A Quick Guide to Facebook Ads for Your Restaurant

Your customers spend time on Facebook, that’s almost guaranteed. More than one billion people log into this social platform every day. Facebook know a lot about those people; where they live, what they’re interested in, how old they are, even what they do for a living. The list goes on and on. This is information that any business would benefit from and you can access it all through Facebook Ads (advertising).

To create any sort of advert on Facebook you will need to visit the ad manager and set-up a payment method in the billing area. Facebook ad manager is used for setting up and monitoring the results of any paid promotion on this social platform. It’s worth familiarising yourself with it before you get stuck in.

Drive Local People to Your Website

Before you set-up a new ad, Facebook will present you with a list of options to choose from. It’s here that you will select the main aim of your ad:

An advert designed specifically to send people to your website is set-up to encourage link clicks. You will need to entice people to leave Facebook, to click away from what they were doing and visit an external website. This type of ad really needs to stand out and provide a REASON for users to interact. Discounts, special offers, and freebies are commonly used to entice Facebookers to visit an external website. However, you don’t need a special promotion to make an ad like this work. Simply using an eye-catching image and relevant targeting is enough to grab attention.

Before you choose the image and the wording for the advert, you will need to set the ad targeting. This will include the age, gender, and interests of your desired audience, as well as the location. Location can even be specified with a customised radius:

As a restaurant, you can use Facebook’s data in a unique way to other businesses. Key events such as birthdays and anniversaries are commonly celebrated with an evening meal at a nice local eatery. When creating an ad, target your location and then try out some adverts aimed at people with key events coming up in the next 2-3 weeks.

Promote Content to Your Fans & Their Friends

You probably have an existing fan base of some sort.  It doesn’t matter if you have 100 followers or 100,000 followers, this type of ad works in the same way. When you share content on your Facebook page, you can promote each post to your current fan-base, PLUS their friends. Why do you want to do this? Well, it’s very likely that the friends of your followers are interested in similar things and live in a similar location. After all, common interests bring friends together. This type of promotion is one of the easiest to set-up and it will instantly put your brand in front of more relevant people.

When you’ve posted the content to your Facebook page, click the ‘boost post’ button and simply choose ‘people who like your page and their friends’ from the audience list. Set a budget and the length of time you want your ad to run.

It’s worth noting that this is a quick way to promote content, but for a more in-depth set-up and full analytics on the ad performance you will need to use the Facebook ad manager.

Create Carousel Ads to Showcase Different Elements

The majority of Facebook users are mobile browsers. A carousel ad uses the swipe feature (a common smartphone feature) to its advantage. This type of ad allows you to showcase multiple offers, products, or services with individual links to different landing pages on your website.

Suggestions:

Highlight special events for different days of the week. For example, if you have themed nights at your restaurant, users can swipe through the various themes on different days. Thursday two for one meals, Friday fish night, Sunday lunch specials etc,.

Show your best dishes of the month, linking to your online menu or an online order/booking service.

Facebook are continuously improving their advertising platform and their overall support for businesses. In fact, there is a whole learning resource for businesses who promote content via Facebook. Here you can read more about the different ad types and get a helping hand in all areas of paid promotion via Facebook and Instagram.