How To Do Pizza Shop Marketing

As you develop your pizza shop marketing strategy, there’s good news for you: 93% of people eat pizza at least once a month – and these numbers aren’t changing anytime soon. As you build out your restaurant marketing strategy, focus on customer experience. That is, building, maintaining, and expanding within your community. 

Creating strong customer relationships will set you apart from the competition. And the best place to start is by developing your restaurant marketing strategy. Effective marketing — through campaigns, community engagement, digital channels, advertising, and more — can make an immense difference in building and growing your business. 

To set your marketing strategy up for success, here’s everything you need to know about marketing a pizza shop — including the ideal budget and ways to ensure your shop is busy every night of the week.

What is a pizza shop marketing strategy?

An effective restaurant marketing strategy is as comprehensive as it is flexible. It should include both long-term goals and individual campaigns. It’ll serve as the jumping-off point for all of your branding and promotional decisions moving forward.

Just remember, your marketing strategy is a living document. Meaning, you should tailor your campaigns on the fly to correspond with current events and industry-wide marketing trends, instead of remaining committed to aninflexible plan. 

How much should I spend on pizza shop marketing?

Before you proceed with any initiatives, determine how much of your overall operational costs you can dedicate to marketing.

While your exact marketing budget will fluctuate depending on the location of your restaurant and scope of your strategy, know that the average business spends from 3-10% of their sales on their marketing budget. 

Consider some alternative marketing tactics to craft a strategy within your budget. Many are free or low-cost, like hiring a tech-savvy friend or neighbor, or running your social media accounts yourself. The right viral TikTok can put your small business on the map!

Marketing Ideas for Pizza Shops

Marketing a pizza shop can include a strong email marketing program, social media promotions, word of mouth, special events, and keeping your website and online presence up to date. Here are a few pizza shop marketing strategies.

Develop Your Shop’s Brand Identity

Your brand identity includes everything from your logo to your mission statement. What makes your restaurant unique? What sets it apart from the other restaurants in your community? The food, ambiance, and experience will all be influenced by brand identity.

To develop your pizza shop’s brand identity:

• Determine your target audience and ideal customer.

• Hone your restaurant’s mission statement, priorities, and purpose.

• Establish a brand voice for your restaurant that’s distinct and reflective of your mission statement.

• Continue to evolve your brand identity depending on the results of your marketing campaigns.
  
  

Establish An Online Presence

Your restaurant doesn’t exist unless it has a website. According to Ahrefs, 27 million people search for “restaurants near me” each month — and 21 million of those searches happen in the United States. Establishing an online presence for your restaurant serves many purposes. Your website will serve as the ultimate promotional material for your establishment. It’s where customers can go to read your story and mission statement, peruse your menu, and find your contact information.

As your restaurant becomes more established, your online presence should grow along with it. Redesign your website as your restaurant evolves. To take it to the next level, consider adding a live chat box for customers to get in instant contact, or an online reservation or ordering option. And be sure to always prominently link to your social media accounts, to connect with customers on a more personal level. And if you have a podcast, share it on your social media accounts to create awareness and promote your brand.

Social media has dramatically changed things in the past decade. It affects the way we interact with one another, and the way companies in every industry conduct business and connect with their customers. This is especially true for restaurants. This is why having a social media presence is no longer an option — it’s a necessity.

As a baseline, you should have an Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter account (and add in TikTok if you’re feeling creative!). Focus on building your accounts to reflect your business and tell your brand story, while communicating and relating to your customers. You can even add in some paid advertising or PPC advertising if you’re up for it.

PPC, or pay-per-click advertising, allows you to target certain keywords, and display your restaurant advertisement alongside the search results. For an effective PPC advertising campaign, you’ll want to target based on your location, cuisine, service model, or other factors that would make you a good match for that potential customer. 

Learn more about developing paid advertising campaigns here. 

Learn more about building your social presence with Toast’s Restaurant Social Media Guide here.

Embrace Traditional Marketing Strategies

When developing your next campaign, don’t overlook more traditional marketing strategies. Geo-targeted online ads, ads in the local paper, hanging flyers in your neighborhood coffee shops and mailing advertisements right to your customers’ front doors are dependable marketing initiatives.

Although it might seem antiquated, direct mail campaigns can have a huge impact. A recent study showed that consumers who receive direct mail purchase 28% more items and spend 28% more money than people who don’t get that same piece of direct mail. It can be basic. A coupon or promotion is an effective and inexpensive option for a direct mail campaign. 

To make sure your traditional campaigns are resonating with your modern target audience, always infuse your marketing with your signature brand identity, and take industry trends and best practices into account.

Create a User-Friendly Online Ordering Experience

Since 2014, online ordering and food delivery has increased by 300%. For restaurants unable or unwilling to offer takeout or delivery as an option to their customers, they’re missing an opportunity to connect with new customers and strengthen current customer relationships. 

The best part is, online ordering systems like the Toast Restaurant Online Ordering System makes it easy for pizza shops to increase their sales with minimal effort.

How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Restaurant Marketing Strategy and Make Adjustments

Which of your marketing campaigns are producing the best results? Which are underperforming and could use a tune-up? Are any of your marketing efforts going completely unnoticed or unacknowledged by your target audience?

Don’t wait for the end of a campaign to assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. By asking yourself questions like these as part of the ongoing monitoring and measuring of your campaign, you’ll be able to tweak them while they are still in progress, to reap their full benefits.

To measure your marketing effectiveness, revisit your short and long-term goals, your predetermined KPIs, and any other success metrics your marketing team decided to track (like social media reach, new customers, or email subscribers). Once you have a refreshed understanding of your goals, you can begin measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.

What are the most common pizza shop marketing strategies?

When brainstorming marketing strategies for your pizza shop, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. The most common marketing tactics are common for a good reason — they work.

Consider using one of these strategies:

• Infuse your online presence with SEO best practices to make it as easy as possible for your restaurant to be found online.

• Embrace current social media marketing trends to spread awareness of your restaurant.

• Add personalization to marketing communications whenever possible (like during your next email marketing campaign).

What are effective marketing strategies for new restaurants?

The biggest challenge facing new pizza shop owners is making a name for yourself in an already crowded industry, and ensuring that folks can find you when seeking out new eats in their area. Your job as a new restaurant owner is not only to attract customers, but to convince them to try your spot instead of one of their usual places. It’s all about making a first impression, so how will you effectively introduce yourself and your restaurant to the community?

To start off on the right foot with your target audience, make sure to:

• Take the time to craft a unique brand identity.

• Be active on social media to connect with your future customers on a more personal level.

• Go all out for your grand opening to attract customers and establish a welcoming and congenial reputation.

• Set up your Google Business listing and any other local search opportunities, creating optimized business profiles on sites like Yelp or Foursquare.

What are effective marketing strategies to increase revenue from existing customers and get them to spend more at your pizza shop?

Now that you’ve begun attracting guests, how are you going to entice them to return week after week? Your restaurant can’t succeed on a strong grand opening or initial marketing campaigns alone. To build a roster of loyal returning guests, you’ll need to dedicate time to ongoing marketing efforts.

Here are a couple of ways that pizza shops can keep their guests coming back for more.

Use Email Marketing, and Create a Loyalty Program

With Instagram and Facebook, why do I need email? When social media apps are used to find and attract new customers, email should be used to engage with your loyal, returning customers. When customers sign up for your email list, they trust that they will be the first to know about news and updates, such as off-menu items, new merchandise, and exclusive discounts. 

Your returning customers are the ones that will help you build hype for your pizza shop, by influencing others to go out of their way to find you. Email is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing toolbox, because in the long-term, your most passionate customer base will do a lot of the marketing for you! 

Your loyalty program is a powerful marketing tool for distributing promotional coupons and digital stamp cards, and encouraging repeat visits. Take advantage of that customer loyalty and encourage your guests through meaningful incentives. 

Beyond promotion, loyalty programs are also a tool for gathering customer data, like email addresses and phone numbers (more on this later!). With Toast, you’ll automatically grow your email list when new guests opt to sign up for your loyalty program. This type of technology streamlines your guest engagement, allowing you to further engage your customers with your email newsletter or other marketing efforts. 

Toast has an exclusive online package that includes email marketing and loyalty, geared towards smaller restaurants and pizza shops. You may not have the budget to use more advanced tools like MailChimp or ConstantContact, so our online Starter Kit ‘Growth Plan’ package is designed to help you get started. 

Embrace Consumer-Generated Content (and encourage reviews!) 

Including consumer-generated content in your market plan helps endear your restaurant to the community. Reposting pictures and videos that guests have taken at your restaurant helps translate the experience like no other. 

Showcase consumer-generated content across your social media marketing, email marketing, and online campaigns. Just remember to always ask for permission before reposting or sharing,

And, review sites are your friend (and are often the first places a prospective customer will look up your business!). Your reputation on these sites can make or break their decision on whether or not to visit.

Encourage your customers to leave reviews on Yelp, Google, and your Facebook page. Ask if they would take the time to share their thoughts, opinions, and experiences. Clearly, you’ll want to court customers you know are your biggest champions. Read more about growing your restaurant reviews here. 

Think Big When Marketing Your Pizza Shop

It’s time for you to get started launching your next campaign. By staying true to your brand identity and harnessing your passion as an emerging restaurateur, you’ll make a big impact with your pizza shop!

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