Creating A Successful Digital Marketing Plan For Restaurants

Creating A Successful Digital Marketing Plan For Restaurants

Digital marketing can be a great way to get people to come to your restaurant.

However, most restaurants are approaching it haphazardly, without any clear strategy behind their digital marketing efforts.

That is a waste of time, energy, and money. You can’t afford to flail around hoping that something works!

That’s why today we are going to discuss how to be strategic about it.

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What is the Value Ladder Sales Funnel?

We believe that the most effective way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel.

It was created by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!).

This sales funnel has four stages:

  • Bait. You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
  • Frontend. You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
  • Middle. You offer the customer a more expensive and valuable product or service.
  • Backend. You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.

Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.

We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross-sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue.

What Is the Value Ladder Sales Funnel?

The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:

  1. Start the relationship with that person by offering free value.
  2. Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email.
  3. Build trust by delivering progressively more paid value at each stage.

Here’s how Russell explains it:

How to Build a Value Ladder Sales Funnel for Your Restaurant

What we have described in the previous section is the classic Value Ladder sales funnel.

But not all of that translates to promoting a restaurant online because of how restaurants work.

So now let’s take a look at how to structure a Value Ladder funnel for a restaurant.

What Should Be the Purpose of Your Value Ladder Sales Funnel?

It is widely believed in the hospitality industry that you need someone to come to your restaurant three times to convert them into a regular customer.

Of course, this number isn’t set in stone, it all depends on various factors.

The general principle is that humans are creatures of habit, so the more times someone comes to your restaurant, the more likely they are to keep coming back.

Digital marketing can help you persuade someone to check out your restaurant but then it’s up to you to provide a great experience:

Delicious food, great customer service, pleasant atmosphere, etc.

That’s the key to getting them to come back.

How to Get People to Visit Your Restaurant Three Times

You will need to use free meals, free desserts, and vouchers for this, so make sure that the math works.

You should be prepared to lose money at first – what matters is that your revenue increases over time as you convert people into regular customers.

However, “lose money at first” doesn’t mean “go bankrupt”, so please be careful with this and make sure that your restaurant stays afloat.

Bait: Free Meal

If you offer someone a free meal, they will likely accept it because hey, it’s free!

What we recommend doing is identifying which dish is the customer favorite, then offering that dish + a drink for free.

That’s the easiest way to get someone who has never heard of your restaurant to come to check it out.

Also, while you will lose money with this offer, you might not lose as much as you think because some people will inevitably order a dessert, more drinks, etc.

Frontend Offer: Free Dessert

Talking about desserts…

Your next offer should be a free dessert.

That way, someone who takes you up on it will likely get a savory meal first, as opposed to just coming in for the dessert alone.

So you might start turning a profit at this point.

Middle Offer: $10 Voucher for 2 People

Now you want that person to come in for the third time.

But you also want them to start bringing their friends to your restaurant.

You can incentivize that by offering a “bring a friend” $10 voucher for 2 people.

This is also likely to be profitable.

Backend Offer: Kids Eat Free!

Now they have visited your restaurant three times.

But how can you get them to come more often and bring more people?

If your restaurant is family-friendly, then you can offer a “kids eat free” voucher to encourage people to come with their families.

And if your restaurant isn’t family-friendly, then you can offer a group discount of some sort to encourage people to bring a group of friends.

Maybe your restaurant will become their new favorite place to meet up with friends and family!

What to Do Next?

Once you have made all four offers, you should make sure that you stay in touch with that person via email.

Let them know about new menu items, various seasonal promotions, events you are holding, etc.

You might also want to look for ways to create content that they might find interesting – cooking tips, interviews, etc.

Is This Sustainable?

We have noticed that sometimes restaurant owners are skeptical of this approach because it can feel like you are bribing people with free meals.

And you can’t build a sustainable business if you keep giving away your products for free, right?

But this is a misinterpretation of what this Value Ladder sales funnel is all about.

As we have explained previously, its purpose is to get people to come to your restaurant three times.

The people who enjoyed these three experiences will likely keep coming back without you having to entice them with vouchers.

What if it Doesn’t Work?

It’s impossible to know whether a sales funnel works or not without driving traffic to it.

We live and breathe sales funnels, yet even we can’t tell that without putting our funnels to the test.

Sure, we can make educated guesses, as we know what the best practices are, so we understand what’s most likely to work.

But we still need to drive traffic, then analyze the results. We don’t rely on guesswork, we rely on cold hard data.

So be careful.

Make sure that your funnel is profitable before you start spending serious money on traffic.

Don’t just start pouring cash into it because “you just know” that it will work. You don’t know anything until you have the data!

That being said, what typically happens is that even if a funnel isn’t profitable from the get-go, you can optimize it by tweaking the offers, the landing pages, the emails, etc.

So don’t give up if it doesn’t work immediately – you simply need to figure out a way to optimize it. A/B testing can be helpful here. Keep experimenting until you get it right!

How to Drive Traffic to Your Value Ladder Sales Funnel

So how do you get people to visit your lead magnet landing page where you promote your free meal offer?

#1 Promote Your Free Offer With Paid Ads

We believe that the best way to test your sales funnel is with paid advertising.

Create a Facebook Ads campaign, set a small daily budget, and start running ads. Then sit back and watch what happens.

At this stage, your goal should be to figure out how to run your ad campaign profitably so that you would be getting leads and still end up in the black when everything is accounted for.

Here’s how you can optimize your sales funnel:

  1. Analyze your sales funnel data. Which page converts the worst?
  2. Figure out what the problem is. It might be the design of your landing page, the copy, or the offer itself.
  3. Fix the problem.

Then continue repeating this process until your funnel starts generating profit.

Also, you might want to experiment with Google Ads, especially with location targeting for specific keywords.

Think about what a person who is interested in the food that you are offering would type into Google Search, then target that keyword with your ads.

For example, if you run a pizza place, then you can use the “pizza in [your city]” keyword.

#2 Promote Your Free Offer With Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing can also be a great way to promote your free offer.

However, before you start experimenting with it, you should make sure that your sales funnel works.

Of course, just because your funnel is profitable when you drive traffic with ads, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be profitable when you drive traffic with influencer marketing.

Also, when it comes to influencer marketing costs, they are much more variable than paid advertising costs as they depend on the size of the influencer’s following.

Here’s a quick overview of the influencer hierarchy:

  • Nano influencers (1K–10K followers)
  • Micro influencers (10K–100K followers)
  • Macro influencers (100K–1M followers)
  • Mega or celebrity influencers (1M+ followers)

And here are some estimates of how much influencers charge per post:

Promote Your Free Offer With Influencer Marketing

However, monetary payment isn’t the only way to compensate influencers, you can also barter with them and get a shoutout in exchange for free stuff.

For example, last year only 34.4% of brands paid money to influencers, as opposed to compensating them with free products, discounts, or giveaway entries.

As a restaurant owner, you are in a great position to use the bartering strategy, as you can offer influencers free meals in exchange for a shoutout. 

What we suggest is reaching out to a bunch of influencers, striking a deal with each of them for a single shoutout, then asking them to promote your free offer.

You want to create a separate link for each influencer so that you could track which shoutouts converted the best.

Once you identify the influencers who produce the best results, you can work out a deal with them to get regular shoutouts.

#3 Build a Social Media Following

Finally, you want to build a social media following of your own, so that you wouldn’t have to pay for each and every click forever.

Instagram is the perfect platform for restaurants as its visual nature allows you to show off both the atmosphere and the food.

Here’s how you can grow your following:

  • Post 3x per week.
  • Use relevant hashtags.
  • Reply to every single comment.

Also, if a customer tags you in their photo, repost it on your profile – it will serve as social proof.

The better your photos, the faster you will acquire followers on Instagram, so you might want to invest in hiring a photographer.

That being said, when it comes to social media marketing, the single most important thing is consistency.

After all, the most common mistake people make is giving up too soon, as building a following on any social media platform takes time.

That’s why we recommend committing to posting 3x per week for at least a year. That’s 156 posts!

By the time you reach that goal, you will likely have achieved some momentum, which will motivate you to keep going.

Remember, the hardest part is the beginning, when you feel like you are doing all this work but your follower count remains stagnant. Be prepared for an uphill struggle!

However, the more followers you gain, the more the growth of your following will accelerate, so it will get easier over time.

Build Your Sales Funnel With ClickFunnels (Free 14-Day Trial!)

We are biased here…

But we believe that our software is the best tool for building a sales funnel for your restaurant.

It offers:

  • High-converting sales funnel templates.
  • A step-by-step process for building a sales funnel.
  • An email marketing functionality.

In other words:

We have everything you need to build a sales funnel!

There’s also a free 14-day trial – you can try our software and see if it works for you.

So what are you waiting for?

Start Your Free 14-Day Trial Now

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