It’s great to be back!

We ventured out to our local pub for Friday night pizza last week, and it felt fantastic! Feedback resoundingly says the hospitality industry have worked extremely hard to create safe but sociable spaces, and customers are starting to come back.

As restaurants fire up their ovens, the competition is also starting to heat up in this very busy, highly competitive sector.

We believe social advertising offers exceptional opportunities to keep customers coming through the door. 

1. TARGETING 

Facebook Ads Manager (also covers Instagram) is head and shoulders above any other platform for finding your audience. There simply isn’t a quicker, cheaper or more efficient way to find your customers. If you’re already running ads, are you fully utilising the following:

• Location targeting, including ‘recently in this location’

  1. Interest based audiences

  2. Audiences built from your website visitors or email lists

  3. Re-targeting from your Facebook pixel

  4. Lookalike audiences

  5. Audience layering

2. CONTENT OPPORTUNITY

Restaurants, bars and hotels provide a wealth of fantastic creative opportunities. Focus on food, atmosphere and feel good. With social media usage at an all-time high this year, hospitality businesses can compete well on news feeds with vibrant, scroll stopping ads. The marketing ‘Rule of 7’ which says a brand needs at least 7 touchpoints before a consumer will consider buying is easily (and cheaply) achieved across socials.

3. ROLLING WITH THE SEASONS

Social ads are nothing if not nimble. A good campaign strategy will account for peaks and troughs and maximise the opportunities in those periods.

4. CALL TO ACTION (CTA)

Social ads are optimised and designed to deliver a particular outcome, so you can point your warm audiences directly to booking a table, or taking up your special offer.

5. SALES FUNNEL

Your CTA button is going to get the best results as part of an optimised sales funnel. Build your campaign to create interest through brand awareness, drive the desire to visit through re-targeting and encourage the harder nuts through the door with Messenger Ads.

6. LIFETIME VALUE

Hopefully the experience you give your customers boosts their lifetime value considerably once they’ve been through your doors, but ads (and organic social) are a low maintenance route to ensuring they become loyal fans.

We’d love to talk to any hospitality businesses interested in testing ads. We know times have been tough, and are looking at ‘starter’ packages to support your re-opening.

Julie and Sophie specialise in social advertising and Google ads. Before lockdown we were running restaurant ads with a ROAS (return on ad spend) of up to x 28 (that’s £28 of revenue generated for every £1 spent).