Marketing isn’t just making a Facebook post every day.

It’s not just sending an email to send an email.

It’s not waking up on February 10th and saying “what are we doing for Valentine’s Day this year, how about this?”

And more importantly it’s not something you do and don’t have expectations, DEMANDS actually. 

I’m of the opinion that anything worth doing, is worth measuring and when I see the state of restaurant marketing today it’s apparent I don’t share that mindset with most restauants.

First, you must have a goal for your business.  Next you must have a marketing plan to help with that goal.  And finally you must have some DEMANDS from that marketing plan

As an example, one of those demands should be a trackable path, AKA restaurant marketing funnel, for the marketing efforts.

I went down a rabbit hole the other day of looking at what restaurants do on Facebook on VERY EASY “marketing holidays” to get attention.  But more importantly I wanted to know what their FUNNEL was. 

As I suspected, most just make a post with a weak call to action.  No tools to take advantage of engagement and no way to measure if it was effective.  In fact the only measuring stick they have is seeing it got NO engagement.  

AND GOD FORBID they have a funnel that leads to trackable sales.

THEN I looked at another marketing campaign that was planned, executed at a high level and measured.

It was a restaurants post for “National Pet Day” on April 11th.  The post was made on April 8th, but planned well in advance.  Planning this allowed for amazing graphics to be created, a solid CTA and a traffic driving strategy to be put in place. 

Over the next week I’m going to talk about my “Restaurant Marketing Demands” and today we’ll start with my FIRST DEMAND…

MEASUREMENT OF SUCCESS!

Let’s talk about what you should DEMAND from a simple 1 off marketing campaign like this and what happened.

#1 – You should demand it get attention, eyeballs!

#2 – You should demand it get’s engagement!

#3 – You should demand a path where that engagement equals customers opting into your restaurants marketing program

#4 – You should demand your restaurants marketing program have trackable systems in place to know who’s in your funnel, when they visit, when they don’t visit, etc. (more on that on the next blog).

SOOOOOO, what happened with this campaign?

But first, here’s how we build our campaigns

We make an organic Facebook post, then we put a $25 ad behind it targeting one of their custom audiences.  Next we send either a text, email or messenger campaign.  In this one we used Facebook Messenger.

No onto the stats (some images below.

#1 – EYEBALLS = It had 3,753 impressions and 2,605 people reached on the post.  It was aprox a 50/50 split between organic and paid traffic.  Now keep in mind, 2,605 LOCAL CUSTOMERS is a solid solid number.  Too many times we think posts need a HUGE audience, but I think you’d all welcome 2,605 customers walking through your doors soon :). The Messenger broadcast (pictured below) had a 76% open rate and reached 2,034 people.  We don’t have anyway to cross reference the audience from each, so I can’t even guess what the duplication would be.

#2 – FINGERS…AKA clicks, comments, shares AKA ENGAGEMENTS = 521 Facebook post engagements including 218 comments and 226 clicks.  The messenger broadcast had a 7% click through rate, which is HUGE.  Emails commonly get under a 1% click through rate.  This one had 191 clicks!!!

#3 – DATA = Aprox 53 people joined their restaurants customer marketing program through these engagements.  Now a single social media campaign takes some WORK to drill down to sales in our system right now.  WHY?  Because many of these campaigns are bulked together since they are all part of a bigger picture.  We are working on a better tracking solution for our new platform, so stay tuned.  BUT as I’m typing this I did a little leg work to simply grab a little data for you, plus it’s LATE at night and I’m tired.  In the week around the promo aprox 15 NEW customers walked into restaurant as a result of this post and spent around $525.  

$500 FREAKING DOLLARS IN SALES FROM A PET CAMPAIGN!

DEMAND RESULTS!

A simple 1-off campaign reached a few thousand people, got around 800 people to engage and drove 15 BRAND NEW customers in to spend $525.  

HMMMMM, what if they did that EVERY WEEK?

But more importantly, what if they are like many of you and don’t have a plan set up to KNOW that happened, then they’d never know if they should do these more often.