What if you could take your restaurants customer database and use it find more customers just like the VERY BEST ones in there?
Well you can, it’s called a Lookalike Audience within Facebook.
Three of the best sources you can use to create these audiences are:
– Your Customer List (the finer tuned the better)
– Your Facebook Video Views
– Your Website Visitors.
Why do you want to do this? It’s pretty simple. You take these sources and in Facebooks ads platform your can use them to create what’s called a “lookalike audience.” This allows you to find people JUST LIKE the people in that list/source and then run ads to get them to visit your restaurant, join your VIP club, cater an event from your restaurant, etc. In episode 590 of my podcast, Restaurant Marketing Secrets, I spoke about this GOLDEN opportunity. CLICK HERE to listen on Spotify.
Ok, so let’s talk about how I would use each of these sources to find customers for a restaurant.
1st – Your customer list. I HOPE you have a way to identify who your best customers are. Meaning you’re using a product like Repeat Returns to drive trackable sales at the customer level and associate it to their name, email and phone number. If you are, then you can take that segment of your customer list and upload it to Facebook. Then you create an audience that looks JUST LIKE THEM and target the best zip codes around your restaurant. Once you create that audience you’re going to take them into a “Restaurant Customer Acquisition Funnel” with an offer so good they’d feel stupid saying no to. And now you’re building a brand new customer list for your restaurant that will dryve new sales. Another huge benefit about ads like this is when customers who look JUST LIKE your best customers engage in the ads, Facebook and Instagram optimize them. Meaning, the algorithm uses machine learning and AI to find more people just like the best customers in your rewards/loyalty database.
2nd – Facebook Video Views – You should be using video marketing on your Facebook page to engage your customers. And when you do use videos you can create lookalike audiences based on their engagement of your video. As an example, lets say you’re a restaurant that’s decided to partner with America’s Best Restaurants and the ABR Roadshow to have us feature your restaurant. You can take the people who watched 50% of that 12 minute video and create an audience of people who look JUST LIKE those highly engaged viewers. Then you do exactly what I said in #1, you target them with an irresistable reason to visit your restaurant.
3rd – Your Restaurants Website Visitors – There’s this amazing tool that way too many restaurants are ignoring called the Facebook Pixel. It’s a simple line of code that you install on your website and it gives you the ability to create audiences based on who visits your website. As an example, let’s say your restaurant offering catering and has a page on your site for catering business events, wedding, etc. Well, if you had the pixel on there you could not only target the people who visited that page with an ad “looking to cater an event”, but you could create an audience that looks just like those customers are target them as well.
I could give you 50 other ways to leverage this tool to drive sales into your restaurant, it’s that powerful.
Below is a pretty solid video on the topic. I don’t personally know the author, but he covers the topic pretty well.
See you tomororw,
Matt
