5 Tips for Musicians on Social Media
January 30, 2018Creating Successful Facebook Ads for Hotels
July 23, 2018
With nearly 40 million Facebook users in the UK alone, it’s a no brainer to be using Facebook ads for restaurants.
At the very least, I’m going to assume that by now you probably have a Facebook page.
If you don’t have a Facebook page for your restaurant, stop reading here and go set one up!
If you do have a Facebook page, you have probably been asked if you want to ‘boost your post’.
Some of you may have even tried spending a little money on a cheeky post boost, or perhaps you’ve dug in deeper and tried some of other Facebook ad options.
The problem is that without a solid background in advertising or some level of training it’s likely you will be wasting your both your time and money.
Boosting a post might get your brand out there. If the ad is targeted properly you may even reach some new customers.
But if you don’t do it properly you will probably come away thinking, was that ad worth my money?
Can you actually track the results back to your bottom line?
Today I want to show you 5 ways you can create ads on Facebook that you can clearly measure the benefit of.
These methods will outsmart 90% of your competition, putting your restaurant on the map, and most importantly getting people through your door.
1. Run a Competition
Running a competition is a great way to explode your Facebook page engagement, increase shares of your page to local people.
There are all sorts of ways to run a competition but two of our favourite methods are as follows:
Run a ‘caption this’ competition on a photo taken in your restaurant. This can be of a waiter, or a fun photo of your busy restaurant.
The key is to make sure the image relates directly to your restaurant. Don’t just use a stock image, make sure it relates directly to your brand.
Next all you need to do is announce the competition on a post, and tell people to enter by commenting AND liking your post.
By asking people to comment and like your post you’ll get maximum exposure to the community of people you target.
As people like and comment Facebook’s algorithm will naturally share their actions with your audiences connections, thus creating a exponential reach for your post.
Post the competition as you would a normal post then log in to Facebook’s ad manager to set up a ‘post boost’ to your specified audience (local people that like italian restaurants and competitions for example.)
You could also set up a food photo competition.
This one is simple, target current and new customers, asking them to take a photo of their meals in your restaurant.
You can do this by sending traffic to a page on your website ior by simply using a Facebook post.
Sending the audience to your website (providing your website isn't a total heap of junk of course, make sure you sort that out if it is!).
We prefer to get people to our clients websites as much as possible as it takes people off of Facebook into your own personal domain.
2. Create an offer ad
A great way to use Facebook ads for restaurants is to engage people and get them flooding through your door with a Facebook offer ad.
Offer ads allow people to directly claim exclusive offers from facebook and have them emailed to their inbox so they can claim them in your restaurant.
First things first, you need to come up with an offer! It’s best to come up with something that is EXCLUSIVE to Facebook. Not just a run of the mill offer thats available every week.
By making the offer exclusive it makes people feel like that have found something special. This makes them MUCH more likely to claim the offer. If it’s just the same offer people have seen before or heard about it’s not going to excite them much.
Get creative with your offers, offering a % off the bill or a free bottle of wine when they buy 2 main courses.
Pizza Express are the weekday offer masters, take a look at their website to see how they use offers to fill their restaurants every day of the week.
Once you have decide on your offer, you just need to set it up and promote it! You can find out more about setting an offer up here.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you want help setting up an offer for the first time. We love to help!
3. Create a community event
Running a community event or fundraiser is a wonderful way to show your generousity to the local area, get positive exposure and help a good cause in the process.
Creating a morning charity cake sale at your premises, or go one step further and set up a free event in a public place.
Your only limit is your creativity here.
A couple of great examples of awesome events we’ve worked on are:
Charity cookery classes, where people donate to a given charity to learn how to cook food in your restaurant.
A charity quiz, where donations are taken for entry and a free meal or dish is offered up as a prize.
As well as creating the ads it’s important to understand how to set up an audience using Facebook.
You can learn more about how to do that effectively here.
Or perhaps learning how to set up and run all these ads seems a bit much?
It’s easy to just read a blog like that and move on to the next thing.
You’re busy, we get it.
But don’t just sit on the sideline while your competitors blow up on facebook and leave you’re restaurant empty.
Set up a 30 minute FREE masterclass with one of our experts and start filling your restaurant today.
We’ll personally take time to learn about your brand and offer 3 quick and simple solutions to fill your restaurant.
That’s 30 minutes with a Facebook ad expert, FREE.
There’s no upsell or hidden fee, this is just us providing true value.
So book your free call now in a single click by hitting the button below.