Here’s how to get people into your restaurant or bar using Facebook in 2019!
Restaurants and bars are always particularly sceptical about the immediate effect of social media campaigns on their business. We get it. It’s really hard to track whether business is picking up or not when you’re running a campaign. The big problem is usually that you could run a campaign in January, and people might not come into your restaurant until February, so how do you know that the reason they’re there is that they saw something you posted to Facebook? Well, read on!
Carpet Bombs Work!
You’re probably fed up of us banging on about carpet bombing. We’ve been using it since it was thought up, and it’s worked a treat for the whole of 2018. 2019 is going to be no different! If you’re a local business with a store-front, then carpet bombing is the NUMBER 1 strategy that you should be adopting on social media, before anything else. Ok, so here’s the deal:
You’ll want to follow this strategy, and don’t be afraid to test at least 3-5 creatives, preferably video! We’ve tested things like promoting recent news articles about the restaurant or blog post reviews about the restaurant to areas around the location of the business.
If you’re lucky enough to be opening at a new location then a news article about the new location opening up will work incredibly well! People love to jump on the hype and they’ll share that post with everyone they eat with!
The best performing content has always been videos of the chefs cooking a special dish. Let’s take a special side dish for example, like sweet chilli fries or wedges. Make the video similar to something like this and you can’t go wrong! https://www.facebook.com/tastemade/videos/1359076277512869/
Retargeting
This is where the results happen. Once you drop your carpet bomb video you have to retarget with a solid offer. We’ve tested a few but what has worked the best is offering whatever dish was in your carpet bomb for FREE. So if it was the side of sweet chilli fries, offer that dish to everyone for FREE! It’s up to you whether you add conditions to the offer, but we suggest doing whatever it takes to get people through the door! If people spend an average of £20-30 per visit and return 1-2 times a month then offering a free side dish is a no-brainer! They’ll probably never come alone either!
The great thing with Facebook is you don’t have to be overcomplicated with a landing page on your website etc. You can just use a Facebook Offer so people choose to claim their code. You can limit the amount of codes that can be claimed, adding scarcity to the offer making people act faster! Only having 50-100 free dishes available means people will claim the code so they don’t miss out.
You can use the coupon code to track how many customers actually come into the restaurant/bar. Add up the bills of anyone who used the Facebook coupon code and see how much revenue you get from the campaign.
What’s Next?
The key now is to build on what you’ve got from this campaign. There will be a buzz around your page and people will be talking. This is where a good messenger bot can be just as effective as SMS Messages and Email Campaigns. Retarget all the people who have engaged in your campaign in some way (video views, post engagement, offer claims etc) with a post inviting them to join your messenger list for access to discounts, free stuff etc. You could be talking 100’s of people in your list right from the get-go, who you can send an offer to using your messenger bot. It’s so effective. the messenger bot we use is Manychat, but we have no affiliation to it and there are many others out there you may prefer.
