Luigi’s Restaurant is a little mom and pop restaurant with the best pizza in Akron, Ohio.

In 2014, they were voted the #6 best independent, non-franchised restaurant in the country by Pizza Today.

Already having a dedicated local fan base is pretty easy when you have the best Italian food in town, but how does ONE small, indie restaurant get to be renowned across the whole country?

We’ll tell you how you can grow a restaurant with digital marketing.

You can’t just throw up a Facebook page and expect to get famous instantly.

You also can’t just create an email subscriber list and expect 1,000s of people to sign up right away.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy.

BUT we have the proven methods for attracting more business to restaurants via digital marketing, and we have it down to a science.

And we’ll lay it out for you, right here.

Once you learn the specific strategies to grow a restaurant with digital marketing, it all starts to make sense.

Online Marketing Necessities:

• A Facebook Fan Page. The easiest way to connect with your fans and find new ones through natural social shares and specifically targeted advertising.

• A Company Website. Before you can do anything else to grow a restaurant with digital marketing, you need an official .com company website.

• A Blog. It should be located on the company website, well optimized for search engines and have plenty of compelling content for readers. It works best when it can be updated as frequently as possible.

• Email Subscriber List and Automation Software. The right set of emails that get sent out at the appropriate times will save you tons of time, and increase sales.

• Digital Marketing Funnels. An automated set of appropriate web pages and emails is referred to as a funnel. Certain types of funnels work better for specific goals.

How We Did It:

We use the funnel strategies proven to work by our partners, Digital Marketer, and you can read about the basics of this strategy in this post — Make Customer Service Your Business Model: How to Increase Profits with Customer Value Optimization

This specific customer value optimization strategy is at the core of our funnels.

We grew an email list from 0 to 1,000 subscribers in less than a week.

We used the lead magnet, of course!

Your official company website should be your first priorities.

You can’t run a promotion funnel or get subscribers without a website to host your important pages, opt-in forms, etc.

If you don’t have a Facebook fan page for your restaurant, make it now!

Start spreading the news to get fans AKA “Likes”. Click here for ways to get more people to like your Facebook page fast.

We also used Facebook’s ad pixel to target our audience and monitor the amount of clicks and impressions a certain post or page garnered.

Using a Facebook ad pixel is one of the most effective and least expensive ways to advertise, because you can target very specific groups of people.

People who are most likely to click on your ad, participate and ultimately buy.

We keep the blog on the official Luigi’s Restaurant website updated for the best SEO and reader engagement.

If you can only post once a week or once every 2 weeks, that’s fine.

Keeping it consistent is the key to updating a good company blog.

Keep an eye on which blog posts are visited the most, so you can keep updating with similar types of content and topics.

Click here to read more about running a successful company blog, and click here for great blog content ideas that readers seem to love.

Using all of these strategies together works the best.

If you take away one of these pieces of the digital marketing puzzle, you just wouldn’t be as successful.

If you need any help with these things, let us know.

We’ll help you grow your company’s fan base and increase sales, just like we did for this little independent pizza shop!

Oh, and if you’d like to start out with the basics and save a TON of money, check this out:

You can download our FREE homepage template, and create your company homepage today.