Hey guys bought an established pizza shop 2.5 years ago and have been running it very similar to the previous owner with some slight changes. I’ve kept the advertising platforms the same. Been spending about $1800 a month on advertising thru mainly direct mail, loyalty rewards cards and a little social media. What do you guys spend on advertising and what sources do you use that you’ve had success with?
We haven’t spent any money on advertising. Make a consistently great pie with great service and that will be the best advertising and something that money can’t buy 
Google Ads are extremely painful to setup for a novice. However, it was worth the investment for me. It took me a year to really feel like I knew what I was doing, but I did eventually figure it out. Start with a few dollars each day. You won’t miss it and you’ll learn a lot. Eventually you’ll develop a comfort level to spend more.
I am spending a lot of money advertising. We have about 100,000 people in our metro area. We have 23 pizza companies including the chains. For pizza, I really only have 3 good competitors, but everyone takes a bite.
After 14 years I still hear people say they didn’t know I was here. So I bit the bullet and hired the Wizard of Ads group to help me change that. I raised my radio spend from $500 to $2,300 per month for a year. Thats the short story.
I have 1100 reward members who spend $380 per year. My goal is to get to 2500 members which should generate about $900,000 in anual sales. The big picture goal is 5,000 members. It costs less to keep them than new customer acquisition. I spend $600 to $1000 per month advertising to my rewards members.
My best new customer acquisition campaign: I advertised a free small cheese pizza in the good news paper (about 18,000 people). I made it look like a newpaper article. The headline was “Is this Man Crazy”. We have really good cheese. At the time a cheese pizza cost me $1.50. Pepperoni or any other extra topping were only $1. The extra topping generated an extra $1,100.00 in sales which paid the food cost for the whole campaign. The add cost me $700. We gave away 550 pizzas and my sales increase 19% for several weeks after that.
Hey after reading your post I went and looked your store up and wanted to let you know your google listing to your website returns a 404 error . Its embedded in the site so you can still click links and go to your menu and online ordering but I wanted to bring it to your attention in case you weren’t aware. Looks like its trying to link to a menu page that maybe was the old URL but has changed because its pointing to /menu-page vs /menu
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Thank you,
Wes Kronberg