Written By Melissa Carrick

So, you want to bring new customers into your business but you’re not sure how to reach them? Let us introduce you to the power of paid social. With just a small budget and a special holiday offer, our paid social campaign brought in new customers, extra revenue and ultimately made one happy client.

“We are kicking ass with gross sales and gift card sales at both Sweetwater and Fired Stone! Our gift card sales are at least twice if not almost three times more than in past non-COVID years! ”

— Gary Cooper, Owner of The Compound

A little client background…

The Compound, home to Sweetwater Chophouse, Fired Stone Tavern and 4KD Crick Brewery, is located on Eagle Rock Golf Club in Defiance, Ohio. Sweetwater Chophouse overlooks the beautiful 18th green of the golf course and features delectable food and a top-notch bar designed be a community hangout. Fired Stone Tavern has an industrial urban vibe known for their wood-fired pizza & custom-ground burgers featuring an open kitchen concept with scratch-made food. The newest hangout, 4KD Crick Brewery, is a nano brewery focused on producing artisanal brews for guests to enjoy while watching live music, playing board games or just enjoying the funky atmosphere.

Per the client’s request.

Each year, The Compound offers a holiday gift card special - buy $100 in gift cards from any of their locations and get a $20 bonus card. This year, our client wanted to go beyond an organic social promotion and create a paid promotion to target a specific audience - three cities about an hour from Defiance - to bring in out-of-town guests, and of course, sell some gift cards for the holidays.

AR’s plan of action

While The Compound is loved by Defiance locals, we challenged ourselves to reach new guests in and surrounding Ottawa, Van Wert and Delphos, Ohio and show the value of traveling out of town to drink, dine and golf.

As a marketing agency, we have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, but one of the things we love about Facebook is the ability to build targeted audiences, geofence locations and create forecasted ad results based on our client’s budget to show them what their money can buy (not happiness, but close…customers).

We created a target audience for both Fired Stone Tavern and Sweetwater Chophouse that targeted a 12-mile radius around the three cities our client wanted to reach and included the age of guests most likely to visit this location and purchase gift cards for a Christmas gift. The ad audience size had 58,000 people that we could potentially reach based on our selections.

Once the target audience was set, we were able to give our client a projection of estimated daily results based on different boosting budget options.

For our purpose, we chose “page engagement” because we wanted our audience to take an action such as like, comment or share when they saw our ad. We were able to show our client that with an extra $50 during the holidays we could reach 213-619 people and get 8-26 engagements a day with this gift card promotion. We ran an ad on both Fired Stone Tavern’s and Sweetwater Chophouse’s Facebook pages for two weeks in December and then changed up the copy and did another paid promotion on each page in January with the same audience for another two weeks.

So, what happened next?

The paid social campaign reached 9,914 people and resulted in 253 engagements and 164 link clicks. Sweetwater Chophouse’s Facebook page saw the following results in the month of December:

Fired Stone Tavern Facebook results for December:

Sweetwater Chophouse also gained 136 new followers for an increase of 257% compared to the previous month while Fired Stone Tavern gained 104 new followers for an increase of 116%.

Beyond the social promotion itself, the restaurant saw 57.8% more first-time guests compared to the previous month and had a 79% increase in year-over-year growth. Not to mention, their gift card sales were 3x more than previous years.

What does this mean for your business?

We know budgets can be tight, but once you see the value of paid social, you’ll understand that it is necessary for your business to increase its online presence. Our social media plans come with a built-in ad budget because we strongly believe in the power of paid social. We often recommend our clients increase their ad budget for special promotions, upcoming events and holidays like The Compound did.

Paid social gives your business the opportunity to reach your customers where they are. Based on their demographics, interests and behaviors, we can put your business in front of potential customers without them even following your page. Once your ad finds them, they are most likely to take action by liking your page, visiting your website or even stopping in.

During this campaign, we were able to prove that targeting out-of-town guests on Facebook with a special offer would lead to new guests in the restaurants - as you can see by the 57% increase in first-time guests during the promotion in December. Plus, it shouldn’t go unnoticed that gift cards sales were three times higher than non-COVID years due to the social media promotion.

The Compound also received a message from a customer who lived in Ottawa who insisted The Compound open a restaurant in her area after she made the visit. Now our client is a true believer in paid social and we continue to use this strategy to bring in new guests daily.

“This is solid proof that we are infiltrating the southeastern section of our 25 miles radius, as Ottawa is closer to Lima than Defiance, yet they made the drive to us! Your social media focus on those southern cities and the boosting is continuing to work.”
- Gary Cooper

So, how can you use paid social to promote your business? Contact us today to learn more!