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3 Reasons Restaurant’s Facebook Ads Will Fail (and how to fix them)
3 Reasons Messenger is the Best Marketing Solution for Restaurants
May 24, 2019
If you own a restaurant in 2019, it’s incredibly likely that you are aware you can run ads to promote your restaurant on Facebook. In fact, it’s very likely you have already tried your hand at using Facebook ads to promote your restaurant.
☝️The famous book now ad seems logical, but, it really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The process of setting up a Facebook ad for a restaurant commonly looks like this:
Step 1:
Design the post/ad; this usually consists of having an image and some supporting text that will be served to your target audience.Step 2:
Upload or post it to Facebook with a link or button that takes people to your menu or a booking link.Step 3:
Target the ad at a group of people (local food fans, website visitors etc), set the budget and schedule and launch the ad. On the face of it, this seems like a foolproof way to advertise. You literally choose who sees the ad, pay a low fee to get it in front of them and wait for people to start visiting or booking. But although Facebook or Instagram ads are extremely easy to set up, they often leave restaurant owners confused as it can be very hard to track the return on investment. Maybe bookings increased, but certainly not by much, maybe walk-ins increased, maybe they didn’t? In fact, if you were to ask yourself how much money actually went in your cash register as a result of you running an ad on Facebook, you’d likely draw a blank. It’s just not an easy number to track with so many variables at play, how do you know if they came as a result of your ad? If they did, it can be very hard to have a clear view of what they actually spent. This leads us to our first reason restaurant ads often fail.Reason 1 - You don’t know your numbers
☝️An example of the dashboard we use, because what can be measured can be managed!
When you run any kind of marketing the first thing you need to know is how much money it makes you. If you don’t know the answer to this question, you will never be able to confidently spend enough to scale any ad campaign, you are just guessing.
Solution: Make sure you come up with a way to register a sale from your ad.
For example, if you are advertising an offer of some sort, create a mechanism to digitally validate a redemption in store. This could be by tapping a button on an email with a voucher in, scanning a QR code, using a messenger chatbot or logging redemption details in your POS system (the latter being a little more disruptive to staff but can still work). The next problem with an ad that asks someone to book now is due to the nature of social media and people's behavior patterns.Reason 2 - People are not ready to book, yet!
☝️Do these people look ready to book a table at your restaurant right this second?
When do you go on social media most? On the train to work, late at night, early in the morning, when you are generally bored right?
Social media is really a boredom cure for most people, it’s not often you plan a day with your friends to go on social media, you tend to go on there when you have nothing to do or need 5 minutes off from the real world, right?
This makes social media a terrible place to go straight in for the kill and expect everyone to book or visit, right off the bat.
The reality is most people need to arrange a restaurant visit and they are not just going to suddenly book a table for a restaurant when they are on the train home from work or tucked up in bed at midnight.
So if they won’t book now, what will they do?
Solution: Create some kind of offer or loyalty program for people to join now. Find a way to add everyone that shows an ounce of interest to a database so you can stay at the front of their mind ready for when they are planning their next restaurant visit.
If you are promoting an offer, tell people that they must join your offer program to get a voucher. When someone joins, they either sign up to your messenger channel, give their phone number or hand over their email (it’s best to do all three if you can!). By giving them a reason to hand over their contact details it creates way less friction and will give you a huge opportunity to convert them into customers later. Remember, just because someone isn’t ready to book right now, we don’t want to lose them! This leads us to the final reason ads often fail.Reason 3: You have no way of reaching all the people that didn’t book unless you pay Facebook again.
☝️You should aim to never pay Facebook more than ONCE to reach the same person! Build your own audience!!
Think about it, the vast majority of people might be interested in your restaurant, but because they didn’t book right then, we have no way of getting them back unless we run more ads.
Even if they follow your page, you still don’t actually own any of their data, and with the way the social media algorithms work, most of your followers will never see your content.
If you have to pay Facebook to reach someone multiple times, it is a very inefficient way of advertising and the only people that will profit is Facebook, who’s the audience you are effectively renting.
Solution: Stop renting your audience and set up a mechanism to send out reminders, news, updates and new offers for free.
☝️You should aim to never pay Facebook more than ONCE to reach the same person! Build your own audience!!
Adding people to an automated Messenger channel is probably the most cost-effective way to do this as the open rates are higher, but even an email system will still work to some extent. The key thing here is to create your own audience database that you can message for FREE in the future.
Imagine having thousands of local fans connected to your brand on Messenger, imagine having the ability to contact that list to promote your offers or menu items at will, and be sure 85% of those people will see the message within 5 minutes. Powerful.
Do you want to start building a database for your restaurant using Facebook Messenger? Download our FREE guide and take action NOW!
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