Attract customers to your restaurant with changing advertising

How many times have you seen restaurant ads on social media where the visuals are practically identical all the time? You no longer read the content because you already know it is the restaurant you have no plans to visit.

It is as if customers see the ad and mentally say “that is the ad for restaurant X.” In other words, they already know it is your ad, but they are not interested in visiting your restaurant, so they scroll right past. In short: they care very little about what you are offering.

This is a real problem, and it does not mean those people will never visit your restaurant or that the outcome is carved in stone. Many believe the solution is to target other potential customers, but from experience we know that what you actually need is to make your ad look like a different one, that is, to have it perceived as something new in the eyes of the person who already scrolls past. That way your new message gets seen, and there is a very good chance those same people will come visit you. Why do you think phone companies launch campaigns with different visuals every so often? Because they know it works. You can see a clear example in the following images:

Same company, different backgrounds, different colors, different fonts. The only thing that stays is the corporate identity, in other words, the logo.

In our years of experience in the restaurant business, we have seen how simply keeping the same graphic scheme in your ads makes you spend money on a message nobody sees. We have also noticed that when we launch an ad with different colors, photos, and graphic schemes, sales go up.

So here is what you need to understand: it is important, truly important, that YOU CHANGE YOUR ADS CONSTANTLY. You have to change everything:

• – The images you use.
• – The fonts in your copy.
• – Your photos of the menu items.
• – The background colors.

That way your ad will be perceived as something fresh, something new that people will read out of curiosity, and you will attract more customers to your restaurant.

It is worth mentioning that this strategy only works when you are advertising something different. For example: a new promotion, new menu items, and so on. That does not mean it should only be used for radical changes or brand-new launches; it actually applies to minor changes too, like going from a 20% discount to a 30% one.

The strategy does not work if you go and paste the same copy from your old ads. People already saw that text, and it definitely did not catch their attention. Many will ask: how do we know it does not work with the old ads?

Because we have tried it, and we have lost money doing it. It is true that we managed to attract people, but the results have been much better when we advertise something new at the restaurant. And as I mentioned before, “new” does not mean extremely radical; it can be as simple as a change to your promotions for the week.

Try it and see how effective it is.