it. In a crowded category, we couldn’t wait for buyers to come to us. By investing earlier in the journey with a differentiated story, we built memory and shaped perceptions before decisions were taking shape.
2. Measure brand by impact. Toast shifted the conversation from clicks and impressions to business outcomes. By tracking how often they showed up in restaurant tech decisions, we proved the brand’s value in tangible terms.
3. Make finance a copilot. Embedding the finance department turned debate into discovery. Co-running incrementality tests and benchmarking impact gave finance confidence in brand, and gave our marketing team the license to invest earlier.
4. Use AI to connect the funnel. With Google AI, we adapted creative in real time and bought against intent signals across YouTube, Demand Gen, Performance Max, and Search, reaching restaurateurs with precision at every stage.

Looking ahead, we’re focused on continual evolution, recognizing that the pace of change will only accelerate. Marketing will change more in the next three years than it has in the last fifteen. With the rise of AI, brand only becomes more important, which means our job is to place the right bets, stay curious, and lean on partners and peers to solve challenges together.