New food and beverage businesses owners find it tough at least during the first few months of business where fixed costs keep accumulating and they have to make an impact to their top line fast. While there are several agencies serving the food and beverage industry, most of them are valued at a price point that adds to fixed costs for a couple of months and may end up adding more operating cost pressures. 

This article is targeted to business owners who have just started out and want to help their new customers find their shop, as soon as possible. 

Situation

We were contacted by a friend (Jane) who had recently conducted a JV with a F&B owner and have set up shop near Lau Pa Sat (Singapore). The business owner (Mary) had some knowledge on advertising her business and so she instantly started new customer acquisition activities with Meta and Google Ads. 

She understood that good pictures attract customers through the door and was vested with a social media marketing agency providing 8 social media posts with promotion and content planning. 

When we were contacted, the business had the following collaterals ready: A working Website, a verified Google My business, a functional Social media calendar and a Google advertising account. 

The issue: Not enough getting conversions (from advertising)

Diagnosis

Our diagnosis found following gaps: 

1. The website did not have clickable url i.e. web site visitors could not make bookings by simply clicking on the the telephone number, whatsapp or similar
2. Google Analytics wasn’t setup
3. Meta ads pixels weren’t setup
4. Neither Google Ads or Meta ads were able to figure out when a conversion happened (conversion signals weren’t setup)
5. On diagnosis of advertising campaigns, we found that targeting geo’s were too wide for their humble $20/day campaign budget

In simplified words, this means that the digital customer journey has an opportunity to be improved. Advertising platforms were simply driving traffic to the website and couldn’t optimise towards signals which are more relevant to the business (such as telephone calls, whatsapp messages or emails).

Solution

We went in and fixed these matters in precisely 3 days or less. The process was: 

1. With backend access, we added clickable URls (and these thus become trackable by advertising platforms)
2. Setup a Google Analytics account (GA4)
3. Setup a Google Tag manager that acts like a postman sending data between your GA4 and advertising platforms. 
4. Created conversions signals that would show up on Google Analytics as events and conversion respectively.
5. Fixed the targeting Geo (smaller) to be appropriate to the client’s advertising budgets (on both Google and Meta)

Results

1. More conversions. While we could talk in percentages, the number of conversions driven are evident from the screenshot below

2. While digital signals are relevant for advertising professionals to decide, the key results need to be validated on-ground. Our confirmed:
3. There were more WhatsApp, Calls and booking requests via emails for event bookings 
4. Almost every new client they served came via advertising (how did you find us: we saw your ad)

We work with strict provisions ensuring client’s data and privacy are protected and hence we invite our readers to get an ad-hoc consultation to get results sorted in a simple, no-hassle and proven to work method.