Facebook Ads for Restaurants: 6 actionable tips

August 18, 2020

How to advertise a restaurant online? How do restaurants do digital marketing? Are Facebook Ads for Restaurants worth the investment? Those are questions I get asked alllllll theeeee time. So let’s answer these questions, and do so with 6 actionable tips. These tips will probably clarify the opportunities that Facebook Ads offer to restaurants.

Running Facebook ads to attract an audience for your restaurant business is a smart and powerful marketing strategy. Why? Well, 49 percent of potential clients use Facebook restaurant searches around them.

Facebook enjoys 86% of the total share of socially driven shopping sessions according to statistics. So, ignoring this platform for restaurant ads while you’re planning to grow your restaurant business will not be a tactical marketing solution.

So, how do you market a restaurant online? Below are some restaurant marketing tips and tricks through which you can use Facebook Ads to your best level and grow your business.

1. Present Attractive Seasonal Offers

There are a lot of ideas to present seasonal specials when it comes to food. No matter the season, you can grab any occasion and target your audience to celebrate the event with a special discount or advertise an item that resonates with the occasion at hand.

This is one of the best restaurant promotion ideas. You can promote your updated or changed menu and target both new and regular clients. Or you could post one seasonal item ad each month. This will keep guests who already know about your restaurant interested.

2. Target Right Location

If you’re located in New York, you would not want to pay for ads appearing in Alaska, right? Right. So, what to do? It is simple: use the precise zip code of your restaurant location in Facebook’s Ad Manager Platform.

Also, don’t forget to put in the zip codes of neighboring areas to cover places from where people can easily travel to your restaurant.

3. Market Your Extra Restaurant Services

Many restaurants have something extra they offer to their guests. For example, you might be serving a complimentary starter or dessert, or having a live music on Sundays.

These are great ideas, but they are not going to help your business grow people don’t know about them. Run ads solely based on promoting these perks with clear and inviting photos or engaging videos to make your restaurant stand out among the rest.

Facebook Restaurant Ads Inspiration – Check out this fun, emoji using ad from Lazy Dog!

4. Retarget Your Customers With Facebook Ads for Restaurants

You can do special promotions or include brand awareness tactics in your Facebook online advertising for restaurant to encourage your existing or previous clients to visit your place again. Sending specific messages based on their visit can help you maintain customer turnover and hence your business revenue.

How to do this? With advanced geofencing Facebook ads. You may have heard of ‘location targeting’, but geofencing brings this to a whole new level. It allows you to draw a virtual polygon around areas where there’s a high chance that your guests are located. When you draw that virtual polygon via the ad platform, people that step inside that boundary see ads for your restaurant. This way Facebook can keep track of people who actually visit your restaurant. Insane, right?

You can also target competitors’ locations, events, and conferences if you want to. But for retargeting ads, your own location would make the most sense.

Using this information, you can send a customized message (including a special offer or new additions) to your existing customers.

5. Post Restaurant Ads Following The Right Schedule

Facebook allows you to schedule your ads with the ad scheduling tool. You just have to know the best time to display your ads to engage more customers, and you are good to go.

If you don’t know the best time to run Facebook ads, HubSpot has done the research for you, and here are the results:

3:00 p.m. is the right time to post on Wednesdays,
On Saturdays and Sundays, it’s between 12:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m
On Thursdays and Fridays, it is between 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.

Obviously these may vary per country and per target audience, but they give you a good general idea.

6. Use Facebook Ads to Promote Catering Services

Many restaurants also offer catering services, which can be promoted using Facebook restaurant ads as well. For example, you can build a Facebook Ad for wedding catering services and highlight the assorted dishes you are going to serve your clients.

You can target clients accordingly with the Relationship Status set to engaged. Or what about birthday parties? You could create an ad specifically targeted to people who’s birthday is within the next 30 days.

So, Are Facebook Ads for Restaurants Worth It?

Facebook ads for restaurants are killer marketing tactics used by many restaurants. They enable you to filter your restaurant ad exposure according to location, profile information, and demographics, among others. Now, if you fortify these ads with restaurant SEO, you are bound to reach your restaurant target market successfully.