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.
