I’ve seen a lot of restaurant companies invest heavily into performance marketing only to eventually hit a plateau.
Sales build and then at some point just reach a steady run rate. Making matters worse are continued increases in ad costs.
Why does this happen?
We seem to forget that most of our performance marketing media and message choices are really focused on harvesting the demand thats in market now.
Outside of using heavy discounts, etc., there’s just a limit to how much business you can extract given how the market sees and uses you today.
So what’s one way out?
By switching some of your spend or layering in activities that focus on building demand.
If your performance marketing activities are rational-based, your building demand activities are emotion-based.
We’ve had a history of doing this as an industry. We showed up in lots of different places. We used messages that were highly engaging and became part of the culture.
By triggering an emotion we create the disposition—and ideally linkage to the types of occasion for which we want to compete—that either brings someone into a buying situation or become more favorably inclined when they enter into buying mode.
So how does this help performance marketing?
When these build-demand activities are used, improvements in site visits, rankings, and lower cost-per-clicks all follow helping the overall efficiency of the line.