New Pizza Store- Adverising/Marketing

I am buying existing pizzeria in beach community. I will be changing name, as it is franchise that has lost its way. I want to have all my advertising/marketing ready to go on Day 1 after landlord approval/escrow closes in -30-45 days. Here is my plan. I will be doing EDDM on all local routes by store within n 3 miles.Plan is to give USPS all my menu mailers day before opening, so on Day 1, all addresses will have menu mailed. Plan is to saturate local community. Also, I’ve also read, FB add is cost effective way to get brand name out there. Same idea, pick 3-5 mile radius from store. How does this sound? Your thoughts welcomed!

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Hi there :slight_smile:

First of all, congrats on starting your new business, and good luck with it!

Your advertisement plan sounds good.
Maybe add Twitter and Instagram along with Facebook to target & reach more audience.

EDDM is the way to go, but I’m not sure if you’re gonna have enough time to deal with bundling 100s for the post office and preparing for the opening at the same time.
Unless you have plenty of helping hands, you should consider the option of having your menus printed and direct mailed by the same company. That would be one less headache for you.

Either way, best of luck!
Looking forward to reading your success stories!

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Thanks for quick response. I have 2 addl partners. I am responsible for Marketing/advertising (MBA Pepperdine Unibersity), so EDDM is no problem. My first objective is brand awareness. I spent 2 years finding other partners to compliment my skillset

You have an MBA from Pepperdine and you’ve read that Facebook is a cost effective way to get your brand name out there?

Here are my suggestions:

Start with Facebook hard

*about a month before you open. Put out a reach ad set the frequency to be twice a day. The ad can say something like coming soon follow us to stay updated

*every other day put up a post about something going on, a menu item, loyalty program you have or just anything to keep everyone intrigued.

*two weeks before you open start a FB event ad have some kind of promo free small pizza from 11-2 or something like that. Make sure it’s a very aggressive offer

Chamber of Commerce

*use you chamber to set up a ribbon cutting. Then squash them after that.

Press Release

*send out a press release to every newspaper source and every news station in your area. Hopefully one or two will run with it.

Food Bloggers

*send all the food bloggers in your area your press release and also let them know that would love to set up a day and time for them to stop by. (by setting up a day and time you’ll know when you have to be on your best performance)

EDDM

*i would start this about a week after you open up. Once you iron out all the kinks. Make sure your menu has an aggressive offer to get people to try you out instead of the regular place they would have ordered from.

Google Ads

*set up a google search ad the same time you set up the FB reach campaign. Use keyword of the name of your place. People will be searching for you and you don’t want them to be distracted. By doing this you’ll set your site right at the top of the page. It will not cost much because there is no competition with your shops name.

Sign Spinner

*depending on you location. If you are located off a very busy road a sign spinner will grab people’s attention. If you are located in a shopping mall or plaza have someone out there handing out little square samples of your pizza with a menu. I would do this for the first week your open.

Those are just a few suggestions. Good Luck with your shop. I wish you the best. Remember no matter how prepared you think you are there is going to be something that goes wrong.

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Costs of FB ad to run 2 day for month?

There’s a lot of factors that come into play with that. A couple are the size of your audience and the the placements of the ad. You can set a Lifetime budget for your Campaign and FB will make sure you don’t go over it.

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DO NOT send your EDDM before you open. Who knows what hiccups come up to keep you from opening or being at full potential. What if health department doesn’t allow a seamless change of ownership without downtime? What if your credit card processing isn’t up and running yet? Nothing sucks as bad as losing customers you paid for because you can’t serve them yet. Why rush it, wait till you’ve been open a couple days to drop the EDDM pieces. Pick up the slack those days with some doorhanging or dropping flyers at businesses.

this just happened to a mexican place in my area except it was in a Coupon Magazine mailer…they were getting killed in social media and looked like complete idiots…

I am not a fan of mailing an entire market area all at one time…Better to divide it into 5 to 8 segments and mail to 1 segment each week…Then repeat as often as it is showing a return…In my opinion, marketing should not be a fixed % but rather keep spending so long as your “investment” is showing a return…However, in the beginning you may need to bump up the frequency to build up your client base…Good luck…

Hey there, First of all congratulations on your new venture. As it happens I’m a marketer by trade with a good deal of experience in the digital marketing space. I tend to shy away from EDDM, but (you may already have this in mind) if you do I strongly recommend having some way of tracking it back to the EDDM, like a unique coupon code so you can understand its performance.

In terms of leveraging digital platforms, I would steer clear of Google Adwords but would recommend Facebook and Instagram. Facebook ads are usually less expensive than Instagram but I think they can both be pretty productive.

(Disregard the rest of this message if you know this stuff already, but in case you’re interested I’ll go into some ways to maximize your digital advertising)

They key to advertising on Facebook, Instagram and most digital channels really is targeting and optimization. If you just run an ad with say a 5 mile radius, you’ll get a lot of waste. What I mean by that is that a lot of people who see your ad won’t be your customers. So the first step is to identify who your customers are and who you want them to be. There are a few ways to to this, first you can use your understanding of the business and the community. Who are you targeting? What age groups? What genders? What interests? In a family community you may want to target women who you think would be making the decision to order food for the family. You may want to exclude people who live outside of a 5 mile radius even if they are currently in a 5 mile radius while they’re on Facebook. However if it’s a touristy beach community, then you may want to target tourists and go after people in a 5 mile radius who don’t live in a 5 mile radius.

Since you are buying an existing business I would assume that they have an email list. This is great and can be a huge help. Take that email list and upload it into Facebook Business Manager as an Audience. This will match those email addresses to Facebook accounts and allow you to run ad campaigns specifically at those users. It will also allow you to create what are known as “Look Alike Audiences”. This is where Facebook looks at the accounts of your customers and identifies people that share similar attributes with a statistical significance and identifies them as enough like your current customers to be likely new customers. This is great way to find people who you should be getting to but for some reason haven’t. But remember to geo-target all of these campaigns so you’re not advertising to people outside of your trade area.

As you create new audiences, also create new campaigns. This takes a bit of work but it’s how to be the most efficient. Have one campaign targeting existing customers, another targeting lookalikes of existing customers, another targeting tourists, another targeting moms, another targeting dads, another targeting singles, etc etc. This way you can measure performance from one campaign to the next and optimize them to work or cut them out if you can’t. If you like I can write more about optimizing campaigns but this is a high level overview. Again, my apologies if this is all common knowledge.

The other big thing is creative, and by this I mean what’s in the ad, what people see. This is another way to optimize campaigns. For larger campaigns we make literally thousands of pieces of creative and Facebook rotates them to find which one performs the best and then stops showing ones that don’t perform. So you might have a banner that shows a slice of cheese pizza with the message “The Best Pizza in Town” and then you might have that some message on a pepperoni pizza and a BBQ Chicken pizza, and a family eating pizza, and a woman eating pizza, and a man eating pizza etc. This way you can get an idea of what your customers want to see visually. Then you want to test what messages resonate with your customers. So using those images, just change the ad copy from “Best Pizza in Town” to “Voted Best in Town” and “Best New York Style Pizza” and “Delivered in 30 Minutes” and any other value proposition you have. This way you can start to understand what messaging resonates with customers the most. You can then take this messaging and use it in your business more broadly. You may find that people don’t care about efficient delivery messaging until they’re ready to order a pizza or that people are more impressed that you’re voted the best rather than picked the best or vice versa. Again, the point here is to test and iterate and understand which of your key value propositions resonate with your customers.

You asked earlier about budget. This is really going to depend on the population within the radius you target and how competitive your market is. For instance, if you are in the beach areas of Los Angeles, I can tell you it’s going to be a lot more expensive than if you are in the beach areas of say San Diego. Price will also vary by time of day, day of week, time of year, etc. Remember, it’s a live real time auction.

I’ll stop here as this is probably getting a bit long and over the top but hopefully this helps.

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JMM - Keep the info coming. I’m a sponge. I love the details.

Question: You mention creating audience in FB utilizing existing customer email database and then targeting them via FB ad. Why wouldn’t you use mail chimp to to send directly to customers email? Doesn’t cost anything.

Great question! In the end you’ll end up doing both. The issue with only doing email marketing is that only a small percentage of your customers will open your email (this is called your “open rate”), so you may send out 2,000 emails but only 10% of those who receive it open it, meaning only 200 people saw your messaging from the email. On Facebook I can not only guarantee everyone they have matched sees my advertisement, but I can tell set how often they see it, what messaging they see based on any number of targeting options, and decide how I want to pay for the ad. (for example, you can pay a CPC or Cost Per Click, or on a CPM which is Cost Per Thousand Impressions, etc) . On Facebook you can also set different goals, for instance if you wanted to have an event you drove people to like your grand opening, you can create a Facebook event for the grand opening and then set an RSVP as your desired goal for your Facebook ad campaign and their system will optimize toward getting people to sign up. Does that make sense?

So in the end you want to use email and social. The idea is to use every tool in your box because each marketing channel will hit your customer at a different point in their journey.

Sure thing, what else do you want to know about?

Great thread…so here’s my compelling offer on FB entice email sign ups and build customer database.

Free Pizza For 1 year.

So the winner gets free pizza once a week for 52 weeks. Say pizza retail is $10, so $520 value.

So I send out email announcing winner to all contestants. In Subject Line “The winner of Free Pizza for 1 year is…”

Once they open up email, a coupon is offered for 20% off to all non-winners.

Thoughts???

$10 pizza? What size are you giving away? I would suggest not giving away anything less than a 14”. You would be able to Up the Value of the prize and it won’t cost you much more. A 14” or larger would probably be too much for one person but not enough for two. Too much for one person they would have to get someone to share with, not enough for two they would have to order something else. IMO

Put a deadline to sign up. If you don’t have enough people signed up by then, extend the deadline. A deadline gives a sense of urgency or FOMO.

I wouldn’t bother with the 20% coupon code. You’ve already collected their emails. Maybe just let them know about other specials you’ll have going on. Or direct them to place an order online and save 10%.

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Personal size. I used $10 as a reference. I like your idea of 14”. Makes total sense. By the way, anybody have feedback on POS? I read all the POS posts. Speedline is a favorite, but out of my budget. I’m m meeting with Toast next week

Sit down and make a checklist. The list should have everything you want your POS to do. Don’t forget about things you want to be able to integrate with it. Then contact every company your interested in and see if how many items on your list they check off.

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Before I answer your post, let’s get this out of the way…
POS reseller here!

IMO, you should follow Rico’s suggestion on the POS and explore your options after you have identified what these options would be.

My company offers Aldelo Express which is free for all licenses BUT requires the credit card processing.

Contact me if you’d like to know more.
Stefanos!

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