Should You Run Paid Ad Campaigns for Your Restaurant?

The answer to this question depends on a few factors.

We’ll start by discussing what else can be done if not paid advertising.

To promote your restaurant you can try using two methods:

1. Paid advertising or Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
2. Organic advertising

Paid advertising or PPC

Paid advertising or PPC helps you to reach larger and more targeted audiences in exchange for a relevant monetary investment. The best part about paid advertising is the precise data it offers. You can find numerical data of the site traffic, number of clicks, conversion rate, bounce rate, etc., and use it to adjust your campaigns.

Organic advertising

Organic advertising usually takes time to increase traffic but it has its own advantages. Organic promotion is free and more genuine to the customers because they discover you instead of you reaching out to them. It might need constant effort and track but once it picks up the pace, the audience will grow naturally.

If this is the method you want to use, try search engine optimization (SEO), word of mouth, email marketing, or enhancing social media presence for better results.

If you’ve just begun with digital marketing and you are not looking for a sudden increase in traffic, then you don’t necessarily have to opt for paid advertising. You can start by building up a small but organic audience base and then switch to paid advertising.

This way you’ll also have enough data to compare how paid and organic advertising is working for you individually and which one you should focus on more.

Whether you should use restaurant PPC or not, depends on a few parameters.

• Do you want quick results?
• Do you want to find out the type of audience you’re reaching?
• Do you want to remarket yourself or not?

Try answering questions like these and you’ll be able to figure out whether you want to choose PPC for a restaurant or not.

• Budget:

One of the major factors that affect your decision and results of PPC is budget.

The budget acts like fuel to the vehicle. As long as you have fuel, the vehicle will run. Similarly, as long as you keep maintaining your campaign budget, the campaign will run. But once you stop it, there will be a sudden fall in the traffic.

The decision to run paid campaigns for restaurants also depends on how much budget you can provide and for how long. It’ll be deteriorating for you if you reach a good state of building the traffic and then run out of budget.

That might flush down the entire progress.

If you want to use PPC for restaurants, then where should you start from?

Here’s a list of a few PPC campaigns to start with:

1. Facebook Ads

The normal Facebook Ads are pretty much like the other platforms, but a new feature is in trend nowadays. The Facebook Location Ads. Here you can target audiences of particular locations. The main purpose of Location Ads is to guide the potential customers to your restaurants, without leaving the app yet getting directions.

2. Instagram Ads

Did you know that 33% of restaurants use Instagram as their social media platform of choice?

There must be a reason if such a large number of restaurant owners are using the platform. And if you are not among that 33%, then you are missing out on huge opportunities.

With Instagram, you can share pictures, videos, and snippets and advertise them to targeted groups. Use Insta Stories to share behind-the-scenes food prep, recipes, customer reviews, and ‘meet the team’ interviews.

3. Pinterest Ads

20% of all pins on Pinterest are food-related. Food and beverage is the most popular category of content on Pinterest. Pinterest is designed in a way that the viewers click on the pins and visit the link assigned to them. They are supposed to leave the platform to discover more about the related pin.

Thus, it naturally encourages the audience to visit your website. Paid Pinterest Ads magnify this process.

4. Google Ads

This is a very crucial tool for restaurant owners for marketing. On search engines like Google and Bing, the audience searches with intent and need. They are already interested and intended to use services similar to yours.

Thus, target the right keywords and launch restaurant PPC campaigns. Track the analytics data regularly and use it for remarketing.

Another important step is to set up your Google My Business account, which is free of cost but will tremendously assist your paid ad campaigns.

Conclusion

In simple words, there is not a one-word answer to this question. Each restaurant is different and so are the requirements. What might work out best for you could be a terrible strategy for another.

Thus, choose the hit and trial method. You can start with organic advertising, then switch to paid advertising, monitor performances of both and take action accordingly. But we’ll recommend you implement PPC for your restaurant because organic reach is time taking and the industrial environment is ever-changing.

To keep up with the competition and increase sales figures, you need to reach larger and more targeted audience groups. Paid advertising will help you to do this. When you want to use PPC is absolutely up to you.

But don’t worry. Whenever you want to go for PPC restaurant marketing, we’ll be there to assist you and provide sufficient information on the topic.

If you want, you can check out restaurant PPC services by RaSu Creatives here, for more information.

Till then, analyze your needs and resources more and let us know any suggestions or queries in the comment box.