In my opinion, Facebook is by the far the most profitable marketing platform for attracting and retaining customers. They continue to keep creating new ways to help business owners crank up the ROI on their marketing dollars. What I have to share with you today is groundbreaking for bar and restaurant owners and can’t be ignored!
Before I get into that, I want to cover the importance of capturing “Leads.” Capturing people’s personal contact information. It’s critical to your success in the bar and restaurant business for several reasons.
- Anyone who hands over their personal contact information to you, in exchange for an offer to DO business with you, is telling you they WANT to do business with you. Right? Or they wouldn’t give you that information, would they?
With that said, these people are more profitable to market to for future promotions than anyone else. There’s no denying that.
- You can cut your marketing costs in half by e-mailing, texting, sending direct mail, and remarketing with banner ads on google, to your customer list, rather than marketing to the masses and paying a fortune.
If you have just 500 to 1,000 people on your customer list, you can easily get a 10% response with just e-mail alone. (That’s if you have the right offers and messaging in place, not just promoting prices.)
- You can take those e-mail addresses and phone numbers and upload those to Facebook as a custom audience where you can then run ads ONLY to your customer list on Facebook. This brings a massive ROI because now you’re only marketing to people who’ve personally said they want to do business with you.
I could give you several more reasons but I think you get the point. The most profitable people to market to on the planet are people who personally give you their information in exchange to do business with you over marketing to people who’ve never heard of you or done business with you.
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Facebook’s Newest
Secret Weapon
One of the biggest problems we all face when trying to collect e-mail addresses is getting the correct e-mail address from customers. Some people give fake information, which is why you should always make sure you do a double opt-in online. Meaning after they give the e-mail, they have to go to their e-mail and click a link in that first e-mail to confirm you have the right e-mail. Then after that, you deliver the goods.
Good news. Facebook has made it even easier for us. A bulletproof way to capture information on auto pilot without getting fake information.
Facebook has just recently launched “Lead Ads.” This is where you can target your perfect audience with an offer and when they click to receive, a second screen pops up with their first name, last name, and e-mail address in a form. All they have to do is click submit and boom, that information is then sent to you.
Let’s walk through how this would look.
Here are two different ads. One targets males and the other targets females. Notice the images, the headlines, and copy. Remember, there’s no one size fits all offer. If you want to get the best results, you have to target specific groups with the right offers and right messaging.
Then, after they click “download” or “sign up”, (you can choose from various options) they are taken to a 2nd screen similar to this where all their Facebook information is auto-populated 
and easy for them to just click submit.
Facebook gives you the option to get more
information as well, such as gender, age, phone number, occupation, and so much more!
Keep in mind, though, the amount of people who want to give you more detailed information about themselves is limited. A restaurant marketing best practice is to allow for 2-3 form fields, especially for mobile users. The example on the right includes only name and email.
You can then run a second campaign to these leads after you’ve built trust and relationship with them. That way they will be more than willing to give you that information.
How I Use This Strategy In My Clients’ Bars & Restaurants To Boost Sales & Profits – And How You Should Too
When people sign up to a lead ad, we have built a custom feature to add that customer to our marketing automation system automatically (To get the leads otherwise, you have to download from Facebook and upload to your system yourself). As they are added automatically, we send them an e-mail or text (depending on the strategy we are using) with their offer and a unique offer code. We also include a 7-day expiration date to get them in the door fast! That’s important!
When they come in to redeem that offer, the staff or manager enters that code into their phone or tablet. Then 24 hours later, a very personal e-mail from the owner is sent asking them about their visit, what they can do better next time, and thanking them for their business.
This personal touch really makes the brand and owner stand out from the rest of the market because very few owners put personalized systems like this into place. This type of system is game changing and the best part is, it’s all automated and it builds trust with your customers.
What Kind of Return Can I Get From Lead Ads?
Here are some stats from a $150 ad campaign we did for the first time. These were based on the ads you saw above.
You’ll see that this only shows $139.20 spent so far and that it cost us on average $2.17 per lead which is really good. Think of the last time you spent $500 on advertising. How many customers came in and what did they spend?
Out of the 64 contacts who’ve signed up, we’ve seen 18 come in with their offer so far. There’s still more time on the expiration, so we are expecting a few more to trickle in. So if you do the math, so far it’s cost us $7.73 to get them in the door for a 1/2 price meal. Not to mention, we targeted NEW customers.
When we did the targeting we selected people who did NOT like our business page and we also said don’t target anyone who we have e-mails for already. So these were all new customers that we targeted.
I always use these stats, but Jon Taffer wrote in his book, Raise The Bar, that it cost on average $60-$70 to get a new customer in the door using traditional media. And he’s 100% spot on with those figures. So I’ll take $7.73 all day.
Follow Up Is
The Secret To Success
What’s important to remember though is that we all live VERY busy lives. We forget about things. We’re human! Which means, a good percentage of people won’t make it in with the offer. That’s normal as you know. However, we now have their contact information! So we can target them again with other offers and promotions for many months on end, which will increase the chances of them walking in at another time.
That’s the difference the really successful owners have over others. They have systems in place for attracting and retaining customers to maximize the ROI on their marketing dollars.
Great read and insights, Nick. I think Facebook is an extremely under-utilized means of advertising and customer retention. There is a lot of power behind some of the capabilities that they offer, and this just adds to that. We all know that the smoother the process for our consumers, the higher the likelihood of a conversion. Thanks for the article!