Do you run a small/mid-sized restaurant?
Then you’ll love Facebook ads for restaurants.
Facebook is a marvelous tool for advertising your eatery. Through Facebook ads, you attract tons of new customers and turn occasional customers into loyal regulars. And that at an affordable price than other digital marketing strategies and traditional advertising tactics. Many businesses and food establishments like yours have achieved splendid success through Facebook advertising.
In this article, I will explain how to use Facebook ads for local businesses to make your restaurant popular and the go-to spot among locals
Why Facebook Ads To Promote Your Restaurant?
Not sure if Facebook is a viable online marketing channel?
There’s no need to hesitate because Facebook ads work superbly across industries and professions. The restaurant industry is no exception. The major benefit of Facebook that makes the platform tower above all digital marketing strategies is its detailed targeting capabilities. It allows you to target people based on location, gender, interests, and more.
We will discuss audience targeting in-depth later.
What Are The Benefits?
Why choose Facebook when there are countless digital marketing strategies?
Here are some top benefits of using Facebook Ads to promote your eating joint using restaurant Facebook ads:
Wide Reach
Facebook has a very large active audience. You market your restaurant to almost 3 billion Facebook users. Yes, billions, not that you need so many people coming to your eating house. But that’s just to show you how massive the social media marketing channel is. Not only are there many people on Facebook, but they are also deeply engaged, spending up to 1 hour per day on the platform.
Excellent Targeting
While it’s wonderful to have so many people to target, how do you narrow down your options to potential customers who are likely to engage with your Facebook ad campaigns? That’s where Facebook’s excellent targeting options come in. You target customer profiles better and create more engaging ads tailor-made for the target demographic.
Cost-Effective
Facebook marketing is economical. You can run an ROI-boosting ad campaign for a couple of hundred dollars. Not so with traditional advertising—it's crazy expensive. Look at the graphic below for a marketing channels cost comparison.
Source: Lyfe Marketing
Social media marketing channels trump traditional ones by a country mile. Among social channels, Facebook advertising, with a CPC that can be as low as $1 or less, is cheaper than other digital marketing paid ads platforms.
Boosts Traffic
Facebook ads for restaurants are excellent for increasing traffic to your landing page, where people can learn more about your delicious food. This traffic hike ultimately increases food orders at your food establishment.
The Initial Steps Of Starting A Marketing Campaign
This section will cover everything you must do to start a Facebook ads marketing campaign.
It all starts with a company Facebook page. Don’t have one yet? Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. You can learn how to set up a Facebook Business account in this article.
Install The Facebook Pixel
Besides your Facebook page, another essential for successful digital advertising is a website. Having a dedicated company website for their restaurant makes it easy to reach your target audience through Facebook.
To take your marketing efforts further, install a Facebook Pixel on it, if you haven’t done so already. In case you are wondering, a Facebook pixel is a piece of code you put on your website.
It acts as a link between your website and Facebook by collecting visitor information from your site and passing it on to Facebook. The pixel collects valuable data, such as:
This info makes it easy for you to retarget people who exited your website without converting.
How To Set Up A Facebook Pixel
How To Install The Facebook Pixel On Your Website
Now that you are done with setting up your Facebook Pixel, go to your website’s admin panel, where you will insert the code. The process starts on Facebook and finishes on your site.
Learn How The Ad Manager Works
To create a good Facebook ad for your business, you must first understand how the Facebook Ads Manager structures ad campaigns.
There are three major tabs on the Ad Manager:
Campaigns
Campaigns are the bedrock of a Facebook ad campaign. At the campaign level, you choose the major goal of your commercial. Do you want website traffic, likes on your Facebook page, or new customers at your restaurant? Ad sets help you execute your Facebook ad strategy and achieve your goal.
Ad Sets
With your restaurant marketing objective in mind, move on to ad sets. Ad sets are groups of ads. On this tab, you work on ad targeting. Decide your target audience, so you produce effective restaurants Facebook ads that line up with your goal. Such Facebook ads appeal to the needs of your target audience. Using Facebook’s detailed targeting options, pick a target audience based on location, interests, gender, and more. At the ad set stage, you also set your budget and schedule. Finally, decide the best ad placements for your Facebook advertising campaign so it’s seen by the right people.
Ads
Ad sets contain the individual ad creatives, that’s the last tab. The campaigns tab is for choosing a goal while the ad sets tab is for picking your audience. This tab deals with the different ad formats for reaching your potential customers efficiently. From images to videos, there are many ad formats to create effective Facebook ads for restaurants. We will dig into ad formats at your disposal later.
In summary, the tabs are connected and built into each other. A campaign contains ad sets, and an ad set contains a certain number of ads. That’s how you structure ads in Ads Manager.
You now understand the structure and flow of Facebook advertisements. Move to the next step.
Define Your Marketing Objective
For your Facebook ads for restaurants to resonate with Facebook users and drive action, have a simple marketing aim.
Facebook groups marketing objectives into three buckets:
Let’s unpack each category.
1. Awareness Objectives
Awareness objectives create an interest in your restaurant. How? Create and distribute enticing restaurant ads about the delicious food you serve and the warm atmosphere people can experience at your restaurant. This way people who know nothing about your restaurant will become aware it exists and visit you.
Awareness objectives include:
2. Consideration Objectives
Consideration objectives make people mull over your business offerings and reach out to you for more info.
3. Conversion Objectives
The goal of conversion objectives is driving specific actions on your Facebook pages, app, or website.
These actions include:
Identified and picked your marketing goal?
Great.
Next, work on the target people of your restaurant’s Facebook ad.
Decide On What Your Audience Will Be
Facebook ad targeting engine allows restaurant owners to advertise based less on keywords and more on interests.
Interest-based targeting is more powerful because they resonate instantly with people who have similar interests as those contained in the Facebook ad.
As a restaurant owner, target:
However, use Custom Audiences only if you already have an established audience whose specific interests you know very well. Then you can use those interests to create Lookalike Audiences on Facebook to unearth people with similar interests.
If not, build an audience from scratch.
Coming Up With A Good Restaurant Ad
With your audience sorted, it’s time to work on the Facebook ad itself.
Here’s how to set up your ad on the Ad Set tab.
Choose The Right Facebook Ad Format
First, choose the right Facebook ad for your restaurant marketing strategy.
Choose The Best Ad Placement
For your Facebook ads for restaurants to have the greatest exposure, the platform allows you to choose where they appear.
You can display them on the:
You can place your Facebook ad manually. Alternatively, let Facebook do all the hard work through automatic ad placements. If you are not a content marketing specialist or are new to restaurant marketing on Facebook, choose automatic placements.
To pick the right placement for your ad:
Here’s how the placements feature looks in Ad Manager.
Pick An Ideal Budget Option
For your Facebook ad campaign to run, you need money to bid for clicks.
You must allocate a budget for it.
There are two ways of allocating a budget on Facebook:
Automatic placements are the best option because it allows you to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. You don't have to worry about your daily budget limit or that your ad spend will be depleted before you land good deals for the day.
Set Delivery And Ad Scheduling
Once you’ve created your Facebook ad, schedule when it will appear to your prospective restaurant customers.
Here’s how to do it.
It’s wise to schedule your Facebook ads when your audience is most active. Use Facebook Audience Insights or split test to discover the best times.
So how many times should you show your restaurant’s Facebook ad to your target audience?
Standard practice says 2 to 3 times a week is optimal.
Direct Your Customers Towards Online Ordering
In a post-Covid pandemic environment, online shopping is the norm. More often than not, people prefer food delivered to them.
Any self-respecting restaurant owner should offer food deliveries to maximize this opportunity and add another revenue stream to their business.
The best people to target for online order offers are:
Offer Spectacular Deals And Coupons
Everybody loves a good deal. Digital coupons are a lucrative restaurant marketing strategy.
The best Facebook ads for restaurants include coupon offers. Use coupons to make hesitant prospects buy their first meal because of the generous discount you are offering.
You can also use them to reward repeat customers with price reductions.
Successful restaurants who see significant results from the Facebook ads coupon strategy group their coupons by:
Coupon deal restaurant ads highlight the benefits of the special.
Split Test Your Creatives
Split testing is a vital part of a solid restaurant Facebook ads marketing strategy.
A split test, aka A/B test, is comparing two or more elements of a web page or specific page element to find out which one performs best.
You can use split testing to:
Here’s how to split test your restaurant Facebook ads.
3 Restaurant Facebook Ads To Inspire Your Next Campaign
Here are three food industry Facebook ad examples to show you the kind of success you can have with Facebook advertising.
Pizza Hut Singapore saw impressive results by using mobile-optimized video ads to launch a new service office offering.
They used a Facebook ad video like the one below.
Another case study of a successful Facebook ad campaign is from Pollo Campero, a Guatemala fast-food restaurant chain. They saw a 75% decrease in order processing time and a 16% hike in orders placed at their food establishment through ad placements on the WhatsApp Business Platform.
The third example of a fruitful Facebook ad is one is from Black Swan Catering. The restaurant increased sales by a staggering 57% through Facebook Automated Ads.
In one month, the restaurant saw a 2x return on ad spend.
Win More Regular Customers With Facebook Ads For Restaurants
Admittedly, learning how Facebook ads for restaurants work is easy.
But profiting from them takes time.
To find the winning formula, follow these 3 guiding principles:
Master Facebook ads to move ahead of the competition and win more regular customers.
