You need to spend money to make money, they say. But the key is knowing where to spend it.
The money needs to multiply, otherwise this saying isn’t revealing the whole truth.
Last year, I personally spent $70K on ads for my own Louie La Vella “the event marketing consultant” brand. That seems like a crazy amount of money on Facebook and Instagram ads for one person to spend—probably more than most venues across the country—but guess what? My spending is a result of such specific targeting that those ads pay for themselves time and time again.
I work with large venues, nightclubs, bars, and even festivals on their digital strategies. If you’re reading this, you might have seen one of my video ads at some point. So, how do you take a leap of faith and invest in your own marketing at such a scale? How do you have marketing dollars multiply and pay for itself?
Check this out: The 3 Things That Limit the ROI of Social Media Marketing
At those levels you know you would be outspending your competition. Well, get ready to do exactly that.
Start by finding a winning offer, one that creates profit that you can reinvest. You want your marketing dollars to pay for themselves and scale up with their own “fuel.”
Example: Simplify Your Strategy
Let’s use simple math and an easy example of birthday parties. You have perfected the birthday post and run ads to a targeted audience. Every week, $100 in ads brings you 50 inquiries for reservations. Only 20 people actually take up the offer. Each of those 20 have 6 friends. Your $100 has brought 120 people through the door. Each spends $20 on average, so $100 has created $2,400 in new sales. In week two, you reinvest the $100 and scale that up to $200 so you can double your birthday traffic. You create a new offering for a new group of people (maybe bachelorette parties or office groups, or whoever) and invest a part of the newfound profits in that campaign: $100 for this new campaign that will be ready to scale up a week later. By the end of a month, your initial investment has created a few monster campaigns that bring in multiple thousands of dollars each night.
Are you following?
Once you re-invest that specific profit back into targeted ads, the sky is the limit. You’re scaling up, and scaling is key to outspending the competition.
Breaking it Down
It sounds simple enough when you break down the numbers, but you’ve got to know what you’re doing before you blindly spend ad money on social media. There are a few things to line up before you get started.
You need to know what to look for to get a great ROI, otherwise you’re another statistic of bar or restaurant operators who spent thousands of dollars and returned nothing, and quickly gave up on social media marketing.
- Know Your Numbers. Any business owner needs to know their numbers to run a successful enterprise, so this one should be easy. How much does your typical customer spend? What about for higher-end spenders? Large groups, big dinners, bottle service…? Make note of these numbers.
- Don’t Go in Blind. Use the data from above to create a successful marketing plan that will pay for itself. Don’t guess. Don’t create discounts that make no sense profit-wise. Don’t assume the consumer wants a product at a certain price. Create a winning offer, one simple campaign like that can fund your entire marketing venture.
- Know Your Acquisition Costs. Expanding from point number 1, how much does it cost you to get a person through your doors? Is it acceptable to spend $1 on ads if the return is $5? When you know those numbers, you’re no longer afraid to spend. One dollar out equals five dollars in. Let the math assure you that outspending your competition isn’t scary. Rather, it could be quite simple with the right marketing method.
Once you find the right campaign for your target demographic, you could spend $10 to make $50, $100 to make $500, and so on. When I execute these campaigns for my clients, that’s the scale of return that the LAVELLA METHOD has been proving it can achieve over and over again. If I were you, I’d be doing that all day long.
Louie La Vella is a renowned event marketing director with bar, nightclub and major festival clients around the globe. He’s speaker at the Nightclub & Bar Show and contributor to Nightclub.com. You can connect with Louie online and download a free copy of his latest audiobook at audiobook.louielavella.com.