Growth in the restaurant business is a combination of intuition, drive and creativity. Being a market leader is great but to get there you have to build a foundation.
As I always like to say, I never wanna pour gasoline into the top of a leaky engine. You gotta make sure that you have the right marketing system set up so that you can use your creative and financial resources to grow.
If you want to know what that looks like check out this blog I wrote on the marketing ecosystem every restaurant needs. It will help you establish a foundation for your marketing.
OK, so now that you have the ecosystem what should you do?
I was talking with my good friend Gregg Majewski from Craveworthy Brands and he asked me a question that I actually found to be more perplexing than I had considered it before: “what should you budget for Marketing?”
At Handcraft Burgers and Brew our December 2024 saw an increase of almost $20,000 in gross revenue from December 2023. That’s not a fluke. That was a years worth of engineering and then a couple of key moves that really turned it up at the end.
I’m not humble bragging. I’m showing you the result so I can segue to how we got there in hopes that it works for you.
But don’t worry, we’ll get back to budgeting.
Some of our 2024 marketing plan, from a very high level, was based on a simple value suggestion from Gregg. We ran a barbell marketing strategy for the entire year. We balanced offers deals and promos with premiums. I can tell you beyond the shadow of the doubt, it worked.
For the last quarter we added in two new marketing moves that absolutely I will tell you made the difference in our revenue.
1. Increased and fluctuating budgets with meta-awareness ads.
2. Influencer marketing.
META AWARENESS:
I had a really interesting conversation with both Justin Ulrich 📢🎙️ from Evocalize and Julie Wade, CFE from Taziki's Mediterranean Cafe in Q3 about how they can use Meta awareness ads to drive revenue on a day when a store is performing under projection.
It made me think how do I do that every day?
The playbook is easy here… It’s an always on marketing move. You have 24/7 awareness ads running that share the highest value prop for new customer acquisition. Typically, this is your most popular menu item or the experience that people most frequently have on their first visit.
Start with a minimum budget of five dollars per day, but honestly $10 per day is better. Then increase as needed.
The goal is to have your CPM under $5. Anytime I saw our CPM trending down underneath $1.25, I added budget. If it started to creep up to $2 CPM or higher, I removed budget.
Need help? Talk to my friends at Targetable. They are running ads for almost every single restaurant I’m consulting with and they absolutely helped build and understand these playbooks.
INFLUENCER MARKETING
As a content creator myself, a restaurant owner and a hospitality marketing consultant, I can tell you that influencer marketing absolutely works to drive awareness.That is top of the funnel for your business.
Don’t believe me, go look at what influencer marketing has done for Dave’s Hot Chicken.
We are regularly inviting influencers and content creators to come into the restaurant to Enjoy a meal and share to their social feeds. On average, we’re getting 1-2 a week by simply inviting them in.
We also chose a couple of really large and impactful influencers and gave them a budget while allowing them to be creative.
Additionally, and this is something that would be easy for you to do, we onboarded using the Mustard platform. It’s a monthly fee and based on your needs, you get a certain amount of Influencers per month.
To be honest, it’s way better than I expected and for sure I think we have quickly figured out how to be power users. I would definitely recommend you check it out.
We are still employing this tactic.
BUDGETING
OK, so back to answering the question how do you budget? The right way to do it is actually on a location by location basis. I know if you have a lot of locations that sounds like a total headache, but this guide will help you figure it out quickly.
First of all, a minimum daily budget per location for Google ads is $5 per day and the same for running awareness ads on Meta. Increase from there, based on necessity.
I would reserve a minimum of $1000 per month for digital ads. You may not use it, but if you budget for it, you know you have it.
PS I doubled our daily budget at Handcraft Burgers and Brew today!
Assuming you have set up the marketing eco system I mentioned above, these are the next three questions to ask and answer:
1. Does the location have an awareness problem?
=> Use META AWARENESS ADS
2. Does the location have a volume (acquisition) problem?
=> Use GOOGLE SEARCH ADS
3. Does the location have a retention problem?
=> Use Email, rewards and offers to increase trips.
WHAT ELSE??!
Once you have tuned up all of those channels, then I would look at direct mail if you are in a suburban location and influencer marketing if you are anywhere but a rural location.
If all of that is firing and you’re kicking ass, but you’re just looking to really increase overall … yhat is about brand marketing, not a block and tackle solution. … And a totally different conversation.
Before you say, “yeah that’s great Rev. This is for your hamburger shop in New York City. What about all of my locations?” I won’t go into the detail, but every single one of my clients is running some version of these playbooks … and it’s working.
Now that you’ve digested all of this, what questions do you have?
Have you registered for the P3 Restaurant Marketing Mastermind yet??!?!
I’m telling you, this is the only way you’re gonna learn every marketing tactic and playbook you need to know for the entire year in 48 hours.
There’s about I think maybe six tickets left. You should check it out right now.
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Do you need help with any of this? Send me an email rev@brandedstrategic.net
- Rev Ciancio
WHAT DOES REV DO?
*I help restaurants to build guest marketing programs.
*I help hospitality tech companies with lead generation and content marketing.