There are many ways to grow your restaurant. Let’s dig deeper into Facebook. Let’s discuss the ways that Facebook, as the most famous social media platform, can be used to help grow your restaurant.

Too many people think that Facebook is just selling stuff, but there is a lot more that you can do with it.

In Restaurant Autopsy, we talk about a Restaurant that looks like it is entering the Groupon Death Spiral 🙁.  There are a lot of things that you can do that are free or don’t take a lot of time, or are free and don’t take a lot of time, and yet they still don’t get done. This is how Restaurants end up using Groupon out of desperation to try and keep the doors open.

We look at the Lobster Cave’s Groupon strategy.  They are one of the few Restaurants that have a decent discounting strategy.

We look at how to run very cheap and cost-effective Facebook campaigns, often the budget is just $3 per day.

 

Ways to grow your restaurant using Facebook

1.  Sell stuff

Have a think about what it is that you are selling and how you are reaching out to customers and prospects.  You can drive people to make an order and/or booking.  You can then make your marketing accountable. Our FROLO and FORBS system will tell you where your bookings come from. This can make a big difference in understanding how effective your marketing is. You don’t need a discount, it may just remind people about your great food. Don’t forget to drive people to call for take out or book, or even as a walk in.

2.  Targeting

We show you how targeting can dramatically increase the response rate from your campaigns. There is a huge range of options in the Facebook demographics section of the ad setup. This creates a simple way to run a birthday campaign. If you don’t have a database, you can use Facebook’s database with targeting.

3.  Retargeting

This is how to target people who have been on your website, you can even target based on individual pages that they have visited.

4.  Recruiting

We use Facebook to recruit staff. We have found it to work so much better than using job boards. On Facebook, it is a lot easier for prospective employees to see what kind of Restaurant you run, and you are more likely to attract the right kind of people.  You can target people in the job role that you want. It often works out a lot cheaper to advertise on Facebook than on a job board. Best of all, the talent pool is so much better.

Stay tuned for the next episode with the other 4 ways to grow your Restaurant businesses using Facebook!

 

Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.

 

Other Podcast episodes on Facebook Marketing to help grow your restaurant

Sign up on M4R University: Running your first Facebook campaign

You may also want to check out other episodes regarding Facebook Marketing to help grow your restaurant:

• Episode 3: Basic Facebook Marketing for your Restaurant
• Episode 15: How to set up a Restaurant Facebook Page
• Episode 27: Emergency Facebook Marketing for your Restaurant
• Episode 28: Advanced Facebook Marketing campaigns Part I – Segmenting
• Episode 29: Advanced Facebook Marketing Part 2 – Remarketing and Retargetting for Restaurants
• Episode 35: Advanced Facebook Marketing III – Email marketing and setting Restaurant Facebook ad budgets
• Episode 36: How to do Facebook Live Streaming for your Restaurant
• Episode 44: How to build the most popular Chinese Restaurant Facebook Page with Grace Choy

54 – 8 ways to use Facebook Marketing to grow your Restaurant Business – Part I

James Eling: Hey, it’s James from Marketing4Restaurants here, and welcome to episode 54 of Secret Sauce, the restaurant marketing podcast: 8 ways to use Facebook marketing grow your restaurant business, part 1.

Voiceover: Some restaurants are quiet, lose money, and the owner works 70 hours a week. Other restaurants are busy, profitable, and the owners work a few hours a day. What’s the difference? They have a secret sauce. Join James from Marketing4Restaurants as he helps you come up with your recipe for restaurant success, your secret sauce.

James: Hey everyone, welcome back. Last week, we talked about AdWords arbitrage, I thought we’d get into some of the nuts and bolts about restaurant marketing this time, and talk about some of the exciting things that we do to help our restaurant customers and that we see restaurants doing every day. And that is some of the innovative ways that you can use Facebook.

Too many people think that Facebook is just about selling stuff. Some people don’t even know what to do with Facebook. So, we see that there’s so much more that you can do than just selling stuff on Facebook. And so, what we want to do is go through some of those things that you can do, and give you a few ideas that you can use in your restaurant to find more customers and turn them into repeat customers.

Grow your restaurant: The Groupon death spiral

Before we do that today though, I want to do a really quick restaurant autopsy. Tina gets Groupon emails, and we just sort of keep an eye out because it really does give you an indication of restaurants that are struggling. And we’ve talked about this before, the number of times that we see what we call the Groupon death spiral, a restaurant that will do a Groupon campaign for the first time. Then four to six weeks later they’ll do another one. Then two or three weeks they’ll do another one. Then they’ll do one with another company. Then two weeks later they’ll have shut up shop and that’s it, all over red rover. They’ve gone out of business. And that’s why we call it the Groupon death spiral.

And it was quite sad to see a restaurant that we know, we’ve been out there, we’ve spoken to the owner, really nice guy, runs a really good restaurant. Quite innovative, very innovative. And obviously they’ve fallen on hard times because they’re now doing a Groupon campaign.

And it’s interesting because we’ve spoken to them about some of the things that they could be doing to market their restaurant better, and this is the thing that I always think is quite amazing. There are things that you can do in your marketing that are free, there are things that you can do that don’t take a lot of effort. Some of these things are free and don’t take a lot of effort, and yet they don’t get done and it gets left to the point where, “Well, let’s run a Groupon campaign.” So, I’m going to ping the business owner there an email and just say, you know, “Is everything alright? Because we’re concerned to see you guys in Groupon.”

It’s very hard to run a successful Groupon campaign. There’s a multiple number of issues with it. So, you don’t get the customers contact details for starters, which is why some of our customers who do run successful Groupon campaigns will use our Free Online Restaurant Booking System (FORBS) because when they make a booking, then you get the customers contact details. That’s one of the first things that you can do. The other thing that’s really quite concerning is that when people search for your restaurant, Groupon will often run an AdWords campaign, and this links back into our AdWords Arbitrage type of deal. They want to sell as many of these coupons as they can. Now someone who may pay full price will then see that you’ve got a coupon campaign. And so, you’re actually taking full paying customers and offering them a coupon. It’s very difficult. And I think probably only one percent of restaurant owners are running successful discounting campaigns.

Grow your restaurant: Successful coupon campaign

Now, it’s interesting, so we’re based beautiful Melbourne in Australia, and there’s a restaurant that’s received quite a lot of publicity this week, and that is the Lobster Cave in Beaumaris. Quite a famous restaurant. Very, very, very expensive. So, they have a burger there, which I think’s got lobster in it, which is $165. Now, the reason it’s so expensive is because they have a very successful Groupon campaign. I’m reading a review of them now. So, we had a politician who had a meeting with some people at the Lobster Cave and they may or may not have been members of the mafia, it all seems to be a little bit untidy and a little bit messy. So, this is why so much press has been given to them. It’s interesting because goodfood.com.au went out there and did a review on it, and they said it’s really, really, really expensive. And one of the things they noticed, though, was that someone said when the waitress came up to the table at the start of the night, “Which coupon are you using?” So, the expectation there is that you’re going to be using discounting coupons, rather than having full cash paying customers. Which is really interesting. And, of course, I think that the product that they sell is that they’ve got $165 burger.

Now, the coupon that they’re running at the moment is a 62% off, it’s still a $65 burger. Which is probably quite expensive, although it does have lobster in it. But this is one of the ways that you can run a successful campaign. But very, very, very difficult to do. And if you haven’t marked up the prices hideously, like what these guys have done with the expectation that absolutely no one’s going to come in and pay full cash price, and, you know, if they do then obviously you’re making a killing out of them. If you’re not marking your price up like that and you’re giving away a 50% off coupon, then obviously you’re into a very, very unprofitable marketing campaign. So, I’m just thinking before you go running off to run a Groupon campaign, or any of the other discounting type things, have a think about these ideas for Facebook marketing, because these are the kind of things that are very, very simple to run and very, very cost effective. You know, we’re not talking about large budgets. I understand why restaurant owners run Groupon campaigns, it’s because they’re short of cash. These campaigns are, we run a lot of Facebook campaigns that are $3 a day. That’s not a lot of money and they can be quite effective.

Grow your restaurant: Facebook marketing

So, it’s not that hard to be able to get an understanding of where the profitability’s coming from when you’re running a campaign like that. So, let’s have a look at it and go through the 8 things that you can do with Facebook to find new customers and turn them into repeat customers. Now, the first thing that you can do is you can sell stuff. Now, I was going to say that, you know, a lot of people think that it’s only about that. I think a lot of restaurant owners don’t know what to do with Facebook, and you see them putting up all sort of crazy crap that really doesn’t make sense. And there’s no sort of articulation of a marketing plan or a marketing strategy.

You want to think about the way that you are selling. I’ve seen it where people will, every Tuesday night, say, “It’s Parma [ham] and a pot night,” or, “50% off night.” You know, in Australia we call it, “Tight-ass Tuesday,” because the movie theatres used to do half price tickets, I think they still do. But what we see some restaurants doing is putting the same photo up with the same text week after week after week. And I always think, you know, social media the thing that’s amazing about social media is it’s just like word of mouth. It’s just social. Let’s emphasis the social in social media. You wouldn’t say, “Come in it’s half price pizza today. Come in it’s half price pizza today. Come in it’s half price pizza today.” That’s just crazy, no one would have a conversation like that. And yet, this is the way that people are trying to sell on Facebook.

And we see it all the time, people say Facebook doesn’t work. And it’s like, “Well, you know, it doesn’t work for everyone. But it works for a lot of people once they put a little bit of the thinking into it.” So, you need to be thinking about how are you in a social manner going to, which allows you to do photos and videos, how are you going to sell? If someone walked up to your restaurant, you wouldn’t just repeatedly say the exact same thing. Now, the thing that I love about Facebook selling, so using Facebook to actually sell something.

Grow your restaurant: Online reservations and online bookings

So, we’re talking about building an e-commerce platform here, so you want to think about the two things that you’re going to sell, predominantly are going to be like a takeout order or a booking. So, they’re the kind of things that you are going to be driving to get your customers to do, or your potential customers. One of the things that you can do really easily with Facebook is you can include a link to your website, and you can tag that. So, Facebook will pass through the details and so if you’ve got a tracking program, something like Google analytics, or we use Piwik here. It will know that it came from Facebook, and so you can see how much traffic came through. The thing that’s really exciting is with our system for Free Online Restaurant Booking System (FORBS) and Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering system (FROLO), so FROLO the free restaurant online ordering system, and FORBS, the free online restaurant booking system.

Grow your restaurant: Running a Facebook campaign

For both of those you can run a campaign. That campaign will be tagged against the economic transaction that occurs. So, when someone makes a booking you can say, “It was this campaign. This came from Facebook.” So, you’ve got restaurant owners who are now saying, “That’s interesting, I spent $90,” you know, a 30-day month, “and I’ve been running a $3 a day campaign for the whole month. I spent $90 on Facebook and I’ve been getting X amount back.” You can now, you know, that X might be $100, that wouldn’t be a great campaign. It might be $1000, it might be $5000.

There is a lot that you can do to really make your social media marketing accountable. Which is one of the reasons why I love online marketing so much, is that you know if a campaign is working for you or not. And this is one of the things, if you’re engaging a social media marketing person, you want to make them accountable. If they’re just saying, “We’re about getting the word out,” no. We’re not about getting the word out. We’re about bringing in customers in through the door, and you should be able to see that. Now, not everyone is going to take advantage of an offer in an electronic way. So, they might say, “Look, here’s an offer for…” And it doesn’t have to be an offer, you know remember that, it doesn’t have to be an offer. It might be, you know, “It’s a cold night tonight, wouldn’t you enjoy a nice pizza?” “That sounds like a good idea, that makes it nice and easy.” What they may do then, is ring up, you know.

Our online ordering systems make it easy of people to be able to call because not everyone wants to place an order online and I think that that’s an important thing to think about, as well. So, it is a bit of a leaky funnel. Not everyone’s going to go all the way through and make the purchase, some of them are going to deviate and they’ll either make a phone call to place an order for takeout, or they might just rock up to your restaurant, they might just come in as a walk in. And there’s a couple of interesting ways that you can still tag that. You know, “Mention this offer for a discount,” so someone will actually say you know, “And I saw on Facebook that there was a 10 per cent offer,” or, “I can get a nicer bottle of wine for the same price as this one.” That’s one way of knowing.

Or, you can push an item. So, we talk about our little pancake extravaganza in Perth where we were able to fill a café on a Sunday morning and have a really, really profitable Sunday morning for the grand total of $8.78. Very few people actually made a booking because everyone knew where that restaurant was, and no one had the expectation that they needed to make a booking. Everyone knew where they were, so they just rolled up. The place was busy, they were turning people away. Everyone was ordering pancakes, though. So, you know that it was the drive on that ad was, “Come in and get pancakes.” So, that’s the first thing, selling stuff. You know, make sure that it’s linked so that you can track the success, or lack thereof, but hopefully success of the marketing campaign.

Grow your restaurant: Targeting the right customers

Now, the next one is targeting. I love targeting, there is so much amazing stuff that you can do with Facebook ads to do targeting. So, you could target people, and the reason why, the important thing is that the more targeted your message the much better reaction you’re going to get from your marketing campaign. So, let’s just say I’m scrolling through Facebook one day on a Friday lunch time. And because everyone knows that I like vindaloo, everyone knows that it’s never hot enough for me.

Imagine if I was scrolling through and there’s an ad for my local Indian restaurant and it says, “Hey, James, it’s Friday. You’re probably thinking about some takeout tonight. You’re probably thinking about vindaloo. We have got some extra special hot curries that have just come in. we’re going to be making a really, really, really hot batch of vindaloo. It’s going to be the hottest Vindaloo that we’ve ever made, and we would love to get some out to you tonight. We’ll include some free garlic naan bread.” Now, I would order that in a heartbeat. It’s aimed exactly at me. It is a really well targeted campaign. Now, there’s a flip side of targeting that you have to really understand. That ad is only going to work for people who are called James, only working in a very narrow geographic area, only going to work for people who like vindaloos, and only going to work for people who like Vindaloos that are really, really hot, and people who are likely to order on a Friday night.

For me, that marketing campaign fits like a glove—perfect, absolutely perfect. But you’ll probably only get one sale, and that would be me, from that campaign. So, you don’t want to go too targeted, but the more targeted you are the better the result is going to be that you’ll have with your marketing campaign. So, what are the kind of things that you can do? You can target women with kids, you know, mums. “Had a tough day at work?” You know, working mums, so, “Had a tough day at work?” don’t send that ad to someone who’s unemployed. We know that. Facebook will tell you all of these sorts of things. If you haven’t done it, go to through the demographics and have a look at it, because this is going to give you so many ideas of all of the people that you can target. It’s absolutely amazing.

The ideas that flow out of just going through the demographics are huge, really exciting. You can target people who like vegetarian food. You can target people who have an interest in celiac disease, or gluten free. You can target people who like chillies. So, if you were doing a really hot burger, then you could target people who like chillies in your local, and you can target by area. You can target by household income.

Grow your restaurant: Promotional campaigns

Now, everyone likes running a birthday campaign, don’t they? Yes. And that’s pretty exciting to do. What if I told you that you can run a campaign to local people who have a birthday coming up in the next week? Now, I don’t know, let’s just wonder about, now you can also target buy month. So, you could do a rolling, you know, we’re going to run a January campaign. So, “You’ve got a birthday in August coming up? Why not have it at our restaurant? Invite four of your friends, and we’ll give you a free main meal.” I’ll let you work out the wording on that, but that kind of thing just works really easily. I think the monthly targeting probably works quite well, because people are probably going to book somewhere in. But you can in Facebook you can do it for people who have a birthday coming up in the next week.

Grow your restaurant: Database marketing

I’ve always said this, that you should do database marketing. So, you should be sending an email out to say to everyone, “Hey, we know you’ve got a birthday coming up. Come on in and we’ll give you some, you know, we’ll make sure that your birthday is a special day for you.” If you don’t have that database, I’ve always said, rent Facebook’s. and this is the simple and easy way of doing that. So, targeting people based on a whole range of demographics. You can target them by where they work. You can target them by their job role, you know. We’ve run campaigns targeting tradies in an area with a special tradies lunch. There’s 101 things that you can do when you go through that demographics and you start looking at all of the options that you’ll have for targeting. And I think that this is where there’s so much money to be made in, you know, creative Facebook marketing campaigns.

Grow your business: Retargeting your audience

So, targeting, we’ve just talked about that, now we’re going to talk about retargeting. So, retargeting is where you put the pixel, and we talked about this in the Masterchef Effect. People go to your website and then what you want to do is you want to be able to get them to remind them that they should’ve gone to your restaurant. Now, because these people are either going to have come to your restaurant or ordered from you. Or, they had a look at it but something, you know, maybe they were looking for another time, or maybe they forgot about it, maybe they never got around to it. So, they may or may not be a customer yet. But the thing is that this is a lot easier, these people are one step closer to being a loyal evangelist of your brand, because they’ve actually been on your website.

So, this is one of the things that we do a lot of work with, make sure that the [Facebook] Pixel for your Facebook account is on the website. Once you do that, you can create an audience of all of the people who’ve visited your website. So, how this works is that Facebook goes and, when someone goes to the website, the [Facebook] Pixel fires off and if they’re logged into Facebook at that time on the devise that they’re doing it, so it might be on a mobile phone, it might be on their computer or a tablet, it will then put them into an audience of people who’ve been to it.

And that audience will basically, you can set it up for what you want, anytime out to 180 days. So, people, out to 180 days, who have been on your website. That’s the basis of retargeting. It’s not overly complicated, it’s pretty easy to setup. But here’s where it starts to get a little bit interesting. So, what are the kind of things that you want to target in your restaurant? And it might be corporate events. You know, you might want people to come in and have corporate breakfasts. So, if you’ve got a corporate events page on your website, you can then target the people who’ve been to that page. So, now it starts to get really, really interesting. They might have been looking around, they may or may not have made a decision about where they want to go. And this would be the thing where you might put into the audience, “Anyone who in the last 30 days has gone to our corporate events page, I want to run a campaign at that.” And there’s not going to be that many people who go there, so this would definitely be a $3 a day campaign. So, you might spend $90, but what are the good things about corporate events? You know, generally mid-week, which is when you’re quiet, and generally less concerned about price.

So, we’re targeting a group of people who are in your very, very highly desirable category. Money to spend, and mid-week when you’re quiet. So, a great way to optimize the yield across the whole week in your restaurant. And we can do this for all of the other things. So, you might have a vegetarian page. You might have a gluten free page. You might have a family friendly page. Each one of those you can then target with a specific message.

So, we’ve got a page that talks about our vegetarian menu, and why vegetarianism is important to us. And where we get all of our produce from and the creative journey that we’ve taken when cooking with potatoes, or whatever it is that you’re doing. Now, that person may have come in and had a vegetarian meal there. What you want to do is you want them to come back. And I think today, one of the things that’s changing, and a lot of marketing books will talk about this, is that in the old days there was very little environmental advertising. So, there was the yellow pages, and there might be some billboards.

Now, I’m exposed to probably 10 or 20 ads before I get out of bed. You know, by the time I’ve checked my mail and flicked through Facebook and done it, you know, you’re already being marketed to. And every time you’re on your phone you’re being marketed to, every time, you know, you’re on a website you’re being marketed to. So, people just forget. And it’s harder to build those brand loyalties. You need to work on the second, third, and fourth visit to try and build that habit in of people coming to your restaurant. This is what retargeting is for.

So, you’ve got someone who’s gone to the vegetarian page, and you will then hit them with an ad, you know, “We’d love to see you back here.” And so, you’re going to run a campaign, you know, “We’re going to try this new vegetarian meal item.” You know that the person’s interested in vegetarian food, so this is your opportunity to continue that conversation and get them to come back. And I think one of the things that a lot of people forget about is the, you know, the fundamental economics of a restaurant. You know, the number of customers that you’ve got coming in, the average transaction size. So, are they going to spend $10, $20, $50, $100? What is it that they’re going to spend? The frequency with which they do that, that gives you the revenue from that customer on an annual basis. So, if someone comes in once a year, then you need to find a lot more customers.

Grow your restaurant: Turning customers into repeat customers

Then if, on average, they come in twice a year, you only need to half as many customers if everyone comes in on average twice a year. What are you doing to make them come back? And I think we just need to say forget about, “We provide an amazing experience and the food’s fantastic.” You know, if that’s working for you, then that’s fantastic. But, and it will work for everyone who’s providing great food, great value, great experience, in some respect. But the moment they go out of the door, then they’re starting to forget about you and every other restaurant out there who is being aggressive with their marketing, is trying to capture them, trying to be top of mind. So that the next time that they think about going out to a restaurant, well they’re not thinking about your restaurant, they’re thinking about someone else’s restaurant. Which is why you need to be continuously, you know, aiming to get top of mind, aiming to get people to come into your restaurant again.

Grow your restaurant: outmarket your competitors

Fight the battle, people. Fight the battle. Every day there’s a battle, “Where am I going to eat tonight?” and so many people just walk away from that battle. So many people just don’t put the effort in, they do nothing to try and sway me from going home and have a toasted cheese sandwich. Which I find is absolutely amazing.

Retargeting is a fundamental part of getting customers to come in more often into your restaurant, and if you can get just a subset of those customers who’ve been in once to return twice and then third, then, you know, then we starting to get habit forming. And then you might have one of those customers that’s going to come in once a month. They might bring their family. And these are the things that will transform your business from being unprofitable to barely profitable, barely profitable to quite profitable, quite profitable to, you know, a self-sustaining business that’s running under management. Isn’t that what everyone’s sort of trying to aim for? Now, so this is the last one for this podcast and this is going to be something that I think is really, really interesting. Because so many people don’t think about this.

Grow your restaurant: Hire the right people

We use Facebook for recruiting. So, in Marketing4Restaurants, we use Facebook to run ads to get people to work here. Now, this is really quite an unusual way of using Facebook, and I’ll tell you why that we do this. These days, you’ve got all of these job board companies out there. Now, who uses job boards? It’s people who want to hire, and people who are looking for a job. So, you always ask, “So what?” So what, someone’s using a job board to find a job, why? Well, probably because they don’t have a job, so they might be unemployed. Okay, why are they unemployed? They might be looking for a job because they’re not happy at their current job. Okay, why? Why are they unhappy at their job? Do they have one of those nasty bosses that makes all of these unreasonable demands of them, like, “Don’t spend time on Facebook when you’re meant to be waiting tables.” Do they have one of those unreasonable bosses that won’t let them take stuff out of the freezer for their own use? Are they just a dodgy employee with all of the, and everyone knows what I’m talking about, everyone’s employed at least one in their life, dodgy employee, you know, potentially 10s. Or, if you’re running a decent sized restaurant, probably hundreds of people who were just dodgy.

Now, this is the thing that’s really quite scary, is that the people who are unhappy in their work are looking for a job, that’s why they’re on a job board? The people who are unemployed are looking for a job, that’s why they’re on a job board. That is not the talent pool that you want to go swimming in, is it? What you want to do is you want to reach out to people and, this is where you know your whole business plan you need to be thinking about it. I always think you got to think about how you’re going to get customers. Hey, it’s pretty important, it’s pretty damn important to think about how you’re going to get awesome team members, as well.

If you’re trying to build an awesome business, you’re not going to build an awesome business with average or poor employees. You’ve got to get the awesome employees, so what is it that is about your business that is unique from a team member’s point of view? And how do you tell that story to them? This is the thing, so you can actually run an ad, remember how we talked about targeting? Yeah baby, now we’re talking. Because we’re going to target people who do front of house, we’re going to target maître d’s, we’re going to target sommeliers, we’re going to target line cooks, we’re going to target executive chefs. We are going to target F&B [food and beverage] managers. Think of the job description, they’re in Facebook. Facebook knows what their jobs is, you can target them. And so, if you’re running a pretty successful business, it might be the compensation package that’s better, it might be work life balance, it might be the culture, it might be all of the above. What is it that makes your restaurant unique?

What is it that’s going to help from a hiring point of view? And then, once you’ve got that message right, and if you don’t have that message right now, hey that’s fine because I’ve just laid this on you now. And I know so few people talk about this, and think about this in their head. They just think, “I need someone, and I need them now. Look, this person has a pulse, I’ll hire them.” What we want to do is we want to move slightly up the value chain with people, we don’t want to have the criteria as, “This guy has a pulse.” Let’s try and get some really, really good people into the organization, because they’re the ones who are going to really create value for you.

So, you can target them and you’re getting them before they’re thinking about going onto a job board. So, they haven’t had three interviews, you don’t have to make a decision really quickly because they’ve got three job offers on the go already. They’re not even looking for a job. You’re saying, “Would you like to work at our restaurant? These are the benefits that we’ve got here. You know, you’ll be able to express your culinary expertise. This is the way that we’re going to train you up. This is what our roadmap looks like, and we’d like you to take that journey with us.” You can come up with a really quite emotive selling point which really engages with the kind of people that you’re trying to reach, and you’re doing it all through Facebook.

And I’ve got to tell you, it’s a lot less than using a recruiter, and it’s often less than using a job board. And comparing to a job board, the talent pool is so much better. So, there you go.

Grow your restaurant: Podcast summary

There are the eight ways to use Facebook marketing to grow your business part

1. Sell stuff on Facebook, okay.
   Remembering that it’s pay to play, you need to run an ad. Come up with some great creative, but make sure, most important, make sure that it is tagged so that you’re going to see that the traffic has come from Facebook, and you’re going to be able to work out what the economic value is of those transactions that you’ve done. Whether it’s an order or a booking.
2. Target people. Have a think about the kind of things that you can do in Facebook, and run that and start to come up with some campaigns that you can run around that. I think there’s so many things, when you go through that you’ll get ideas about the kind of campaigns that you can run. You can target by age, when they’re having a birthday, all of these sorts of things. 101 ways to do it, and the more targeted your campaign the more successful it’s going to be.
3. Retargeting. So, once they’ve been to your website, once they’ve been into your restaurant, once they’ve looked at one of the pages of your website, you can then retarget them. Because we want to turn a customer into a repeat customer. We want to create that habit of them coming into your restaurant once a month, once a week so that they – or, if you’re running a lunch session, every day during the week. You know, this is where you can really increase the value of each of your customers. And as you increase the value of your customers, you can spend more to get them.This is the other thing that’s really interesting. You can spend quite a bit of money to get someone, if you know that on average they’re going to come back 20 times. This is why I think, you know, really successful fish and chip shops do a really, really good job, because they spend quite a lot on marketing. Because they know once someone’s got that habit of having fish and chips once a week with them, that customer’s probably going to spend 2, 4, maybe $10,000 with them. That’s a lot of money. Fine dining restaurants don’t have that kind of average customer value.
4. And lastly, think about recruiting. Think about the kind of things that you can do to get awesome people into your restaurant, if you’ve got awesome people in there it’s going to be easier to get people to come back. You’re going to retain them more, because you’re not churning through employees who are just really ordinary. You’re going to decrease your training budget because you not training too many people because they don’t last. It’s a much more virtuous cycle when you are hiring using Facebook out of a much better talent pool. So, that’s it. We will be back next week with the other four, and we’ve got some pretty interesting ways that we can help you to find more customers and turn them into repeat customers. I hope you have a really busy day.

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