Diversification in advertising is key. However, with diversification you also need prioritization, especially when you have a limited budget.
When you have a limited budget, you want to be 100% confident that the budget was optimally spent when it was fully spent. You can only know and feel this when you have implemented an advertising strategy that prioritizes your marketing spend for the highest return on investment.
You can only know that after you implement a sound advertising strategy that tracks your return on investment for you. If you want to know how to implement it, feel free to read on:
Before You Can Prioritize
There are 3 items you need to plan for when it comes to prioritizing budget and implementing your advertising strategy:
1. Mapping customer stages
2. Tracking customer actions
3. Choosing the most efficient ad placements that move customers from their current stage to next stage
Mapping Restaurant Funnel Into Customer Stages
For a new store opening, your customer stages may look like this where you have an ad that makes the customer aware that a new store is opening soon. Then the ad gives them a link where they can sign up via email to get the latest updates on that store. This is a common mapping for new store openings as email is still the most efficient way of communicating in terms of cost per reach.
This map of customer stages goes from left to right. Essentially, customers see an ad > go to signup page > see a page that confirms their signup > gets email updates for the store opening. Then you can send them email updates from there, which also builds your email list.
When you have the customer stages mapped out, then you can implement tracking for each stage. The point of having a map along with tracking for each stage of the map is to make sure that customers are seeing the right ad (message) at the right time. With tracking, you can include and exclude specific audiences from each of your ads. For example, you can target people who saw your signup page but didn’t see the confirmation page. This means that they viewed the signup page but didn’t submit their email.
This is very important because when working with a budget because if someone already signed up to receive email updates about a store opening, you don’t want to show them the same ad that they already originally saw. That would be double-spending and an inefficient way to spend budget. You would rather use that spend to get other people to sign up for email updates.
Prioritizing Ad Content & Placements
Now comes the time for prioritization. First we need to prioritize what will get us the best result. If our Here’s an overview of what prioritizing your customer stages should look like:
1. Views ad about store opening
1a. If views ad and clicks link, exclude from current targeting because they have already passed this stage
1b. If views ad and doesn’t click link, advertise to them on other ad networks to remind them to get past this stage
2. Clicks on link from ad to email signup page
2a. If clicks link and views email signup page, exclude from current targeting because they have already passed this stage
2b. If clicks link and doesn’t view email signup page, advertise to them on other ad networks to remind them to get past this tage
3. Submits email and visits the email signup confirmation page
3a. If submits email, exclude from current targeting because they have already passed this stage
3b. If doesn’t submit email, advertise to them on other ad networks to remind them to get past this stage
4. Opens your email sequences about the store opening that has a coupon or next step
4a. If opens your email, exclude from current targeting
4b. If doesn’t open your email, retarget on other ad networks
5. Visits store w/ coupon or other trackable method
5a. If uses store or is tracked in store, exclude from current targeting
5b. If uses coupon or is tracked in store, retarget w/ coupon info on other ad networks
Prioritizing Ad Networks
The next level of prioritization is choosing ad networks. Prioritization should definitely be based on return on investment. For example, if you get the lowest cost per email signup on Facebook, then you should prioritize Facebook as #1. Then if Instagram is the 2nd cheapest, prioritize it as #2. Then if Youtube is the 3rd cheapest, prioritize it as #3. And so on and so forth.
Facebook – $1.10 per email signup
Instagram – $1.15 per email signup
Youtube – $1.30 per email signup
When you get the “b” stage of 1-5 above, you target people based on this prioritization. So your first ad that you publish would be on Facebook. Then you would publish another ad on Instagram that people only see if they already saw the Facebook ad but didn’t move on to the next stage. Then you would publish another ad on Youtube that people only see if they already saw the Instagram ad but didn’t move on to the next stage. This way, you will always get the lowest cost per KPI.
An example of what a customer would experience with this prioritization of advertising is this:
Views Facebook ad > clicks on link for email signup > exits page. Views Instagram ad > clicks on link to email signup > exits page. Views Youtube ad > clicks on link to email signup > submits email to get email updates > doesn’t see any more ads regarding email signup.
Once you have these two prioritizations in place, then you should know that your budget is being spent for maximum return on investment while also diversifying just enough to get the maximum results.
In Conclusion
When it comes to spending your ad budget, you need to be 100% confident that you ad budget fulfilled as much as your sales goal as possible.
The above strategies teach you exactly how to do that so no matter where you end up in your sales roundup, you’ll know that your ad budget performed its very best.
Where have you prioritized your restaurant advertising?
