The restaurant industry has been one of the most affected from Coronavirus.
With the UK on lock-down the only way to generate orders now is to push your takeaway offering. However relying on the takeaway platforms to bring in orders isn't always reliable. Also your organic posts only reach between 1-3% of your followers- on a good day!
We know that Facebook Ads can guarantee reach and exposure to your local community, but to beginners it can seem intimidating to set one up properly.
That is why we've recorded a simple AF guide to launching your first ever Facebook Ad for your restaurant that will reach EVERYONE in your delivery radius.
And you can create one in under 15 minutes!
This video walk through only scratches the surface of what you can do and is meant for businesses who have never tried social media advertising, so it is a rough and ready tutorial for ensuring your business gets seen fast!
We used Wandsworth as an example and for £20 a day you could reach 17k residents who use Deliveroo, Justeat and Ubereats.
ANY restaurant owner (or other small business) who wants a free walk-through with us holding your hand (metaphorically!😷) and tailoring the campaign for your business check out our Local Biz Booster now!
👇 If you don't want to watch me/listen to my nasally voice here are written instruction 👇
🤳 What are Facebook Ads? 🤳
When you scroll on social media approximately 1 in 3 stories or posts on your Facebook and Instagram feeds are ads created by businesses that have paid to reach you.
Facebook's comprehensive advertising tools allow businesses to target very specific audiences with tailored advertising messages.
Paid social media advertising is the fastest growing advertising channel globally, Facebook has seen a steady increase in advertising revenue, simply because it works.
96% of marketers consider Facebook ads the most effective form of advertising available with any business able to generate meaningful, measure results from just £5 a day
More so than ever, screen time is increasing and businesses owners NEED to ensure they reach their target audience
Now could be the perfect time to experiment with the most cost-effective advertising platform available in 2020.
🚫 Why you should NEVER press boost post 🚫
Facebook always makes it so tempting doesn't it.
Sending you gentle reminders like 'ooh your post could be reaching 2,000 more people, wanna boost it?'
Please don't
Boosting a post doesn't fully utilise the extent of options available to you with regards to audience targeting, the type of ad and most importantly it's optimised for 'engagements' not on people actually taking that action. Also you are missing out on a ton of data to easily test, compare and improve your adverts
😁 Creating Your First Ad Campaign 😁
The first step is to open your Facebook Ads Manager.
To find out if you already have a business manager account or create a new one go to:
https://business.facebook.com/ and go through the simple set up instructions there to create an account.
Once you are in ads manager you can select 'Create' which should be somewhere on the left hand side (some users view will be slightly different depending on if your view is the updated ads manager or previous version).
You will see there are 3 'levels' to a Facebook Ads campaign.
Campaign
Ad Set
Ad
The 'Campaign' level is where you set the objective you want to achieve for your ad campaign.
The 'Ad Set' level is where you decide WHO you are showing the ad too as well as WHERE the ad gets placed. The 'Ad' level is where you set up the creative (image/video), the copy (the text that accompanies the ad) and the destination (where you are taking the audience after the ad).
We recommend clearly labelling each level and to develop a clear system of labelling over time.
Trust us it will help when you come to compare and review different ad's performances!
🏆 What's Your Objective? 🏆
There are many objectives you can set when creating a campaign. This will dictate how your ads manager measures 'success' as well as what Facebook tries to optimise for. For the purpose of this campaign and getting orders please focus on 'Traffic' or 'Conversions'.
By selecting 'Traffic' you are telling Facebook for the maximum amount of people to click the ad and visit the page you want them too. If you have your pixel set up and measuring conversions then choose conversions. If the last sentence doesn't make sense to you please click the traffic objective!
💵 Budgeting & Schedule 💵
For an initial test we recommend a minimum spend of £5 per day per ad created. Anything less and you don't give the Facebook machine enough juice to provide any conclusive results.
The higher the budget, the more people you reach, more often. Giving your ad the maximum chance it has to perform and for Facebook to learn more about your audience and who is likely to convert.
Pick an appropriate amount and you can see on the right hand side as you create your estimated daily results in terms of reach and estimates link clicks.
But...
Remember this is only an estimate, if you show a highly relevant ad to the right audience, you will smash these estimates!
If you have your own takeaway page and know the conversion rate (what percentage of page visitors end up ordering) then you can do some quick maths and base your budget on that.
The aims for your first ever campaign should be to learn more about your audience, which ad creative can work and can you break even. Then you can build upon this and scale up your advertising.
🎯 Who to Target? 🎯
This is the exciting part where we can select your audience and play around. For a beginner campaign we recommend keeping it as broad as possible. Maybe just targeting everyone within your delivery radius and let the Faebook algorithm do the hard work. You can get super specific and also narrow down to your perfect customer, which may be relevant for certain offers or future events.
But right now it's about generating mass awareness and orders!
I'd recommend watching the video tutorial from 7 mins 43 seconds for this specific section to show you how to create an audience.
For the purposes of this campaign I've created audiences for 10km from Wandsworth Town train station and selected individuals who use JustEat, Deliveroo and UberEats.
👤 10km Radius interested in JustEat, Deliveroo and UberEats: 430,000 individuals
£20 a day = 4.7k to 14k reach / 52 to 149 page views
I also created an audience where I narrowed down those users to people who also love Sushi!
👤 10km Radius interested in JustEat, Deliveroo and UberEats AND Sushi: 46,000 individuals
£20 a day = 3.4k to 9.8k reach / 34 to 97 page views
As you can see on the images, £20 a day spend on either audience would attract significant daily clicks and reach.
If a Sushi restaurant in Wandsworth decided to focus on Sushi lovers and spent £20 a day for 1 week it could:
Reach 46k Sushi Lovers within their delivery radius (probably multiple times)
Get over 600 clicks to their designated delivery page
Say that even if only 5% of visitors per day ended up ordering from them that would be 3-5 customers a day and if their average order value was £15 each time this stacks up. So for spending £140 on ads (20 x £7) they could expect to generate 21-35 orders resulting in £315-£525 revenue.
Not a bad return on investment and a great start to improve upon!
These are only example numbers, if you want help forecasting your budget with your own data or creating a specific audience for your restaurant book in a call
Everyone's budgets are different, have a play around with the budget and audience and the estimated results change, for context heres the same audiences but with £100 a day spend...
👤 10km Radius interested in JustEat, Deliveroo and UberEats: 430,000 individuals
£100 a day = 19k to 55k reach / 185 to 536 page views
👤 10km Radius interested in JustEat, Deliveroo and UberEats AND Sushi: 46,000 individuals
£100 a day = 8.1k to 23k reach / 69 to 200 page views
These audiences are called 'Saved Audiences'. You can also delve deeper and create 'Custom Audiences'.
This allows you to reach people who have already interacted with your business on Facebook, Instagram or even your website. You can create very specific segments based on their behavior, such as 'viewed menu page within last 30 days' if you have your Facebook Pixel setup. You can also upload the users on your email list to ensure those repeat orders from your loyal customers. An extra step is then asking Facebook to create 'Look a Likes' of those audiences. If you want to learn more about custom audiences and retargeting, you should check out our Social Media Advertising Academy!
📱 Where Are Your Ads Shown? 📱
This part is often overlooked by beginners but optimising the placements of your ads. Facebook Ads automatically are shown across a variety of placements across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and what it calls their 'Audience Network'. This Audience Network is a collection of ad spaces online and in 3rd party apps that Facebook owns.
It could explain why when you are playing on a mobile game you see the same companies advertising to you on your Insta feed!
You want to select 'Manual Placements' not 'Automatic Placements'.
(Sometimes Facebook's 'recommendations' aren't actually the best thing to follow 😉)
We recommend using the more premium placements such as stories and news feeds as that will deliver the most click-through's from your ads.
Having a wider range of placements is useful for raising awareness and increasing your brand recognition, but if you want people to take action then that is more likely to happen on these premium placements.
You will be able to see performance broken down by placement during your campaign and adjust this throughout. This might also change the estimated results on the right hand side.
🤤 What to Show Your Audience? 🤤
You can upload a variety of different ad formats such as images, videos and carousels (one or more images/videos to scroll through) with specific sizing customised for different placements. We recommend using square images or 4:5 portrait images to take up more space on a mobile phone!
You can also preview the ads on the right hand side and see what the ad looks like in different placements.
I'm sure you have some great mouthwatering photos of your dishes and really simplicity is key here.
Focus on your most popular dishes or specific offers you are promoting. It could be work from home lunches, kid-friendly dishes or Netflix and chill specials!
Don't be tempted to overdo any text on the image, Facebook will restrict any ad with excessive text on the image you upload. Videos can perform slightly better but everyone loves pictures of food! You want to stop people scrolling past and sell the click. The benefit you have over other advertisiers is people love engaging with food content already on social media, and this increased engagement can lead to your ad performance increasing. Again for the copy keep it very simple and clear what you are offering.
You are given 3 text boxes:
Primary Text - The same as a caption on a normal post
Headline- The headline of the ad below the image
Description- Optional extra line under the headline for some ad placements
Nobody wants your life story and it's all to encourage that tap, click or swipe up to the page you are guiding them to!
📄 Where to Guide Your Audience? 📄
So you want to guide preferably to a designated landing page which shows all the ways they can order a takeaway from your restaurant ASAP! (A landing page is simply a specific page someone lands on from an ad)
A lot of business guide straight to their website homepage, which can still work but you are reducing your chances as people are fickle. If it's not immediately obvious and user-friendly they will exit. Make it as simple as possible for your user to buy from you! For this campaign we recommend a simple landing page highlighting how they can order takeaways direct via phone/ online form or with links straight to your restaurants page on the other takeaway platforms you use.
We create our landing pages with an easy-to-use landing page builder that's fully customisable and can integrate fully with your current apps and systems.
For speed you can also guide straight to your businesses page on the takeaway platforms, however longer-term you want to guide to your own website page as then you can control the data.
You can also get more feedback and insight from Google Analytics and your Facebook pixel than these platforms are ever willing to share
Also if you can create a simple takeaway form with PayPal payment you could earn save upon that commission... we can help create this for you or advise on design. It might be the case though that customers are still more comfortable using their favourite app though...
If you don't even have a website or can't take orders on it, you should think about our Local Biz Booster! We engineer a campaign where someone fills out their details on Facebook & Instagram and they receive an exclusive discount code and join an email list. For a London-based Chicken Shop we signed up over 500 leads for under £200 with a 'Buy 1 Get 1 Free' offer and a secret discount code to get free wings!
📈 Top Tips to Improve Performance 📈
This is only scratching the surface of what you can do with Facebook Ads... Here are some quick tips to increase the performance of your campaigns
📝 Space out your captions
This makes the copy easier to read for your audience and is also an awesome app for your organic content. From now on you don't need to try and copy and paste that line break or use random dots to break out paragraphs.
🧪 A/B Test different audiences and creatives
By duplicating your ad set you can tweak the audience and test them side by side. You can also create new ads to the same audience and test those side by side.
If one audience or one advert is generating clicks for 50% less cost then you know you should allocate futurue udget to it. this marginal gains approach and constant experimenting and iteration is what sets appart the winers and losers with advertising and the businesses thst scale rapidly!
📍 Use a broad audience
Simply the algorithm knows more than us, let the all-knowing, creepy Facebook algorithm do the work!
🎨 Get creative with your offers
Why not create some bespoke dishes/offers on Sundays or weekday lunches, if your ad is more contextual and stands out from the other 'we're on deliveroo, help support us' posts it will yield better results
💷 Minimum spend of £5 per day per Ad
This is just a general rule of thumb to give your ads enough juice and give you statistically viable results that let you judge if campaigns have generated positive results.
Also we'd recommend leave your ads running for at least 48 hours before editing and adjusting anything.
If you have majorly f***ed up, duplicate the ad and delete the one with errors.
If it's going amazingly well duplicate the ad or ad set and increase spend by 10-15% per day.
🤔 What else can you promote?
Some restaurants are experiencing great success by offering vouchers/coupons for their favourite customers to buy now and redeem later.
A great idea to get cash flow and pay your staff!
Some of you may have recipe guides or other merchandise too, if you can afford the budget it's wise to promote other pieces of content that are interesting, educational, entertaining and informative for your audience.
If you can afford to, experiment with other offers!
🔥 Level Up Your Campaigns 🔥
🎁 Run a giveaway/competition
Also, why not run an engaging competition where someone can win free takeaway for a week or that they get a 'back card' upon re-opening. We use an incredible software called Vyper.io to run competitions the right way, actually generating leads and sales, not just some likes on a post.
Vyper.io lets you manage a competition where entries earn points based on their actions, read our full guide to managing the competitions here.
❤️️ Promote your brand with some high-value content
Don't forget about promoting your brand either...
Why not host a Ready, Steady, cook challenge with your chefs or put out how to cook your signature dish tutorials so people can still attempt to get their fix of their favourites.
Challenge other local restaurants to live cook-offs or collaborate on a unique dish available for a limited period The businesses able to focus on brand advertising will come out this stronger with their audience resonating with the business more and having increased trust and loyalty.
me to allocate some time on that to sharpen the sword and come back stronger!
👋 DO YOU NEED HELP? 👋
Given the current situation we want to help as many small businesses as possible innovate and promote their services and product online.
We have launched our most affordable plan yet!
Start leveraging the power of social media advertising for just £100 a week!
💚 WHO ARE EVERGREEN? 💚
Evergreen Growth & Marketing are a social media advertising agency that help businesses hunt attention online and turn clicks into customers 👍 We focus on creating digital marketing funnels and lead generating systems that predictably and consistently deliver customers to our clients 😍 We were recently runners up in New Business of the Year and Entrepreneur of the Year in the Wandsworth Business Awards and want more local businesses to get smarter with their marketing!
🤓 OTHER RESOURCES TO LEARN MORE 🤓
Honestly our full spectrum of knowledge is now available to you through the Social Media Advertising Academy. Click here to check it out. Also some other useful bits to look at!
Adobe Spark - Lets you create images and video and resizing instantly for different social media platforms
Facebook Audiences Insight - Facebook’s own tool where you can analyse and create new audiences
Facebook Blueprint - Facebook’s free online training course
Google Digital Garage - Google’s free online training course
Audible free 30 day trial to learn more about anything
Stay safe, wash your hands and please don't press boost post...target your audience properly 🎯