Social media advertising is the most common form of digital marketing these days, with Facebook being the leading social network channel to reach larger audiences. Many restaurant owners simply settle for “boosting” their Facebook posts but lose out on so many tools or content ideas that will help target their specific target audiences in a more appealing and successful way. Here are 5 stellar Facebook ad trends that will help jumpstart your restaurant marketing strategy to a whole new level.

Start Making More Videos

Pictures have been the media of choice for restaurant marketers for a long time since it’s easy to generate, file space is minuscule, and you can church out a lot of them to continue advertising. It’s time to start incorporating videos along with them. Facebook users are starting to watch more videos than ever before, and the number just keeps rising. If your potential customers are taking more time to watch videos, then you need to move your advertising to video as well.

By doing this you will increase audience engagement and you’ll be able to better show off what your restaurant has and what it is capable of pulling off. A great example of a captivating video is Moe’s ‘Putting Microwaves In Their Place’ advertisement. They are able to grab a user’s attention in the first three seconds with a title screen that reads “Don’t try to do this at home, in a field, or anywhere.” Microwaves are then dragged across a field, dropped from a helicopter, and blown up into little pieces. The video is entertaining and keeps viewers engaged until the end. It’s also a great advertisement for Moe’s, which is using this message to display their superiority as a restaurant.

Invest in Images of Tasty-Looking Food

That’s not to say that pictures aren’t valuable. A picture says a thousand words, but they’re doubly important in the restaurant business. You can have a great ambiance, live music, prime location, and special deals, but if your food looks unappetizing in a restaurant ad, then you’ll most likely lose prospective guests. A major portion of a diner’s trust in a QSR brand relies on the quality of food, and posting a tasteful plate of your food might just stop a potential customer from scrolling past your ad. In fact, photo posts get 120% more engagement on Facebook than those without.

Investing in high-quality photos of your food will ensure that your diner’s mouths will be watering when they see your ad. And investing in your images doesn’t necessarily mean spending mounds of money. You can take a great photo with your iPhone and invest a little more time to edit it properly.

Write Tastebud-Tempting Copy

Speaking of mouthwatering, don’t miss the opportunity to use text to grab a potential customer’s attention. It takes some effort during the copywriting process to differentiate your stack of pancakes from the place that sells pancakes down the street. You want your customers to be able to envision exactly what they’re missing out on if they don’t dine with you.

Season your captions with just the facts, and avoid filler words like ‘delicious,’ ‘crispy,’ and ‘rich.’ Get specific on preparation, ingredients, and any other unique features of your menu item. ‘Slow-cooked’ sounds better than ‘moist.’ ‘Seared on a cast iron grill’ is more appetizing to read than a generic ‘mouthwatering.’ When in doubt, dust off your thesaurus and see what juicy captions you can craft.

Create a Lookalike Audience using Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel is a new tool that collects data that helps you track conversions from Facebook ads and optimize ads. This line of code is placed on your website and it gives you the ability to build targeted audiences for future ads, remarket to people who have already taken some kind of action on your website, and create lookalike audiences when designing campaigns.

A lookalike audience is exactly what it sounds like. It’s an audience that looks like the original audience. To create a lookalike audience on Facebook, choose your source audience (which can be pulled from the data collected by Facebook Pixel) and the lookalike algorithm identifies common qualities of the people in it (like demographic information or interests). Then, the ad is delivered to an audience of people who are similar or look like, your current customer base.

Make Your Advertisements Dynamic

Dynamic ads automatically promote your inventory to users who have expressed interest on your website or anywhere else on the internet. These ads look like other single image ads, carousel ads, or collection ads on Facebook, however, instead of individually creating an ad for every item you promote, you create an ad template that automatically uses images and details from your catalog for items you specify to advertise.

But dynamic ads can also mean interaction. You can take a number of your most popular meals and place them into a format that allows Facebook users to interact with the advertisement. Facebook users get the enjoyment of interaction which can boost potential gusts, and it shows off your best dishes all in one ad.

Getting great advertising results on Facebook all boils down to targeting the right audience with the right message at the right time. It may seem daunting at first trying to learn how to effectively advertise on Facebook, but there’s no need to try and figure it out all on your own. We can assist you with getting your advertising strategy up and running and make sure that you’re getting the best return on your Facebook advertising dollars.