5 reasons to use Facebook ads If you own a restaurant

A low-cost, high-impact way of increasing customers & promoting your local business

August 16, 2017

Nowadays, one of the cheapest and by far the most powerful methods of getting your business discovered is by advertising on Facebook.

But how much can it actually help your restaurant or cafe?

For small, local businesses, the benefits of Facebook advertising can be broken down into four areas:

  • Hyper-local targeting
  • Low financial cost
  • Low time cost
  • Low competition

Hyper-Local targeting

This basically means being able to target and reach your customers on an extremely detailed level.

Let’s imagine we were running a vegetarian restaurant in Amsterdam - in a few clicks, Facebook allows us to find out our market size.

A quick Facebook audience search reveals there are around 50,000 people matching the following criteria:

  • Within 4km of Amsterdam centre
  • Age 20-55
  • Male & female
  • Dutch or English speaking
  • Interested in vegetarianism, veganism or vegetarian cuisine.
‍Now we know our market size 💁🏻

So, we now know there are plenty of people who might be interested in our restaurant who are within 5-20 minutes bike-ride.

All we need to do now is great a compelling advertising campaign to persuade these people to come to our restaurant the next time they are looking for a delicious meat-free meal.

We'll cover how to advertise to them in different article. In addition, there are even more advanced and intelligent ways of targeting customers, which we’ll also cover in a future article.

For now, let's move on to the next benefit...

Low Financial Cost

Facebook can be employed very cheaply to reach people that want to find out about you.

Firstly, did you know that you can reach over 1,000 people for under €10?

I recently conducted a Facebook advertising campaign that was able to reach 5,902 people for €40 in total. That means for each €1 spent, 147 people saw my advert! 

(Note: this cost will depend on who you are targeting and how much competition there is from other advertisers.)

Secondly, you only pay when someone clicks on your advert. This means that you don't waste money on showing your advert to people that are not interested at that time.

Lastly, you can set daily, weekly, monthly & lifetime budgets to prevent costs from spiralling out of control. For example: let’s say you have a monthly budget of €155, you can set your advert to run over a period of 31 days, spending a maximum of €5 per day. Your advert will simply stop showing for that day once that limit is reached.

Being able to control your costs automatically and keep the adverts running is incredibly useful for small businesses.

‍A nice steady graph of advert spend hitting a daily limit of £5 😅

Low Time Cost

One of the great things about Facebook advertising is once you decide your budget, target audience and advert campaign, you can set it and forget it!

Apart from checking the results, there's nothing you need to do except let the customers roll in.

To make sure the advert is performing well, I recommend reviewing its performance every week and making small changes to see how it improves your response rate. This should take less than one hour.

To make life easier, you can pay a professional digital marketer like me to handle it all for you - I offer a managed Facebook advertising from as little as €99 per month.

Facebook advertising takes up very little time - so you can spend more time selling 💰

Low Competition

Lots of big companies have colonised Facebook with their advertising expertise and we regularly see adverts targeted at us from companies we already know.

There is a gap, however, for small restaurants to advertise themselves. Since moving to Amsterdam, I have never seen an advert on Facebook for a vegetarian restaurant, despite being interested in vegetarian/vegan groups and restaurants in the city.

In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an advert for a restaurant at all.

There is a gaping opportunity for smart business owners to leverage the power of Facebook to attract new customers.

This could be your restaurant! 🥑

Real Results

This is all well and good, but does it actually work?

I have seen amazing results from advertising on Facebook. For instance, we were able to reach 100,000 people on a budget of less the €200, of which 2,700 people eventually took the action we were asking for. In small restaurant terms, this would be the equivalent of getting 2,700 people to write a review of your business online.

The Facebook adverts site is equally full of success stories of how local businesses were able to use it to bring in more customers and make more sales - around 20% on average.

This graph shows how a Facebook advert can give you a huge lift in website and restaurant visitors 👍🏿

Conclusion

Facebook advertising is a powerful method of reaching local people who you know are interested in what your business provides.

We can easily control the time and money that we put into it, and when done intelligently, it provides amazing results that will grow the amount of customers you attract to your business.

In my next post, I'll talk about how we can construct a Facebook advertising campaign to maximise clicks and increase traffic to both your website and physical location.

I offer a managed Facebook advertising from as little as €99 per month - please get in touch to find out more about how I can grow your local business.

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