Facebook Marketing – We look at the Facebook Marketing Report Card for Australia, and very few Restaurants are doing any Facebook marketing.  This is a huge opportunity for most restaurants.

Annual event marketing – We discuss a Restaurant that made a Meat Pie Burger for Australia Day. Sounds pretty ordinary, but it is an Aussie thing.  A great idea that got them mentioned in news.com.au. 

We look at how you to run a Facebook Live Video for your Restaurant.

Check out the Facebook Live Map, to get some ideas of the kind of streaming that people are doing.

Equipment –

Here are the makers of the phone holder that I use – Arkon.

Bright lights – we bought some cheapies of eBay.

Your phone – Android or iPhone.  It doesn’t really matter, both do an excellent job.

A couple of tips – Rehearse, plan, and start with something exciting because the video will appear silent.  People need to engage with the video to be able to hear the video.

Pick somewhere quiet, make sure you have a good phone signal.

Be authentic – this is a great way to build your personal brand.

Types of content you can use in your Facebook Live Videos:

• Food going over the pass
• Food prep – tell the story of how you create your dishes
• Sourcing the food – video from your garden, the market
• Use it to do market research – what items do people want to see on your menu?
• Go through a recipe

Aangan at Footscray prepare their own spices, that is a perfect type of video for Facebook Live.

We then discuss some ideas on how to best run an ad to your Facebook Live Video.

Tag us in on your Facebook Live videos.

Connect with us on Linkedin to keep up to date with the latest Restaurant Marketing ideas.


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

 

Transcript on How to do Facebook Live Streaming for your Restaurant

James Eling: Hey it’s James from Marketing4Restaurants, and welcome to episode 36 of Secret Sauce, the restaurant marketing podcast. Facebook live streaming for your restaurant.

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: So, maybe you had a listen to the advanced Facebook marketing podcast technique podcast, maybe you didn’t. We know a lot of restaurant owners aren’t interested in Facebook marketing at all. So, Christine’s nearly finished doing her audit. So, we’ve gone and had a look at 500 restaurants, 100 each in Australia, United States, UK, New Zealand, and Canada. And we’ve been having a look at just how, so restaurants that do takeout, how many people are using Facebook, what is the engagement, how successful are they, are they running campaigns? And it’s looking fairly much across the board. Now, interestingly enough she looked at some of the really high-end restaurants in the United Kingdom, just as a comparison. And they do a lot of Facebook advertising, funny about that. This is really important and this is why I’ve been meaning to talk about Facebook streaming but I think this is probably one of the easiest ways that you can do it. Once you get it set up and once you get over the fact that it’s live. So, we’re going to talk about that in a little while, a few other bits and pieces of news.

The FROLO, the free restaurant online ordering system, the printers are going really well. That’s exciting, so people are now getting dockets printed out in the kitchen to smooth over those operational issues that people have got, is they’re trying to get their takeout cooked up and prepared as quickly as possible, that’s working really well. The other things that’s really exciting with the free restaurant online ordering system is we’re now integrating with LNH and Startech. This is really making a big difference for some people. So, those orders are now popping straight up into the POS printers, which is that’s exciting, as well. So, I’ll include links to information about that in the show notes, have a look at that. Really quite exciting. Now, before we get into Facebook live streaming I want to talk really quickly about, so today’s the day after Australia Day in Australia. So, our national holiday, the 26^th of January.

Now, it’s very interesting some of the marketing campaigns that were run. I went to a local burger joint, this is so Suburban Burgers, it’s a great little burger joint. Of course, in Melbourne you got the burger wars, hideously competitive. Everyone seems to be wanting to do burgers. Really, really tough market. The thing that I love about Suburban Burgers is they’ve done exactly what we were thinking about, so when we talked about annual marketing plans. Now, they’ve gone back and they’ve had a look, they’ve obviously done some work previously. They’ve done some menu engineering, and they’ve come up with a couple of menu items that they could put on that are specific to Australia Day. So, in Australia we like our meat pies. Now, they’re a burger restaurant. They’ve combined the two together. So, there was a burger with a meat pie in it. Now, from a cuisine point of view, it’s not exactly cordon bleu. Not exactly hard to do. But, and they also came up with a milkshake. So, we like our lamingtons, it’s a bit of an Aussie sort of dessert. They did a lamington milkshake, okay. So, they already did the, you know, the super milkshake type things. But a milkshake that, and it was super tasty and it did remind you of a lamington so that’s all good. Not here to sort of debate the culinary expertise of the kitchen there, one thing that is really important though is that they were featured in Australia’s main news website, so news.com.au.

Had a story about them and their burger. That’s the kind of opportunity that’s out there. Have a think about what holidays are coming up, have a think about how you’re going to meld all of that together and then execute on it a little bit of PR, you know, just submit the story to, you know, and a couple of photos. And a little bit of a story, and that’s how you get nation wide coverage. And I think that that’s, you know, there’s never been a better time to be doing that kind of thing, coming up with a great idea and really, really get a good, free advertising with it. That’s what PR is, it’s free advertising for you. So, you should be to, this is one of the benefits of having a well-focused annual marketing plan, you’re going to be ahead. I saw that story three days before Australia Day. So, they’d obviously been working on it for, you know, maybe a week, two weeks prior, who knows when they came up with the idea about that. But, yeah, really good to see someone doing that sort of thing, coming up with an idea, and having a crack. I don’t know, we went in there at about four o’ clock in the afternoon, it was pretty quiet.

So, obviously not peak times. I don’t know how well that campaign went. I’m going to try and contact them and find out just exactly how well it did go, because it’s obviously still running. They’re running those special for the next three days. But the interesting thing was, when the went there, the kids said, “Oh my God, Dad. We’ve got to come back here. Look at these other burgers.” Now, what more could you ask for? We went there specifically for the meat pie burger, and the kids are going, “We want to come back here. This place looks epic.” That’s the whole thing, you know. Your menu is your sales person. So, good on them to Suburban Burger and I’ll include a link and some photos in the show notes, so have a look at that. Now, Facebook streaming how exciting is this.

So, if you follow us on Facebook have a look at some of the Facebook live videos that we’ve been doing. I’ve swung a lot of our marketing budget to Facebook Live videos now, because of the fact that we’re getting a lot more engagement with them. So, I’m a really big believer and this is something that’s working for us at Marketing4Restaurants. We’re generating engagement, we’re generating conversations with restaurant owners, and it’s not overly difficult to do. Now, of course, the number of one thing that you have to face when you talk about Facebook live is that it’s live, okay. We’re talking one cut here, people. So, you really want to know what you’re talking about. Now, I know a lot about restaurant marketing, well, I talk about a lot. So, I’m moderately comfortable in doing that. It still kind of scares the willies out of me, I’m getting more and more used to it. I’m not as nervous as when I do it. Mine all go for about 10 minutes because I tend to waffle on a bit, so I will actually practice two or three times and I do a PowerPoint presentation.

So, I’ve got the images in the back because we’re talking about marketing, which from a visual point of view is pretty boring, okay. It doesn’t work too well. You guys, though, you’re in restaurants and got all sorts of interesting things that are super exciting from a video point of view. And that’s why I think, you know, if I can make it work, you can definitely make it work because you’ve got 101 things that you can be doing a video of that people are going to be really interested in. So, what we’re going to talk about is how it works, the equipment that you’re going to need to do it, and then we’re going to talk about some of the things, I want to give a few ideas about the kind of things that you can talk about. It’s kind of a no-brainer, I think. So, what you do is you basically, now it has to be done from a mobile phone.

So, Facebook really wants to capture spontaneous, exciting kind of content. So, it has to be done from a mobile phone. Now, that’s not to say that you can’t prepare a video and then put it up and then run an ad to it. You can definitely do that, there’s no problems at all doing it. Facebook live though is different. So, there is a URL that you can go to, which I’ll include in the notes, which shows who’s actually run a Facebook live now. They promote the Facebook lives, because they want people to see them. So, what happens is you use Pagers Managers probably the best place to start. So, Pages Manager, which you should be using to manage your page in Facebook on your phone. You go there and when you go to hit post there’s a little icon for ‘go live’. And when you hit the ‘go live” button it sort of, it then narrows down, it shows you want kind of video is going to be shown. And you then put in a title for it, and it’s on the phone so it’s a little bit difficult to do. So, I normally put a fairly generic title in, and then there’s a button to go live. Now, a couple of things to think about, you want to be in a good reception area.

Now, we’re in Carrum Downs out here and Telstra, our ISP and phone carrier, they don’t do a lot of things to help us. The reception in our building, so the 4G reception is actually quite poor. It’s so poor that I can’t use it. And you’ll have a look at some of the earlier ones, reception’s really quite poor, the video’s really pixelated. And they’re the kind of things that really decrease the experience and decrease the engagement. So, you want to make sure that you’re in a really good reception area. Now, because of the fact that we’re in a poor reception, I actually use WIFI here. You’ll then hit the ‘go live’ button, and then you start talking. Now, here’s where it starts to get a little bit funky. So, you’re trying to concentrate on what you’re saying. You’re going to start seeing people reacting, you’re going to start seeing people put comments in. Which you, if you can, you want to respond to. Now, on an Android phone, there’s a little bit of a gotcha, particularly if you’re doing text. And that is that if you’re using the screen so that you can see what your Facebook live streaming, everything’s back to front, okay. And in the first one I did, I actually did a trial and I had text in there in everything and I looked at it and thought, “Yup, this is all looking great.” I didn’t even look at the text, if I had I would have seen that it was back to front. So, what I will do is

I will show some pictures of the way that I’ve got it setup. Now, I’m using test, so I’ve got PowerPoint presentation in the back and I’ve got text and graphs and all sorts of crazy stuff in mine. I am picking that you’re not going to do that, okay. And if you’re not going to do that, you don’t need to go to anywhere near the effort that I go to. So, the equipment that I use, the first thing I use is I’ve got a holder for my phone. So, I use an Arkon phone holder, they’re pretty good. I found it to be quite reliable. I’ll include a link in the show notes. Now, I have two laptops and that’s because I’ve got one that’s driving a PowerPoint presentation through a projector, and the other one is so that I can see what is going on on my phone. Which is a bit complicated.

So, I’m actually looking at my phone, I’m actually looking at the laptop to see what’s on my phone. So, I use some software called Side Sync. Now, that’s created by Samsung, I’ve got a Samsung phone. That allows me to control the phone from my laptop, because what I have to do is I have to use the camera that doesn’t have the screen. So, the screen is actually facing away from me, I can’t see what’s going on. If anyone makes a comment, I can’t see it. Truth by told, engagement that we get, not a lot. So, there’s 7,000 people following us, we don’t actually get that many people live. So, we’ll get 5 or 10 people on a video when it’s live. And so, one of the things that you’re thinking is, “Why would you bother doing that, if you’re going to get such small engagement.” Now, this is the big thing, you can then run an ad to the video that you created, and that’s what we’re doing. So, we’re doing out marketing trends podcast, so I did a podcast and then I did a blog which I turned into podcast.

From the podcast I’ve then done a video that talks about those trends and drives people to the podcast to download it. We’ve had lots of people listening to that episode of the podcast, and a lot of it’s been driven by the ad that we’ve got. And the other thing that’s really interesting is that people have been driving engagement. I know a lot of people have been like, “Hey, is that guy crazy? He’s talking about drones delivering food.” Well, since we did that, Flirty has raised $16,000,000 to further grow delivers. So, that I think, I think speeds up where we’re going to be at as far as drone delivery. But, you know, I’ve been saying to people, “Yes, it’s a little bit out there and it’s one of those things that’s not so much in the kitchen.” But I think that the competition is so fierce that you need to be absolutely smashing it with the food that you’re cooking and the innovation that you’ve got in the kitchen. You need to be innovating out of the kitchen, as well. And this is one of the big trends that we are going to be seeing, I think, in 2017.

So, that podcast I have marketed predominantly through a Facebook Live video and it’s been really, really, really cheap to run those ads. Let me just have a quick look. So, now that ad has reached 30,000 people, it’s had 11,000 views, and I’ve paid $100 for it. So, I’m paying 9 cents to get people to look at that and so that’s, in Facebook world, you know, I think that that’s pretty cheap. It’s definitely created a lot of engagement with us, a couple of sales. So, it’s a real no-brainer to be able to generate really, really good traffic with Facebook live ads. So, now the last bit of equipment that I want to talk about is lights. You’ve got to make sure that the lighting is pretty good. Now, I’ve actually gone out and bought some lights off eBay. They were very cheap, I think they were $30 each. You’ve probably got lights on the pass, you know, you’ll have some bright lights somewhere.

So, we’re in an office here, I wanted something to be able to create the best lighting possible. So, I’ll include a picture of all of our set up, so that you can get an idea of what it is that we do. If you need them, but some lights they’re not that expensive to run. And I think that that’s a really good way of making sure that it looks as good as possible. So, couple of best practices to think about, have a look at where you’re going to have the camera sitting. So, you’re going to want your phone placed on something, you want it stable. Unless, of course, you know, you’re running around the kitchen or something like that. Some of those work quite well. You may have someone holding it for you, you might be using a selfie stick. I think it’s better though with a tripod or having it, before I had a tripod I was literally just sitting it on a chair and I had a cardboard box that I’d cut something out of, I made my own holder which was okay except when my phone fell down which was a bit awkward. It doesn’t have to be super complicated.

Try and engage with people as the comments come up. So, they can comment and if you’re doing a decent length of video, then you might get people commenting and they might ask questions through it. So, when you see that, acknowledge it, answer the question. I think that’s a good way of really building engagement with the people that you’ve got. Have a think about your description, because that’s the thing that people are going to see when it comes up in their feed. Because the reason that I love Facebook live is that Facebook I really pushing the engagement that you see in Facebook live. So, they’ll try and get viewers for your video. So, write a good description that is something that people are going to be interested in.

Now, a lot of people say that you should promote the fact that you’re going to be live. I’m not sure that that works, particularly, and I know, you know, that for most of our customers they’re not going to have huge Facebook audiences. If you’ve got 100,000 people following you then it might be worthwhile saying, “We’re going to be live in half an hour or an hour.” I’m not sure that that’s the case. We’ve got 7,000, I don’t do it. I might actually try it. But I’m not super sure that that’s critical, particularly if you’ve only got 500 people following you, I think that you don’t really need to be filling up people’s timelines with, you know, “We’re going to be live in half an hour.” It’s just really not going to be super practical.

One thing that you do want to do though is pick the right time. Have a look at your audience and in the insights, it will tell you when your audience is online. Now, one of our problems is that being a global organization, so we just picked up our first customer in Dubai, which is super exciting. Really excited about that. So, we kind of spread the whole globe now. So, we have this argument about what time should we be thinking because, you know, you don’t want to be doing something when it’s in the middle of service. Well, there’s three services a day and whatever time we pick it’s going to be service for someone. So, we’re experimenting it but we’re not certain that we’re going to get the right time with that. Now, make sure that you’ve got a plan, rehearse it, make sure that you know what you’re going to say. Make sure that you’ve got your call to action there ready to go. You don’t want to get on there and go, “Hello, um, welcome to my Facebook live.”

It needs to be quite punchy. One of the things that you need to plan for is the fact that there’s no audio by default. So, I’m actually looking at my Facebook Live video from a couple of weeks ago and it’s actually a bit discombobulating because there I am moving around and it’s not clear], but it looks a bit weird. It’s completely silent thought, so people have got to actually engage with the ad to be able to hear what you’re saying. So, that’s one of the things how is that you’re going to get engagement? How is that you’re going to create that story? So, we’re working on some things that are going to be, have a lot more visual impact to start off with. And I think that is going to help with our engagement. But what is it that you’re going to do to try and get people? Or, is it that you don’t actually need a call to action. Can you have a call to action that’s entirely video driven?

Get personal. I think, you know, particularly in a restaurant, if you’re the chef, you know, what is it that ‘s going on? You know, people want to feel this is your opportunity to create that connection, you know. So, whether you’re front of house, back of house, this is your opportunity to build a connection with your audience. And I think that, you know, they want to know, people want to come into a restaurant where they know the chef. People want to come in where that they know what’s going on. If there’s something, if you’ve got a new menu item on and they know about it before anyone else, you know, what about if you’re talking about a hidden menu item? All these kind of little tiny things that get people to build a relationship with you. they’re the kind of things that you want to be thinking about. Have a think about the sounds.

So, you’re going to work really hard to try and get people to actually, you know, hit the button so that they can hear what you’re saying. Make sure that it sounds good. I’ve seen somewhere, you know, there’s all sorts of noise going on in the background. Try and get a quiet place, try and get a time when, you know, you’re not doing it in the middle of service where there’s all sorts of crazy stuff going on. And if you do, you know, maybe try and keep it shorter. Maybe try and be closer into the microphone of the phone.

Lastly, you know, be authentic. You know, this is your opportunity to sort of be building your brand, you might be building your personal brand. It might be your restaurant you’re building that. You want to be authentic and this is one of the things that we struggle with when we talk to a lot of restaurants. Sometimes there’s some people in there that just aren’t people people. And, you know, maybe that’s not the right person to be putting in front of Facebook live. So, have a think about who it is that’s going to do it. Because it may not be you, you might want to get someone else to be doing it for you which is tough. Because it is fairly confronting doing a live video. It’s one take and if you stuff it, then you’ve stuffed it and it’s like live TV. That’s why it’s a lot more stressful doing live. Now, what are the kind of things that you’re going to be thinking about putting on your Facebook live.

So, remember we’re trying to create a connection here, we’re trying to give people a reason to want to engage with your restaurant and by engage we mean come in and buy lots of food, and have a good time and tell all their friends. And come back as a regular customer. That’s what I mean by engage. But it’s nice to get a like on your video, but I don’t really care about that. And it’s nice to get, you know, lots of people liking it. Once again, you can’t meet payroll with that, you can’t pay yourself to take a holiday with that. It’s about getting people to come in. so, one of the things that we want to start thinking about, I think obviously let’s start with the food. What is it that going over the pass? Now, what is it that looks good from a Facebook perspective? What is it that you’re cooking today? What is it that looks really good in a quick video? And it doesn’t need to be war and peace. We’re not shooting, you know, Lord of the Rings here. “Hey, it’s James. Just wanted to let you know that we’re cooking up, you know, a duck soufflé today. This is what it looks like, you know, come on in. That’s the special of the day.” Now, I just made that up, obviously I’d rehearse that a couple more times. I don’t even know if you can make a duck soufflé, sounds like an interesting idea.

That’s the most basic kind of Facebook Live that you can do, you know, just 10 seconds. “This is it.” The sexiest menu item that you can, the one that’s going to stop people in their tracks and go, “Whoa, whoa, what’s that. Look at that, that looks amazing. Wow, now I’m hungry. Now, I think I might go there. Let’s make a booking, let’s give them my email address. Let’s want to go back there after I’ve been there.” That’s the start of that story that you want to have. People really like to know about the story that you’ve got. So, let’s go back with our duck soufflé. So, you’ve got now and, you know, you may not want to put pictures of the duck as it comes in. Maybe you do. Doing the prep, you know, “So, today we’re preparing today’s special. It’s duck soufflé.” Because remember, as it’s coming out over the pass you’ve lost today’s fight, unless it’s lunch and you’re preparing for dinner. If you’re doing a Facebook live at 7:00, now there’s things there. One, there might be a lot of people on Facebook at that time, that might be a good audience time for you. But everyone’s home and they’ve already made their decisions about what they’re going to be eating tonight. So, do you want to be doing this at 4:00? You know, is this something that you’re preparing for the staff and, you know, you’re going to cook a few of them up as you’re starting prep for the staff meal?

And then, you know, “Hey, this is what we’re going to be cooking tonight. This is the special that we’ve got going on.” Now, plus or minus you may not want to have duck, you know the duck raw ingredient. And I’ve seen this with fish and chip shops. You know, they get a delivery of fresh fish. “Hey, Jim from Jim’s Seafood Restaurant here. We just got these awesome tunas in today. Come on in, we’re going to be preparing them this way, that way, and the other way. Really excited about this tuna, it’s really top quality, super fresh. Today’s the day to come in and get it. We’d love to see you tonight.” How do you prepare that? So, “Hey, it’s Jim. I’ve got these awesome tunas. What I’m doing now is I’m filleting them and I’m preparing them for tonight’s service. I’d love for you to come in. Super fresh. We’re going to be doing them on the grill, with just a little bit of lemon. I think that’s the perfect way of having tuna, particularly when it’s this fresh. Come on in. We’d love to see you.” You can go all the way back to, you know, where does this come from? You know, are you at the market this morning? Are you in your garden? “Hey, it’s Jim from Jim’s Restaurant. I’m out gathering the herbs for tonight’s tuna dish. We’re going to get some,” I don’t know, whatever herb you’re going to put with it. So, there you can see I’m starting to breakdown the whole story about one dish.

And I think that’s what you want to be thinking about. Start telling that story, start taking people behind the scenes so that they can get a really good understanding of what it is that you do, how you do it, all of those sort of things that are really important. Now, so many restaurant owners I talk to, they go, “You know, I’m at the market.” It’s like, well what’s the story with the market? “I’m at the market buying stuff.” How do you pick the food, you know? And they’ll pride themselves on getting the fresh food and, you know, rejecting food that’s not up to their standard. That’s fantastic, but tell that story. There’s no point in, you know, obviously you can do it without actually telling people, but I think that there’s a huge story to be told there. You know, “Hey, here I am at the market. I’ve just had a look at these bananas, they’re not going to cut it. I’m looking for the best bananas.

Let’s go over and see this guy over here. Hey buddy, how are your bananas today? These bananas are looking a lot better. How much are they? Yup, great. I’ll take a dozen, I’ll take two dozen,” you know. “This is going into our,” I don’t know, whatever you’re making banana with. “Banana and tuna dish,” don’t make that, it probably wouldn’t work. “Come on in, we’d love to see you tonight.” You know, it’s these little, tiny snippets and, you know, be quirky. You’ve got to remember, Facebook loves to see that thing that’s a little bit, you know, we want to see behind the scenes. We want to see the thing, where’s your passion? Show us your passion. You’re the guy who’s really maintaining the food standards in the kitchen, and you’re really, really strict about that, let’s see that. You know, “Hey, what are the freshest bananas? No, no, no, they’re no good. They’re not good. Let’s go and see someone else. I’ve got to get the best bananas because we’re going to be creating the best banana dishes tonight.”

Showing off your skills in the kitchen, you know, the prep. Front of house, what is it that you’re doing in front of house, you know, meticulously going over. A wine delivery, have you got a special event that’s coming up? You can talk about that. Do you want to go through and do a recipe? Do you want to cook something? You know, come in half an hour earlier and say, “Right, a lot of people love our Vindaloo. So, today I’m going to show you the kind of things that we go through to cook a great Vindaloo.” And so, we were talking to Aangan in Footscray. Now, they mill their own spices. Now, that’s one of the things. So, tell that story. Let’s do a Facebook Live, you know, “This is how we prepare the spices.” That’s an amazing opportunity there to really A, you’re creating engagement B, you’re giving that inside view to the restaurant so that I feel that I’ve got a connection when I went there. You know, and I can appeal knowledgeable.

“You know, this restaurant it’s one of the best Indian restaurants because they mill their own spices.” That’s an exciting opportunity. And it’s marketing your clear point of differentiation. So, you can go through the recipe. You know, what is it that makes your recipes and, you know, we live in a MasterChef kind of environment. One of the things I think is that A, you can create engagement by helping people to cook the food that you want to cook with or two, you can create that, “Wow, you know, that’s why the Vindaloo tastes so much better at Aangan. That’s awesome. Okay, but it’s actually a lot of work, I can’t do that I’m just going to have to go there. I’m going to have to order from him. I’m going to go in and make a booking now.” So, create that problem, “That Vindaloo looks awesome, let’s just make a booking. Let him cook it for me.” So, there’s a whole heap of ideas about how you can use Facebook live to create some interesting content. But we’re not finished yet.

So, you’ll hit a button to stop the Facebook Live, give it a few seconds. Then what you want to do is load up your post in Facebook and edit. So, I’ll put in a much more detailed description. We’re starting to do some longform ads, you know, giving a whole heap of information so that people could look at it if they don’t want to go and watch the video. You know, I struggle sometimes to watch video, but I want to know what they’re talking about. So, you know, we put a lot of text in there, put the link in, you know, make sure that a call to action is in there. The last step I think is to run an ad to that video, okay. Now, I’ve gone through and I’ve told you the kind of money that we’re spending. So, $100, we’re not talking a lot of money, that’s been running for 10 days. So, I think we’re doing about $10 a day with that. You might, you know, you might only run it for a day. You might try and do a Facebook live every day, you might do it every week. I don’t think it’s important to be regular.

I think it’s important to be doing it and I think it’s important to be doing it when the time is right. You should plan for the time to be right, but you know, you don’t want to create all this stress, because it is stressful doing Facebook live. But run an ad. Have a listen to the advanced Facebook marketing podcasts. Look at your retargeting. Now, if you’ve got, you know, 10,000 people who’ve been to your website in the last 6 months who’ve been on Facebook. What would it be like if you’ve got a new special on and you targeted those people? They’re probably the most likely people who are going to come back to your restaurant, they’ve probably already been there. So, this is a really good opportunity to hit those people, “This is our new special.”

Sorry, one thing I didn’t mention which was crazy of me, market research. “Hey, it’s James from James’ Restaurant. We’re looking at the winter menu and I’ve got a couple of ideas that I’d really like to run past you. the first thing I’ve cooked up is roast beef, and the other one is roast lamb. Now, we’re thinking of doing the roast beef with this kind of sauce. I’ve got the roast lamb with a mint jelly. What would you be more interested in? What’s the one that you want to see?” You know, ask that question. Questions are epic for creating engagement. And the more engagement you’ve got the further Facebook is going to push your ad out. And, you know, the food’s going to look amazing, people are going to be really interested in, “Yes, that’s the food I want to have.” Bang. You know, you’re reinforcing the fact that you’ve got an awesome restaurant and that you cook awesome food. So, yeah, do market research. Please do market research. This is where that whole innovation thing comes in.

So, run an ad to it. I think that that’s really important. If you’re not running an ad to it, you’re really missing out on probably, I think, at least 50% of the benefit. And in our case, in all honesty, probably 80 to 90% of the benefit of Facebook live. We’d only get 10 to 20%, probably closer to 10%, if we didn’t run ads to them. Absolutely vital to really, you’ve gone to all of the effort of creating that content, you may as well get the most benefit out of it. The budgets that we’re talking about, they’re not a lot. In the previous one we talked about the kind of budgets you should be setting. I’m thinking $2 to $3 if you’re not 100% convinced about it. We’re not talking a huge amount. So, there you go. We’ve talked about the equipment that you need. Literally you can get started with just a phone. Particularly, it’s a lot more complicated if you’re going to have text in there and, hey, most of you guys aren’t going to have text in there. So, a phone, maybe a holder. Something to keep it nice and steady, maybe some lights. That’s what you want to be thinking about. We’ve talked about the process and some of the best practices that you want to be thinking about. It’s not overly complicated, and our first couple of efforts they were pretty ordinary. And I would like to think that in six months’ time we’re going to be a lot better job with our Facebook lives than we are doing now.

So, it’s an evolving process. We do marketing for a living and I still think that we’ve got a way to go with the processes that we’re using. But already we’re reaping significant benefits from it. Yeah, just run an ad to it. Test and adjust, look at how you’re going, look at how much those ads cost to run. What’s getting engagement? What is, more importantly, driving those bookings? So, that’s about it. Look, tag us in. I’d love to see some of the work that you do. So, tag us in your Facebook lives. So, I think that that would be really good. Yeah, we’d be keen to see what you’re doing.

Lastly, we’ve been doing some LinkedIn marketing, we’ve been putting a lot more content up on LinkedIn. So, if you’re listening to us, hit us up on LinkedIn, or hit me up. James Eling, keen to connect with as many restaurants owners, chefs as possible. Starting to do some things like asking questions about the podcast, you know, really starting to source people who are doing some interesting things out there through LinkedIn and we’re putting some content up there. So, yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn and we’ll have a few laughs. I hope you have a really, really busy day. That’s it. Bye.

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