How To Make The Most Out Of Your Restaurant’s Digital Ad Campaigns

Great food and customer service are essential to the success of a restaurant, but are they enough?- It is equally important to market your restaurant’s great food and service to potential customers. Without digital advertising, your restaurant loses out on potential customers.Restaurant owners can use advertising to highlight their services and distinctiveness to hundreds and thousands of potential customers. You can target everyone with the pay and spray approach when running digital ads. However, we advise you to create a budget and define your audience’s interests, demographics, and keywords to run a campaign for a niche audience. For trackability and ROI, the latter is a better option.

Even if you are a new business with a limited budget and are starting off, thanks to the Internet, restaurants can reach out to prospective new customers in innovative ways, and social media is no exception. You can start running ads to your target audience with just a Facebook page regardless of your followers. Unfortunately, most restaurants don't use paid social. For example, 50.9% of Rewards Network restaurants say they haven't utilized any paid digital promotion.

Knowing the most successful opportunities to advertise your restaurant online and how to use the right tools to their total capacity could mean the difference between attracting guests and empty tables. You can use advertising to promote your restaurant’s unique selling points, limited-time offers, and campaigns to entice new customers or bring back your existing customers to visit your restaurant.

Best Practices To Get The Best Out Of Your Online Advertising

1. Look For People Who Are Looking For Restaurants In Your Region.

Your restaurant’s ads can target specific locations, zip codes, or radius on all ad platforms, such as Google ads, Facebook, Yelp, etc. However, running ads in a shorter radius can be beneficial that target store visits or calls on Google Maps.

When it comes to growing a restaurant, one of the significant mistakes marketers make is not targeting the correct demographic with ads. Rather than just marketing yourself as a ‘Restaurant,’ you should provide your restaurant category such as ‘Seafood Restaurant,’ ‘Italian Restaurant.’ Hence, you target specific customers who are searching for that cuisine.

You may ask your employees how far most customers travel, but you can be confident that almost all diners would not travel over 30-45 minutes to get to your restaurant.

People search for a nearby restaurant unless you're holding a big event or if you’ve positioned yourself as your community's go-to destination.

You may use this knowledge to enhance by only showing restaurant advertisements to those searching in your region.

Your goals will be determined by the range you specify, and you may run many ad campaigns during the week. Here are some ideas on how you might enhance geographic targeting depending on your objectives:

• Weekly Lunch Or Dinner: Many restaurants have had excellent success using Digital Ads to increase awareness and foot traffic for certain menus. You can advertise a special lunch menu or a combo for dinner.
• Special Events And Occasions: You can select a broader regional range for special events such as concerts or live bands.
• Holidays And Celebrations: Most people opt for restaurants to host a celebration or to celebrate a holiday event. Valentine's Day, Father's Day, Mother's Day, and other holidays have high demand each year. For these occasions, you can start advertising 2-3 weeks before the events take place to get reservations and create awareness that your restaurant has a promotion or a unique combo for these events.
• Event Manager: Restaurants can utilize the events manager to target individuals who have occasions such as upcoming birthdays or anniversaries, to name a few. If you are a fine dining restaurant, your customers will be searching for a nice place to dine out when they have a special occasion. If your restaurant takes reservations, don’t forget to offer a special combo or free item to the birthday person who books a group of 6 or more.

2. Place Bids On Relevant Keywords With High Search Intent

Restaurant ads on Google are an excellent way to generate highly targeted traffic. You may choose to run brand awareness and reach ads for a new restaurant or go with store visits or get calls to get more foot traffic. We recommend focusing your ad spend on a geographic place near your restaurant or within a 10-20 mile radius, depending on the ad you opt for.

Most restaurant operators should avoid using generic keywords in their ads because they assume they should bid on expensive keywords like the [location] of restaurant. We recommend avoiding phrases that are too broad. These keywords create a lot of traffic volume, but they also have competition. Generic keywords will eat up your marketing budget and produce poor results.

Here are a few food advertisement examples of how you can employ long-tail keywords in your advertising campaigns:

• Your Restaurant's Name: It is to make you up to date while also combating the efforts of review sites such As TripAdvisor. You'll see that Yelp and other restaurant review websites rule the SERPs, which means you may be losing customers in the middle of the customer journey.
• Brunch/Sunday Brunch: For many communities, brunch and particularly Sunday brunch has become a fixture. If your restaurant provides Sunday Brunch, you can promote it with restaurant advertisements.
• Vegan And Specialty Menu Items: Many consumers seek restaurants that provide unique menu items like vegan and kosher cuisine. Make sure to use target these interests in your ads and your ad descriptions.
• Live Music & Fun: If your eatery has live music or several other entertainment options, you can highlight these in Google restaurant advertisements.
• Holidays And Special Events: Your restaurant can increase foot traffic throughout holidays or other special events. Some occasions, such as Valentine's Day, present the ideal opportunity to outperform your competitors and increase restaurant demand by advertising a special combo throughout the holidays or for the special event.

3. Make A Change To Your Restaurant's Ad Schedule

• Weekly Lunch Or Dinner Crowds: If you want to increase foot traffic to your business during your restaurant operation hours, or schedule your ads to show an hour before you open.
• Special Events/Entertainment: You may use Google advertisements to promote an upcoming show or gathering at your restaurant to a specific demographic.
• Holidays And Celebrations: You may run Google restaurant advertising in the following weeks to a holiday to promote awareness and generate more reservations.

4. Incorporate Ad Extensions Into Your Restaurant Advertisements

• Call Extension
• Location Extension
• Review Extensions
• Sitelink Extensions
• Structured Snippet

5. Promote Your Brand With Remarketing Ads

Do you want to increase brand exposure and re-engage potential buyers that visit your website? Using the Google Display Network with remarketing advertisements can assist your business regardless of what you're trying to achieve.

With remarketing advertisements, you'll be able to reinforce your brand or have a cost-effective approach to stay in touch with your clients after they visit your website.

Many website visits will not engage, but you can leverage Google Display Network to display banner advertising across the Internet on all Google platforms such as Youtube, Gmail, etc.

Remarketing is an excellent concept for business models based on direct conversions, as it allows you to reach out to new clients and expand your web presence.

6. Why You Can’t Ignore Facebook

Out of all social media platforms, Facebook is the number one social media channel in the world. The majority of your target audience accesses Facebook multiple times a day. The platform has 66% of its users accessing it daily and 2.89 billion mobile daily active users.

The platform allows you to run different kinds of ads. You can run carousel ads to show different menu items, run targeted ads to a custom audience, target specific occasions coming up, or target audiences based on their demographics or interests, to name a few. Being present on Facebook means you are present where your customers are.

 

Digital Marketing For Restaurants Can Help You Grow Your Business

Suppose you've never heard of Online Ads or are undecided about whether or not to utilize online advertisements as part of your restaurant marketing plan. We highly recommend you give them a try. In addition, we highly recommend running ongoing ads to achieve your restaurant’s marketing objectives.

Remember that restaurant marketing depends on your capacity to connect with qualified prospects in your area. You may tell your narrative with appealing ad language and add attachments to showcase more information.

You may have a lot of say in the type of audience you expose your material to after they walk through the door. You may pay a penny of your sales on restaurant advertisements and get your business to be seen by the right people. These restaurant promotional campaigns and web marketing suggestions add benefits to your restaurant. They boost your trustworthiness, which is crucial for creating long-term consumer and commercial partnerships in the hotel industry.

Consider BestPOS if you are looking for a professionally seasoned agency to do online advertising for your restaurant.