The Instagram comments never let me down! This week it was @jaymckinley123 telling me we couldn’t do what we’ve been doing for around 10 years…HMMMM
Here’s how the story goes. Back in 2015 Nick, a client who owned 3 restaurants said “Matt I can’t deposit likes.” This comment was in response to me showing him how we’d grown 1 of the restaurants Facebook following from 3,000 fans to 39,000 fans. To put this in perspective, his 3 restaurants did about $24 million in annual sales and I was in charge of an advertising budget over $1 million annually. When I started helping them as their marketing agency and consultant we spent 99% of the budget on Radio, TV, outdoor and direct mail coupons. WHY? Because that’s what they’d been doing for years and I don’t change things until I understand what we have. By 2015 I’d been able to work in digital marketing. We were DOMINATING Facebook with Live videos weekly that yours truly was doing for them. We’d also been collecting a ton of customer data in-store through a Kiosk I bought and started building loyalty programs to funnel their best customers to.
BUT, they had not yet me move much of the paid advertising money over to Facebook and YouTube. I won’t go down that road, for that you can watch the YouTube video below about how we built this company into a nationwide powerhouse for marketing restaurants from this conversation.
So let’s break down HOW your restaurant can take Facebook comments, website visitors and people you find through paid Facebook ads and turn them into a customer database, but more importantly drive SALES.
First, to do what I’m talking about here, you need to have a tech stack for your restaurant that does some fancy stuff. We have all of this built into Repeat Returns, so it you want it done for you, simply ask us. or CLICK HERE. And on top of that, you could really use help from a marketing expert or some education. In case you don’t know about the Restaurant RGA Guide, CLICK HERE. It’s an amazing training from ABR U!
Now back to the blog 🙂
1st – You need to have 3 items in place outside of the tool to make this magic work. You need to have a website pop-up, the Facebook Comment Growth Tool and paid Facebook ads. All 3 of these items will have an offer so good people would feel stupid saying no to. Once they engage it will start the process of gaining their data and driving them into the restaurants.
2nd – The stats below tell the story. This 1st picture is of one of our BEST restaurant clients. This owner has 1 pizza restaurant and he listens to every we say and he takes massive action. These results are from aprox 2 years.
– The 1st line shows where 6,548 customers opted into his marketing program that we built through paid ads on Facebook. That drove 2,145 visits and $60,000 in sales!
– The 2nd line is exactly what it says, his website pop-up. This gathered 2,045 customers information and drove $35,000 in sales from 1,185 visits.
– And the next 3 lines are all through comments on Facebook Comments. We gained 1,986 customers into their database and 835 of them visited and spent $24,567.
Now keep in mind, ALL OF THIS is only the front end of the customer journey. I can call you that these customers are responsible for HIGH six figures in annual sales and millions in lifetime sales. By the end of 2024 we’ll have all of our systems built into Repeat Returns (new name coming soon) and we’ll be able to show the customers entire journey.
I don’t think I need to dive deep into the #s below. This is the 2nd restaurant I spoke about in the podcast that inspired this blog (link below).. They have worked with us for about a year and take some of our advice. But, as you can see, they still have great results and are ROI positive.
So now that I’ve 100% squashed the online hater and proved without a reasonable doubt that you can show Facebook conversations, meaning taking customers from Facebook and depositing cash in the bank, let’s look at the big picture.
Below is a screenshot of our Restaurant Customer Acquisition dashboard. This shows the lifetime numbers that this customer has received through this program on the FRONT END. So in 1 year we were able to build a database that was 46% new customers and 22% lost customers. When you take the $38,000 in total sales and pull out ONLY the new and lost customers along with the food cost, that part of the program drove aprox $18,000 in net incremental PROFIT plus gained a boat load of customer data.
That’s it, that’s all I got for today, see you tomorow.
Matt
P.S. I did a podcast on this blog post, check out episode 598 of Restaurant Marketing Secrets for more insight on how you can do this for your restaurant. CLICK HERE
