Even today, the restaurant industry is relatively timid about using the digital advertising offered by Facebook, with the exception of large fast food chains and marketplaces like Uber Eats or Deliveroo.
Yet, it is one of the most effective levers to promote your services (especially delivery and Click and Collect) and increase your notoriety.
What is Facebook Ads?
It is simply the advertising suite of Facebook.
If you didn't know, the social network offers an interface particularly rich in options (and accessible for free, excluding advertising budgets of course) to create targeted advertising campaigns and increase the awareness and sales of your restaurant or your brand.
Why choose Facebook Ads?
When you want to start advertising on the Internet, you have several options: Google Ads, Bing Ads, affiliate programs, sponsoring articles, banners or newsletters on specialized websites and blogs...
There is no shortage of options. However, Facebook has some serious assets to seduce you.
The proof below 👇
Precisely target your potential customers
The setting options allow you to reach a very specific audience:
- interests (including your competitors' pages),
- geolocation,
- age group,
- family situation,
- interactions with your site,
- presence in your subscriber file if you have a loyalty program.
Access a huge and interested market
Most of your potential customers spend several hours a day on the Internet, including an average of 1 hour and 46 minutes on social networks, including Facebook, according to Le Blog du Modérateur. That's even 5 minutes more than last year!
Not only do they log in several times a day, but food and beverage is the most searched for sector by consumers on mobile.
Easily duplicate your ads on Instagram
With Facebook Ads, you can run ads on Facebook and Instagram from the same interface. No matter which social network you choose, you control what you run, from content to budget.
In most cases, in fast food, your target is on Facebook and on Instagram, respectively 3rd and 11th most consulted sites by the French in 2021, still according to Le Blog du Modérateur.
Achieve your goals
Each campaign does not necessarily have the same objectives. Facebook Ads allows you to reach yours: increase traffic to your site (ideally to your online ordering site), increase your number of fans...
You can refine your settings based on your goals and then create different ads that meet those expectations.
You want to promote an existing publication? It's possible.
You want to dedicate an ad to your latest Click and Collect menu? It's possible too!
How to launch serenely its Facebook Ads campaigns?
With these elements in mind, it's time to get started.
Don't panic, you don't have to sign a blank check or line up zeros to succeed in your first advertising campaigns!
With a few dozen euros and by working well on your ads, you will already get results with Facebook Ads. Provided of course that you do not publish your campaigns without trying to optimize them and respecting some basic rules.
Test with small budgets
To get started, visit the portal dedicated to this topic by Facebook.
You'll find everything you need to get started smoothly, learn the actions you need to take, access advice from the platform's specialists, etc. You can then supplement your knowledge with hundreds of free resources available on the web: YouTube tutorials, in-depth articles, forums, etc.
Here is what the interface looks like that you will have access to create and track your ads:
Then, let yourself be guided!
Your goal is to create engaging copy, associate an eye-catching visual (photo or other) and promote your offer by choosing the right call-to-action button ("View menu" rather than "Visit website", for example).
Below, we've created a sample Facebook ad in just a few minutes, to show you how customizable everything is!
As you can see, you can see in real time on the right what you are creating in the editor. This allows you to test several photographs or messages if you hesitate.
You can create scrolling image carousels (like a small gallery), with photographs or videos.
Once your ad is created, you can set your budget (daily, weekly, monthly). Facebook will tell you the impact and the number of clicks or people reached according to the budget allocated to each ad.
Choose the right type of advertising for your restaurant
If Facebook allows you to sponsor existing posts, you actually have a whole range of possibilities to consider:
- Promote your flagship products, all year long
- Inform on the services available per point of sale and/or at the national level (take-away, delivery, etc.)
- Broadcasting special offers
- Organize games or contests
- Highlight your updated opening hours
The rest of your posts can continue to be organic posts.
Create high quality, high impact ads
Choose your images carefully
You'd be amazed at the power of an image-centric gourmet product (like a burger for example) on social networks!
The photographs can also be used in the case of a montage, with for example an offer or a text added as a watermark on top.
Pro tip: It's important to preview your ad on Instagram if you want to repurpose it, as the formats are not the same.
Get started with video
The video, although it requires a little more time to realize, has the advantage of increasing the time of engagement of the Internet user, which plays in your favor in the eyes of the algorithms of social networks.
On average, Internet users are more attracted by video content than by photos. Vary the pleasures!
Respect your brand image
Do you work for a restaurant chain?
In this case, it is essential to maintain brand consistency at all levels, from the chain or franchise Facebook page to the pages of each outlet. Colors, logo, typeface... The customer should always be able to recognize your restaurant, no matter the advertising, the visual or the message.
Keep your texts short
On the question of textual content, a recurring question arises: should we be direct, or more subtle by adopting a humorous tone for example?
The Hemblem agency and the Bagel Corner franchise, for example, recommend that you don't beat around the bush and that you use clear messages that are more understandable than long-winded ones.
Of course, this doesn't prevent you from using a touch of humor, or even straight talk, in the rest of your organic communications. It all depends on the DNA of your restaurant or brand!
Optimize your results
As with any marketing strategy, the deployment of advertising campaigns on social networks must be subject to precise monitoring of the results obtained.
Reinvent your ads
Tracking budgets and ROI, measuring impact and cost per click, comparing the effectiveness of different messages, networks, formats... It's not enough to launch your ads, you need to optimize their tracking and make them evolve over time to gain in effectiveness and budget. It's also a good way to identify ads that run out of steam and don't work as well as before.
Beyond the statistics provided by Facebook (including for Instagram), you have different ways to measure your efforts, detailed just after.
Use a tracking pixel
It is a small piece of code that can be easily integrated into your website and/or online ordering site, in order to track the exact actions of people who clicked on your ad.
On the other hand, the Facebook pixel also allows you to create personalized audiences, for example by creating ads that target only visitors to your site (or even specific pages, for even more relevance.
More information is available here.
Create an exclusive promotional code per campaign
By adding a promo code to your ad, you can then see how many people used it when placing an order with you, making it easier to compare the budget invested with the results obtained.
Increase your subscriber base
Growing your fan base on Facebook and Instagram provides even larger audiences for your advertising campaigns.
To do so, accompany your paid acquisition efforts on Facebook Ads with a long-term strategy to increase your audience on social networks (daily posts, etc.).
On this subject, we recommend you to read this article published on Hemblem's blog.
Is advertising on Facebook expensive?
Why do you have to pay to be visible?
Most of the players in the sector opt for an organic approach when it comes to developing their communities on the networks and posting regularly about their current offers.
The main problem is that organic reach, the number of people "naturally" reached when you publish something, has drastically decreased in recent years.
It's normal: social networks, like Google, are developing more and more their advertising activity. Where you could reach a majority of your fans a few years ago, today you have to pay to be really visible !
Beyond this trend, investing in Internet advertising has many advantages. It's the fastest, most accurate and most affordable way to effectively market yourself, increase your fan base and customer base, as well as promote new offers and share breaking news.
Which brings us to the topic of the day: the strength of Facebook Ads in terms of ad channel choice.
Manage your advertising budget and evaluate your objective
Many of you have asked us about budgets to anticipate:
- What is the ideal cost per click (CPC) to promote a takeaway?
- Should investments be made at the local level (points of sale) or at the global level (brand) in the case of franchises and restaurant chains?
Be aware that budgets vary depending on your resources and goals. In general, a cost of $0.6 per click is a good target for a live online order promotion.
Like Bagel Corner, an Innovorder client, it is quite possible to reach nearly 10,000 targeted people with 100 euros spread over 3 days.
To find out more, we asked a panel of customers the following question: what budget are you willing to spend on an online ad?
Here are their answers:
➡️ "between 100 and 200 euros" for 45% of them
➡️ "less than 100 euros" for 41%.
➡️ "more than 200 euros" for 14%.
The learning phase: what is it?
At this stage, your Facebook Ads are ready, you have defined your budget and you just have to launch your campaign.
However, there is one last point that you absolutely must know to avoid any unpleasant surprises at launch!
This is the learning phase of Facebook.
In concrete terms, Facebook will test your ads according to the parameters you have defined to find the best placement, the best audience and the best time to broadcast. During this phase, performance may fluctuate until Facebook's optimization is ideal.
Our best advice during this time: do nothing.
Indeed, changing your ads would involve a new learning phase and would delay the performance of your ads, and cost you more in the end.
Instead, simply wait for your performance to stabilize. Then make the necessary adjustments and increase budgets if necessary to reach more people.
Bonus: the best tips from Bagel Corner and Hemblem agency
Bagel Corner and Hemblem share with us their experience to succeed in advertising campaigns as a restaurant professional. Have a good viewing!
The replay video is available by clicking here!
