Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Ads for Restaurants

Do you post often on Facebook, yet you only receive a few likes and comments? It may be time to up your Facebook marketing game with paid ads.

Your audience is already scrolling on Facebook, but your organic posts won’t reach them. If you want to increase your online visibility and get more clients, you must learn how to use Facebook ads for restaurants.

We'll guide you through the process and give you useful and easy-to-implement tips:

Why you should use restaurant Facebook ads

Did you know 75% of customers use Facebook to search for restaurants? This proves that your target market is already on the social platform, you just have to persuade them to become your clients.

Here are the benefits of using Facebook ads for restaurants:

• Reach a bigger audience: your organic posts only reach your followers, but you can set up your ads to go to any audience, however big or small;
• Target a specific demographic: Facebook allows you multiple personalization options for your ads. For example, you can target the local community that lives near your restaurant;
• Easy to use: you don’t need any technical skills and you don’t have to hire an agency. Facebook has a guide that will show you exactly how to set up your desired ads;
• Increase online orders: by including a link to your menu in the ads, you convince people to try out your delicious food and increase your sales.

Read more: Restaurant Clientele Types and How to Persuade Them to Order More

How to run Facebook ads for restaurants: the Instruments

To make the most out of implementing Facebook ads for restaurants, you will need the following tools:

• A Facebook Business Page: to set up ads, you can’t use a personal profile. You need to create a Page so you can access the Ads Manager account. Afterward, set up a payment method for your ads;
• A restaurant website: if your goal is to convert people to clients, you will need to send them to your website or better yet, directly to your menu. That way, any person is just a click away from ordering your delicious food. If you don’t have a website, use our restaurant website builder to generate an SEO and sales-optimized one in less than 10 minutes;
  Persuade customers to order with a direct link from Facebook to your website Generate your own sales optimized website in under 10 minutes Start Now
• A direct link to your website: to persuade people to order, you need to make it as easy as possible for them. Don’t make them search for your website, add a direct link to it. You can generate a personalized link if you use our online ordering system.

Read more: How to Take Orders and Increase Revenue Using Your Restaurant Facebook Page

13 tips to ace Facebook ads for restaurants

Managing a restaurant is already a very demanding job, but setting up Facebook ads for restaurants doesn’t have to be complicated. Follow these tips to enjoy the benefits of ads with little effort:

1. Choose goals for your ads

To ensure you achieve your desired results, you must set goals for your ads and then measure them. Facebook has a variety of objectives for a campaign. Here are the most common ones for restaurants:

• Reach: get the word out about your restaurant to as many people as possible from your target audience;
• Brand awareness: show your ads to people who are likely to form a connection with your restaurant and remember it when they are looking for a place for food;
• Traffic: drive traffic to your website to increase visibility and ranking on search engines;
• Engagement: get people to interact with your pages through likes, shares, and comments;
• Video views: show your video to people who are likely to watch it;
• Conversions: persuade people to visit or order from your restaurant.

2. Select your target audience

You pay for every campaign you send out, so you better ensure you get your money’s worth. If you set a broad audience without any specifics, your ad may go to people in another city who will never visit you.

Therefore, if you want to make the most out of your Facebook ads, make sure the target audience you set is identical to the one you identified when you branded your restaurant.

Facebook makes it easy for you to select your target audience by breaking it down into:

• Location: send your ad to people in your immediate vicinity because they are the ones who are most likely to visit or order from you;
• Demographics: you can customize the gender, age, education, etc;
• Interests: you will be able to target people according to several interests including the type of restaurant and the type of food they prefer;
• Behaviors: the main categories here include digital activities, financial, purchase behavior, and residential profiles;

3. Decide on an ads budget

At the start of the month, when you create your marketing budget, don't forget to factor in the price of Facebook ads for restaurants. You can either pay for:

• Campaigns: it consists of multiple ad sets. It can be helpful to set a single budget rather than manage multiple as you would do if you would pay separately for each ad set;
• Ad sets: use this type of budgeting if you want to achieve different objectives with different audiences.

For both above instances, you can choose one of the following:

• Daily budget: you set an average daily spend over a week that can vary to achieve consistent results;
• Lifetime budget: it is a set amount that will be spent throughout the campaign or the ad set.

4. Use powerful Calls to Action

The captions you use for your images, carousels, or videos should contain powerful calls to action that entice people to take your desired action. Here are a few tips for writing persuasive captions:

• Keep it short: people have a short attention span and won’t read a long story, especially in a sponsored post. A sentence is enough to get the message across;
• Tell people directly what you want them to do: use direct verbs such as “Follow us for more promotions” or “Click here to see our menu options”;
• Present a benefit: give people a reason for which they should click on your link. Maybe an attractive promotion or a new, interesting ingredient;
• Create FOMO: if you promote something only available for a limited amount of time, people will fear missing out and be tempted to try it.

Read more: Restaurant Call to Action: 6 Tips for Converting Visitors to Loyal Clients

5. Use mouthwatering photography

People see countless Facebook ads for restaurants in a day, what can you do to make them stop and pay attention to yours? The answer is simple: use mouth-watering photography that will make hungry people instantly click on your ad.

In a world where a short attention span is the norm, a professionally taken photograph of a dish can really shine. If you want your ads to pop, you have two options:

• Hire a professional photographer: who will know how to put your food in the best light using high-end equipment. You can have the photographer take images of all your menu items, restaurant, and atmosphere so you can have a large database to use in the future;
• Learn more about restaurant food photography: you can take amazing images of your food with just a phone if you learn about composition, lighting, and colors.

6. Increase brand awareness

Many people jump straight to conversion campaigns, ignoring the fact that you must build trust with people before you can convince them to buy.

By setting up Facebook ads for restaurants with the goal of increasing brand awareness:

• Increase your credibility with potential clients
• Build a connection with existing customers
• Attract more new customers

Here are some ideas for brand awareness ads:

• A presentation video of your restaurant and menu items
• A carousel with your most popular dishes
• A video from the point of view of a client visiting you

7. Promote seasonal menu items

If you don’t already add seasonal items to your menu, you are missing out. Restaurant seasonality helps you reduce costs because ingredients are cheaper in season, and it also helps you attract a new crowd.

Each season, people are interested in trying out new items. For example, in the fall, pumpkin spicethemed dishes are the star items. You can take advantage of the increased interest and promote your seasonal menu items.

Furthermore, you can have specials for holidays that you can use in your ads, such as Christmas or Mother’s Day. Or go a step further and celebrate more unknown holidays such as World Hamburger Day.

Read more: 10 Tips and Tricks for Restaurant Holiday Menus to Make Clients Happy Every Day of the Year

8. Attract people with promotions

If you are planning on setting up Facebook ads for restaurants with the object of converting the audience to clients, promotions are a safe bet. If you pair a hunger-inducing photo with a 10% off the whole cart offer, you will surely notice an increase in sales.

Use the online ordering system from GloriaFood to set up restaurant promotions in seconds. After you set up the offer, the promotion will be visible at the top of the menu so nobody will miss it

Add a direct link to your menu in the ad so clients can instantly take advantage of the offer.

9. Invite people to reserve a table

Facebook ads for restaurants aren’t helpful just for increasing online orders, but also for filling more tables in your restaurant. Use your ads to encourage people to book a table by:

• Highlighting how easy it is to reserve a table: let people know they can book directly on your website, no phone calls needed;
• Creating FOMO: if they don’t book now, they may not find a free table and they miss out onyour delicious food;
• Providing a link: “Click here to book a table”; “You are one click away from booking a table for tonight”;

Read more: 5 Benefits of a Table Reservation System and How to Implement it for Free

10. Persuade potential clients to order

To get people to place orders, the most important step is to add a direct link to the menu. After all, convenience is king in the restaurant industry. You can try creative ideas to get your conversion-focused ad noticed:

• A behind-the-scenes video of preparing a menu item
• A delivery person handing a client the order and the happy client unboxing it
• A fast-paced video showing how to place an order
• An influencer enjoying your food

11. Showcase your contests

Contests are a great option to use in Facebook Ads for Restaurants because they fulfill two objectives:

• Increase brand awareness:
• Drive engagement
• Drive traffic to the website

We recommend you use a simple mechanism for the competition and a picture of the prize (your food) to get people to click on the ad and participate. Here are a few examples:

• Comment with your favorite item from our menu for a chance to win an all-expenses paid meal for two
• Like and share our post in your stories for a chance to win an all-expenses paid meal for two

Read more: 21 Restaurant Competition Ideas to Gain Visibility and Attract Customers

12. Promote your events

If you just post about an event on your wall, you may not reach a large number of your followers organically, especially if they don't constantly interact with your page.

Ensure your reservations list is full by promoting your event with Facebook Ads targeting:

• People who already follow you and have interacted with your posts in the past;
• People in your city as many would travel for a concert, tasting, or other interesting event.

13. Measure your results

To ensure your money is well spent, don’t just set up the campaigns and forget about them. Make it a point to check the progress regularly and make changes if you don’t see results.

You can build a reporting dashboard to track your ads performance or just use a pre-set Facebook Ad campaign report template.

Final Words

Including Facebook ads for restaurants in your marketing budget can help you improve your image and bring more business in. The main advantage of ads is that, compared to organic posts, they deliver way faster results.