Social Media Is Not a Marketing Plan for Your Pizzeria

In this solo episode, I break down a simple truth a lot of operators miss. Social media is not your marketing plan. It is a platform. The real plan is how you drive traffic, get people to try your shop, capture them into your loyalty system, and bring them back again and again.

I also share where we are in week 13 at the store, why now is the right time for us to market harder, and what we are actually focused on. That includes growing our rewards list, using email and text the right way, tightening up our offer strategy, and stopping the habit of handing our best deals to third-party apps.

If you run a pizzeria and want a more practical marketing strategy, this episode will help you think clearer about what actually moves the business forward.

Join Pizza Pro Circle for more practical tools and operator conversations.
 Check the links in the description for the podcast, community, and offers

Join the SPM Pro Owner Group
SPM Pro is a curated group of independent pizzeria owners. Monthly call and private group access.

Streamline Your Inventory Process!
📝 Track stock levels: No more guesswork! Discover the future of restaurant management: WookAI

Get 3 Months Free With ThrivePOS
Pizza Driven Point of Sale. Schedule your free demo today! Tell em' the Pizza King sent you.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

One of the common things when it came to pitch day was how would these businesses attack their marketing plan? And almost all of the kids always just said social media. They just said social media. And one of the things that myself and some of the other coaches and judges always wanted to remind the kids and always wanted to hammer home was that social media in itself is great, but it's not a marketing plan. If you've been following along, we're we're at week 13 now. So we're you know we we had our hang ups in in food compliance or really just specs and making sure we got all of that worked out, finally got got our order guide, everything together when it comes to just um having all of the products that we needed available. Worked well with with PFG. You know, really appreciate the team, David Whistler and the team at PFG Orlando, because they really helped us get our order items available that we that we really needed to go forward here. So with that being said, it's it's time to start marketing. We're, you know, I think our our staff is in a good spot. Our our operations are are pretty solid, cleaning routines are are getting better every single week. We just made our transition to Coke, actually still waiting on Coke to bring me my new cooler, but we got all of our Coke product in yesterday. So now it's time to begin marketing. And it really made me think about time that I've I've been able to spend over the last few years working with high school kids through the junior achievement program. They have like an entrepreneur, an entrepreneurship program in some of the local high schools, and they bring in mentors or folks from the community to work with the kids. They do like a Shark Tank style pitch, they do um workshops, they do case studies, all these different things. And being able to work with them at different phases has been very rewarding for me. And then it but helps me see the business differently too, and and and how we how we think about things and how we do things. That being said, one of the common themes with the high school kids as they got to their their pitch phase and market day with launching their companies, there we would take them through a program where they would, you know, develop an idea and build a business plan and a launch plan for said business in groups and in teams. And one of the common things when it came to pitch day was how would these businesses attack their marketing plan? And almost all of the kids always just said social media. They just said social media. And one of the things that myself and some of the other coaches and judges always wanted to remind the kids and always wanted to hammer home was that social media in itself is great, but it's not a marketing plan. So we were, we were always asking them the tough questions like what is your plan for marketing? Okay, you say social media, but what is your social media is not a marketing plan. Social media is a marketing platform. How do you intend to use the platform? And as I think about what we're going to do here, obviously we have to, we have to do social media. We'll be, you know, we we started the Instagram page, we have the Facebook page going, you know, we'll have regular posts. Social media, really, really great tool for us that we'll use just not just, but mainly to build awareness around who we are and what we do. Marketing in in my mind means how are we gonna drive traffic through the door? And through that we'll use, you know, various, various methods. One being mail. I'm really interested in working with celebration on a birthday mailer, so I'm gonna reach out to David Michelson on that one. We just we just talked to mail-wise, so maybe we'll we'll find a program that we can work with there. We're we're really we're really gonna go hard after our building our eat um with free pizza, first pizza on us. So that will be really the heart of our what our campaigns look like. Come come give us a try. First ones on us, you know, trying to buy and build some language around that uh is gonna be a big one for us. And then continuing to just do what we do well. We we've done a good job over the last 13 weeks re-engaging our current loyalty list. I think we're we're just about a thousand fifty on that list. So we want to see that number continue to grow every single day, every single month. We want to continue to add new customers to our rewards platform because that becomes the easiest way for us to continue to uh engage and market with those folks through the email and text. Email's free, text is super cheap. So we're just we're just gonna push hard on that. And anything that we do, customer facing is either gonna come from corporate, which they'll have their campaigns. I think they're they're working on a baseball campaign right now, so we'll promote whatever those things are and and obviously align with the corporate message. But for us, we're everything that we put out is going to be related to join our list, get the first pizza on us, really not trying to do a whole bunch of pawning and discounting. We turned off all of the offers on on third party. We'll just use them as our delivery partner at this point. There's no there's no strategy to try to attract more business there. So I'm not running any sympathy using them as our delivery partner. So if someone calls, they want a delivery, we'll we'll you know, facilitate that through one of the third party platforms. So otherwise, we're not we're not running any deals or doing anything there. So, you know, first phase of it is drive traffic towards our rewards. One through social media, we'll make posts and we'll we'll put our links everywhere. We have we have our box topper, so that goes on every box, special offer, love our pizza or get rewarded, join our West Shore Pizza Rewards program and start earning earning points with every order, redeem exclusive discounts and VIP perks. So we're we're only sending deals to to rewards customers. We're not sending, we're not publicly sending out deals unless they're online, unless they're part of the corporate messaging. And yeah, you can come get the first pizza on us. So I guess with that being said, the takeout tip really is it was in my mind was thinking about social media. If you're starting a shop or you're you're building your shop or you're starting to get into your marketing, and your goal is to use social media as all or part of that strategy, strategy, I just challenge you to dig a little deeper and really detail what that looks like. Now, that doesn't mean that social media can't work because obviously it does. What it means is what is your plan? How do you intend to use it? Are you going to run paid ads? Are you going to get on a regular cadence? Are you going to post deals? Are you going to post 10 stories a day? Like, how do you plan to engage the community and drive traffic to the restaurant? Take the time to really dig into that and don't just don't just think that or assume that because you're there, people are going to find you. It just don't work that way anymore. So appreciate you guys. See you next Tuesday. Have a good weekend. Don't forget, come join us on school. We got the we got the group going. Come join us in SPM Pro. That one's that one's great. I think we have a call coming up in about a week. So there's still time to get into SPM Pro. Join up over there. There's a link in the description somewhere. Um you can check that out. And that's all we have. Check out the Pizza Expo recap episode that we just dropped earlier this week. We had Jay Johnson last week. Episode is doing really well. And next week we got even more fun coming for you. So stay tuned in Peace King Podcast. Peace.