1. How To Create Your First Facebook Ad and Promote Your
Restaurant Facebook Fan Page?
December 2nd, 2009 · 2 Comments
In my previous blog post I showed you how to create a Fan Page for your restaurant. Hope by
now you have created it for your restaurant on Facebook. If you haven’t I would highly
recommend you to create one today. It is FREE and can be created in under 10 minutes. So why
don’t we take advantage of this Free resource we have right in front of us. If you haven’t created
a fan page for your restaurant yet, here is the link that shows you how to create one.
For those who have created Fan Page for your restaurant, I want to congratulate you for taking
action. All it matters is to START. Once you start you begin to see so many opportunities that
Facebook offers to small restaurants like yours. The possibilities are endless.

2. Now that we created the Fan Page, you need to promote your restaurant to potential fans that
might live near to your restaurant, may be in 5-10 miles radius. Imagine this process like
building a new restaurant. Once you build the restaurant you have to attract new customers in
your brand new restaurant. I’m sure you remember that it was much harder in the beginning to
advertise, do the marketing to attract new customers into your restaurant. I bet you had spent few
extra money to do extra promotions,flyers and local ads just to get your name out in the market.
This is the nature of business when it’s new. To promote anything new it takes time, effort and
little extra money to get the ball rolling.
Now let’s use the same analogy for our restaurant Facebook Fan page and understand that in
order to attract potential fans to your new fan page you need to do extra promotion, ads even if
we have to spend little extra money. But the amount we spend on Facebook ad is very less in
comparison to other traditional advertising platform. So it is well worth spending that extra cash
to gain new customers especially when you are trying to get that momentum. Typically to gain a
new customer restaurants spend almost $6-7 or may be more using traditional lead generation
tactics. But using Facebook Ad, you can attract new fan which is going to be your customer
eventually at merely 52-59 cents. That is a drop out of an ocean. I recommend using Facebook
Ad because it gives that extra boost when your fan page is new and require few fans ( at least
100) in the beginning to get the ball rolling. You can also request your friends and family
members to join your restaurant’s Fan Page on Facebook. That way it looks like that something
is happening in your new fan page. When potential fans arrive at your fan page on Facebook it
will encourage them to join.
Make sure you have good looking pictures of your restaurant, photos of finger lickingly good
signature dishes of your menu. If you have funny videos of your restaurant or employees just
include them too. It just shows how cool and fun it is to be part of your restaurant. It will build
that rapport with new potential fans and more likely that they will join.
When you build a large base of fans there is “update” feature that will essentially allow you to
send updates to all your fans about any promotions that you want to do. It could be wine tasting
session or happy hour or anything related to your restaurant. Though statistics shows that most of
the Facebook fans don’t look at these updates, you can always educate your fans and take
advantage of this feature which is like email to notify your fans about any updates of your
restaurant. It is available at your disposal for FREE. So you might wanna look into this too if
want to make use of the update feature.
For those visual learner I have included the video prepared by Mathew Loop. The steps shown
on the video is applicable for any businesses including restaurants. Please go through the video,
get an idea and then follow the steps that I have outlined below.
3 Steps to create Facebook Ad for your restaurant on Facebook.
1. Design your Ad
2. Targeting
3. Campaigns and Pricing

3. First go to the bottom of the page and click Advertising. Click “Create an Ad” button. It will take
you the similar page that you see above. There are 3 steps to complete this Facebook Ad.
Step 1- Design your Ad
You can design your ad for external website outside of Facebook or you can do it for the fan
page of your restaurant within the Facebook. Since you are going to promote your own
restaurant’s fan page, select “I want to advertise something that I have on Facebook”. It will then
populate the selection box with the fan page of your restaurant. Now the title is going to be
automatically be the same as the name of your fan page. It is better if you choose your fan page
name with the restaurant name followed by the city. It just gives extra clarity to the fans and also
it is easily indexed by search engine like Google. Next thing to do is to write the body text that
should be 135 characters. So be creative to put the most important call to action words. I would
say like “Visit our fan page and become a fan for a chance to win a burrito.” or whatever you are
promoting. Your strong call of action to the new fans is to become a fan. You have to give a
reason to be a fan of your restaurant. When you say for a chance to win a burrito or your popular
item in the menu, you are persuading new fans and giving them a reason to be a fan. The key is
to be creative and come up with an incentive to persuade the potential customers to become a fan
of your restaurant on Facebook. If you are not satisfied with the default photo of your restaurant
logo, you can change the image by uploading a new photo of any menu item you think is going
to attract new fans.

4. Step 2-Targeting
On the location you can select United States. If your restaurant is other parts of the world select
the respective country. Narrow down it to city since your restaurant is local.To get more new

5. fans from the surrounding cities, it is better to include the cities within 5-10 miles radius. If you
want to target more customers from wider area please feel free to increase the miles radius as
you feel appropriate for your restaurant.For the age you can select from 13 and above to any. If
you want to target customers on their birthday you can check mark on “target people on their
birthdays” For sex you can select male and female. Under keywords choose the words that might
describe about your restaurant. For education you can choose all. And the rest you can leave it as
default. ( If you discover some good results selecting them, please do share your findings with
us) When I targeted the customers from Atlanta within 5-10 miles radius it resulted 32360
potential customers. Now that is huge number of customers if you can attract them to become
fans and eventually your real customers that frequent your restaurant.
Step 3-Campaigns and Pricing:
The step 3 is to create your campaign and bid your pricing. Since you will be creating a new
campaign choose “create a new campaign“. Then give a name to the campaign.Choose some
catchy headline. Create your daily budget spending for your campaign ad. This is where you
control how much you are willing to spend per day for your campaign ad. You can be within the
buget $10 or $20 or any amount you wish. Select the schedule when you want to run your ad.
You can run the ad continuously starting the very same day when Facebook approves it or you
can choose to run your ad only on specified dates. Select “Pay for Clicks (CPC)” instead of “Pay
for Impressions (CPM)” as you will have to pay only when fans take an action by clicking on the
ad. So you have more chance of gaining fans this way.Your bid could be between the range of
0.52-0.76 US dollar. It may vary sometimes but it should be less than a dollar which is a good
bargain for ad.
Lastly you press the button Create.Your Facebook Ad will be in pending for Facebook to
approve. Provided you have done everything right it should be approved within 24 hours and
your campaign ad should start working for you and attract some new fans.

6. Keep monitoring the conversion if any potential fans are really becoming fans of your restaurant.
If you are getting result by acquiring new fans then you have hit the nail on the head. If not then
tweak your ads until you start getting the desired result.
I hope this will give you a head start in gaining the momentum while promoting your
restaurant’s brand new fan page on Facebook. If you get good results or discover something
new about Facebook Ad while experimenting with it, I’d appreciate if you could share with us by
leaving some comments. I’m sure all of our restaurant friends would be thankful for your input
and ideas.Hope we all can help each other by sharing information and knowledge to effectively
promote our restaurants on Facebook. Good Luck with your Facebook Ad Campaign.
Share and Enjoy:
Tags: Face Book Marketing
2 responses so far ↓
1 Andy // Dec 3, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Great article! Fan pages should be part of every vertical market”s online strategy.
Combined with targeted Facebook ads, it a pretty powerful one-two punch. I would add
that having a customized fan page landing tab for first time visitors is crucial. For
restaurants it’s a great way to offer specials or get potential patrons on your external
email list.
2 Nash // Dec 5, 2009 at 2:52 am
Thanks Andy for dropping by and leaving a comment.
Indeed, Targeted Facebook Ads is powerful if restaurant can leverage this. It is more
effective than those flyers and other traditional form of advertising/marketing which is far
more expensive.
I checked out your site. Looks great. Small restaurants have a chance to build a Fan Page
and battle with even BIG brands. Facebook has leveled the field plain. I hope restaurants
take advantage of this opportunity.

7. Yeah I agree that Landing Page is very critical for the best results. It is the main entrance
for new potential fans that will impact the number of fans that really become Fans of the
restaurant.
Email marketing is another marketing channel that restaurant can create from the Fan
Page. As you suggested they can offer specials of the day, or exclusive offers to
customers on email list. They can also give away Free Menu item on every customer’s
birthday. So many possiblities.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I’ll be at @iRestaurant. Please do pass me your twitter add. Communication will be much
faster and and on the go.