Boost Your Business: The Power of Positive Google Reviews

Picture this: it's Friday night, and you're hungry for pizza. You pull out your phone to find the best spot. What catches your eye? Businesses with tons of glowing Google reviews!

Those reviews aren't just stars—they're your ticket to the top of Google. The more positive reviews you have, the more visible you become. It's like free advertising to hungry customers everywhere.

But why exactly are these reviews so crucial? Here are five reasons why getting those reviews is essential to stay at the top of someone's mind as they make their buying decisions:

1. Build Trust: Positive reviews from real customers build trust. When potential customers see that others have had a great experience with your business, they're more likely to trust you too.

2. Increase Visibility: The more positive reviews you have, the higher you'll rank in Google search results. This increased visibility means more eyes on your business and more potential customers walking through your door.

3. Social Proof: Positive reviews serve as social proof of your business's quality. They show potential customers that others have been satisfied with your products or services, making them more likely to give you a try.

4. Competitive Edge: In today's crowded marketplace, positive reviews can give you a competitive edge. When customers are comparing businesses online, those with more positive reviews will often win out.

5. Customer Engagement: Encouraging customers to leave reviews isn't just about getting more stars—it's about engaging with your audience. Responding to reviews shows that you value customer feedback and are committed to providing excellent service.

So, don't underestimate the power of positive reviews. They're not just nice to have—they're essential for staying top of mind as customers make their buying decisions.

From Milkshakes to Marketing: How to Take Your Restaurant Business to New Heights

Cavatelli di Lemmo from Aposto, a fine dining restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa

Milkshake lovers rejoice! If you've stumbled upon this blog post, chances are you're running a small or mid-sized restaurant or service business and are in need of a killer content marketing plan.

Firstly, let's talk about why having a content marketing plan is important. According to a survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, "86% of B2C marketers consider content marketing a key strategy." In simpler terms, having a content marketing plan means you'll be able to effectively reach your target audience, increase brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales.

But how exactly do you go about creating a killer content marketing plan?

Identify your target audience

This is crucial for any successful marketing plan. Who are you trying to reach? What are their interests? What problems can you solve for them? As a restaurant owner or service business owner, you want to create content that speaks to your audience. For example, if you own a burger joint, your target audience might be millennials who are looking for a unique dining experience. You could create content around your restaurant's Instagram-worthy burgers or the sustainability practices you follow in your business.

Create valuable content

Now that you know who you're trying to reach, it's time to create content that adds value to their lives. This could be in the form of blog posts, social media posts, videos, podcasts, or even a newsletter. As long as it's engaging and informative, your audience will keep coming back for more.

Utilize SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your content so it ranks higher in search engine results. This means more people will be able to find your content, and ultimately your business. Utilizing keywords, meta descriptions, and internal linking are just a few ways you can improve your website's SEO.

Be consistent

Consistency is key when it comes to content marketing. Your audience wants to hear from you regularly, so make sure you're posting on a regular schedule. This could be once a week, twice a month, or whatever works best for your business.

Measure your success

Last but not least, it's important to measure the success of your content marketing plan. This means tracking metrics such as website traffic, engagement rates, and conversion rates. By analyzing this data, you'll be able to determine what's working and what's not, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

So there you have it, folks! By following these simple steps, you'll be on your way to creating a killer content marketing plan that will take your small or mid-sized restaurant or service business to new heights.

Remember, "Content is king, but engagement is queen, and the lady rules the house."

The Milkshake Method Explained in 100 Words or Less

Here’s the TL;DR for those of you overpaying your agency to run ads for you:

1) Research your market.
2) Use your research to create content. Socials, email, etc.
3) Deliver your content regularly to the digital assets you’ve accumulated and to your target market.
4) Run ads from that content to the market you researched.
5) Collect digital assets such as emails, likes, etc.
6) Rinse, repeat.

If you suck at any of the above, you probably need to hire someone. But don’t let some fool convince you that you can’t create lasting and important content that brings people in your space. Be yourself, be consistent, pivot when necessary and take risks.

Thanks for listening. If you want me to expand on any of these subjects, let me know and I’ll write more on them. Maybe I’ll do some videos.

Photo from Aposto, a fine dining restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa.

ALWAYS give without expectation of return. The world is not your scoreboard.

🍦Shakers! I see so many people out there keeping score.

🛑 “How much can I squeeze out of someone over the lifetime of our relationship?”
🛑 “If I give to this charity, maybe they’ll have me on their podcast.”
🛑 “I wonder if driving him to the airport will give me a chance to sell him on my MLM?”

No.

Look, I’m no socialist. I rely on fair exchange for my business. There may come a time when I have a course or two, because time is also valuable and I want to make sure I can spread this message far and wide. I might need to figure that out one day.

But I’m IMPACT DRIVEN!

I see a world of crumbling retail being swallowed up by Amazon and chain restaurants with ginormous budgets and sophisticated data coming in to take your money.

So I want to make an IMPACT on the world.

I want to train as many people as possible — marketers and businesspeople alike — to think differently about the tools and tactics available to the modern marketer. I want to set them up to support their dreams so that they can in turn do the same to countless others.

You owe me NOTHING except for the satisfaction of your own success.

So quit keeping score.

And GO.

🍦🚀🍦🚀🍦🚀🍦

How to set up Facebook Ads for Restaurant Private Events ... Part 2 (of hundreds):

(Revisit Part 1 if you need to: How I built $6800 private events by using Facebook ads for a restaurant with a measly $180 in ad spend)

In the last post, I discussed creating a simple landing page that would help you generate leads for private parties for your restaurant. Today, I’m going to take it a step further to teach you how to set up your Facebook ads. I’m not going to go into detail on what your ads should say as of yet. We’ll get to that in another post. This is just some of the prepwork you’ll need to do before you set up your ads.

This probably deserves a video, but I’m just going to break it down assuming you’re already familiar with the Facebook Ads platform. If you’re not, well then maybe I’ll just save that for another video and blast you with the basics in a post another time. I’ll update this post with a video or something in the near future if I hear from you all on how to make it happen. Just bear with me now and pretend you know what you're doing. ;)

How to set up Your Facebook Ads for Restaurant Private Events

So let’s break down the research that it takes to get a decent Facebook ad for restaurant private events up and running.

1. Determine the targets. Go back to the information gathering phase and use audience insights and client surveys to set up the relevant insights and demographic info. For example, if your campaign and restaurant’s landing page is aimed at restaurant catering and private parties for baby showers, you’ll build your audience interests in a way that is reflective of your targets.

2. Gather your photo and video assets. Normally what I would do is take a bunch of photos at the restaurant itself, or ask the venue for photos that would be relevant to the campaign I’m running. In this instance, ask them for a few dozen photos of the venue that may have been taken back in the day. Then search out for mentions of them on Instagram and save those photos related to private events at the space. Example: This particular venue had a photo of a bridal shower. I reached out to the woman who posted the photo and asked for her permission to re-post the photo. Then I used that photo for this particular campaign.

3. Install The Facebook Pixel. I’m making the assumption that you’ve installed the Facebook pixel. If you haven’t, it’s super easy to do and necessary if you want to do any sort of retargeting with ads to people who visit your website. Install the Facebook Pixel from your ads account to the header of your landing page. You’re going to use this to re-target your ads to your chosen audience, so gathering this info is critical to the success of your campaign.

4. Create your custom audiences. Again, this might cause me to do another series of blog posts on this subject just to refresh you all on how this is done. But basically in your ads manager there is a way to create custom audiences of people you want to see your ads. That’s done in a bunch of different ways, but the most basic of which is these: engagement audiences, pixel (web traffic) audience and emails audience.

• Emails audience. Take your email list and create a custom audience. Again, this is in the audiences section of the Facebook Ads manager. If you have separate email lists for private events and that sort of thing, even better. Basically you’re asking Facebook to match up it’s users with your email list. For me that usually means

• Pixel (web) audience. If you’ve just recently created a pixel and added it to your site, it will take some time to create an audience large enough to create a custom audience. But do it anyway. What this means is that Facebook will take anyone who has visited your website in a certain time period and put them in a pool of people you can target your ads to.

• Engagement audience. An engagement is defined as anyone who has liked, shared or commented on your posts. In the the audiences tab of the ads manager once again, create an engagement audience by selecting the Facebook page engagement option. I usually set that time of up to 365 days, but depending on what you’re trying to do and the level of traffic that your site gets, you’ll want to create a list that fits your needs.

Using your custom audiences, create a Facebook lookalike audience for your restaurant's private events Facebook ads to increase the likelihood of success.  

In the audiences tab, you’re able to create lookalike audiences of people who look similar to the custom audiences that you just created. (Again, this is going to have be be an entirely new blog post because there are so many exciting things that you can do here. But for the time being, just bear with me). Facebook ads are so incredibly awesome that they can actually match you up with an audience that looks and acts similarly to the data that you’ve just created in your custom audience. For example, the Engagement audience that you created will be populated with a certain number of people that are more likely to engage with your content because they look and behave similarly to those who are in the engagement audience. I don’t know what sort of voodoo that the Facebook algorithm uses, just know that by creating lookalike audiences, you’re going to reduce the cost of your ads and give yourself a much higher likelihood of success.

---

In the next post, I’ll discuss what your posts should look like to ensure the best possible outcome for the Facebook ads for your restaurant private events. Remember that I’m largely a Facebook ads guy who specializes in restaurants, so that’s why I’m writing it from that perspective. Keep in mind that these tactics can work for almost any industry, so feel free to contact me if you have any questions about how to make these work for your industry.

Maybe you should try boxing? Using the lesson of Teddy Roosevelt to overcome obstacles.

Young Theodore Roosevelt was a fairly sickly child. Stricken with asthma, even menial tasks would spark serious reactions in his lungs that were life threatening. Yet he became one of the most successful presidents this country has ever seen.

How did he overcome such a hardship?

In his book, "The Obstacle is the Way," author Ryan Holiday describes a turning point in young Roosevelt's life.

By age twelve, Theodore Roosevelt had spent almost every day of his short life struggling with horrible asthma. Despite his privileged birth, his life hung in a precarious balance—the attacks were an almost nightly near-death experience. Tall, gangly, and frail, the slightest exertion would upset the entire balance and leave him bedridden for weeks. 

One day his father came into his room and delivered a message that would change the young boy’s life: "Theodore, you have the mind but haven’t got the body. I’m giving you the tools to make your body. It’s going to be hard drudgery and I think you have the determination to go through with it." 

You’d think that would be lost on a child, especially a fragile one born into great wealth and status. But according to Roosevelt’s younger sister, who witnessed the conversation, it wasn’t. 

His response, using what would become his trademark cheerful grit, was to look at his father and say with determination: "I’ll make my body."

So with this physical exertion and painful work devoted to improve the working of his lungs, he didn't complain. He just knew what he needed to do and got to work. Clearly he had an advantage over most boys without access to the wealth the Roosevelts had. Regardless, it took a special kind of mental fortitude to achieve the physical vitality to match that of his brain. 

So what I'm saying here isn't that you don't necessarily need to devote your life to boxing and strenuous physical activity. Maybe you just need to find that one moment in your life that you can recall being on top of it all. In my case, I've recalled a few of those moments of struggle and made a serious attempt to meditate on what those moments meant to me and how I was able to take a difficult situation and rise to the occasion.

So here's what I do to start my day.

After I wake up, I meditate for five minutes on how these moments of triumph made me feel and reflect on why they made me so proud. Often, my body fills with memories of the work that it took to accomplish and what I needed to change the next time in case I failed. AND most importantly, I exercise gratitude, but I'm never satisfied. 

So... what is that moment for you?

• Finishing a gruelingly hot half-marathon?
• Acing an exam?
• Leaving an abusive relationship and starting a new life?
• Overcoming physical and mental hardships?

What is that moment for you? Take a few minutes per day to pause and reflect on those moments of personal triumph, pride and accomplishment.

Upon self reflection, you'll find that you've probably accomplished more in your life than you realized. And although your triumphs aren't necessarily something as debilitating as childhood asthma, your self-confidence will thank you.

~~~

SOURCES:

For further reading on T. Roosevelt, I highly recommend Doris Kearns Goodwin's fantastic book, "The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism."

For a nice modern take on Stoic thinkers, I'm a big fan of Ryan Holiday's "The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumphs."

How I used Facebook ads to earn 7 private events for a restaurant in a month (for just $179) .

Okay, so Facebook ads! Hooray! You love them, am I right?

Wait. No? You don’t love them?

That’s a crying shame, sir or madam.

Facebook ads are the most underappreciated and undervalued pieces of marketing out there. Doesn’t matter what you’ve heard about them. I know this about you, because you still check Facebook more than you check any other website. Facebook ads are undervalued, because after passing 2 billion users this year, they’ve gone ahead invested more and more money into their ads platform to ensure that it runs efficiently for its advertisers. Even if you decide to hire someone else to do your ads on your behalf, you should take a few hours to learn the basics and maybe teach your Facebook ads rep a thing or two.

What if I told you that you could advertise private events for your restaurant with Facebook Ads by only spending $3 per ad per day? And similar $3 per day ads have yielded one restaurant I work with on average of $6,800 per month Yes, now I have your attention, don’t I Mr./Ms. Facebook ads doubter?

Before you learned about advertising with Facebook Ads for your restaurant catering and private events, you were all…

And now that you know there exists a way to get ridiculous returns on Facebook ads for not much money at all, you’re all…

So let's break it down. Here’s my secret to winning more private events for your restaurant. Like the whole enchilada. (Do people really still say that? Just me? Hmm...) Ready?

Edit: I decided I didn't want to write a book tonight, so instead, I'm going to break this monster of a topic up into about 4 or 18 different posts. I'll just make a new one every day until I decide that I don't want to write anymore. 

Okay…

Step 1. Create a simple landing page. Luckily, there are literally dozens of great tools out there to create landing pages for your restaurant’s website. I’m assuming you already have a website. And I’m assuming that because you’re reading this, you probably have a couple skills at setting up a website. (If you don’t, don’t sweat it. We’ll cover that at another time.)

Why is a landing page important instead of just having people click over to your website and fill out a contact form? Because you want to track those visits as you go. You’ll be able to prove that people are coming from your Facebook ads to your landing page. You want to track your marketing dollars, right?

1a. RESEARCH. What I like to do is figure out from the restaurant owner which private events are easiest to book and manage and which ones create the best return. From my experience, these are usually company holiday parties, baby showers, wedding bridal showers and wedding rehearsal dinners. Once I determine which private events are the ones that they’re looking to promote, I do a few things:

• Gather photos: Grab as many relevant photos related to the specific event as possible. Go through the restaurant’s instagram account, Facebook page, and have them zip you over as many as you can get your hands on.
• Demographic Information. Get information on the demographics of the people requesting the party. I have a questionaire that I use for this purpose. I try to get as many relevant audience insights as I can from the Facebook Page if I have access to it. This will help you build your page around the audience you are using for this purpose.

1b. Build your landing page. Once you have this information gathered, you can grab a couple ways to make sure your landing pages and ads convert at a higher than average clip.

• Clear headline: Make sure it’s exactly what you said people were clicking over to in your ad. If your ad says “Host your next baby shower at Flo’s Restaurant and Grill” then make sure you have the same title in the landing page.
• Consistent images: Images that match the images in the ads. If your ad has a pregnant lady at a baby shower, make sure the same image is in the landing page. Aim for 4-6
• Easy Contact Form: Make sure people know what they’re signing up for. Try not to give them more than 4 or 5 fields to fill out. Make it as easy as possible so they don’t bounce.
• Testimonials: Put as many testimonials as possible on your page. I don’t know why this is, but for whatever reason, the more testimonials I put up on the landing page, the higher. Just like the other stuff, make sure you’re being consistent. You can put a testimonial about a tasty dinner, but if you’re trying to push private parties for baby showers with Facebook ads, make sure to get a testimonial or two from people who had a good experience at a private party for a baby shower.

You can still rock a pretty decent landing page for your restaurant private events without breaking the bank. I’m going to let Miles Beckler do the honors of discussing how to save thousands of dollars versus ClickFunnels by building a decent page on WordPress. I personally use Squarespace for my restaurant landing page, so if you decide to go with a site like that or Wix, the same principles still apply. However, if you’re working on a budget, wordpress could be your jam. Here’s the formula that Miles uses to determine how much people could save by using Wordpress + Thrive over ClickFunnels:

WordPress + Hosting + Thrive (200,000+ visits/mo) = $328 per year. Clickfunnels up to 20,000 visits/mo = $1164 per year

Step 2: Build Your Facebook Ad for Restaurant Private Events

So let’s break down the research that it takes to get a decent Facebook ad for restaurant private events up and running. Tomorrow we'll actually get into building your ads. 

• Determine the targets. Go back to the information gathering phase and use audience insights and client surveys to set up the relevant insights and demographic info. For example, if your campaign and restaurant’s landing page is aimed at restaurant catering and private parties for baby showers, you’ll build your audience interests in a way that
• Facebook Pixel. Install the Facebook Pixel from your ads account to the header of your landing page. You’re going to use this to retarget your ads to your chosen audience, so gathering this info is critical to the success of your campaign.

This is going to be a 4 or 27 part series that will probably be a novel of some sort where I get to play the hero or something similar to stroke my ego. Anyway, stay tuned for tomorrow's segment, which has to do with the whole rest of the enchilada. 

(Oh and you could substitute pretty much any industry in there instead of just restaurants... more tomorrow... )

Creating Digital Content at Scale: Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of Progress.

I picked this photo of my son and me at a baseball game because I didn't have any perfect photo to use. I just wanted to make sure to get this out there. 

People are so fancy about their online content. It's gotta be the most frustrating part of my business.

Whenever I hear a story from someone about how they can't do this or that online because it would "hurt their brand," I get a bit squeamish. To me, what they're really saying is a couple things:

• You're insecure about your brand. Now, when I hear you openly mock social content that isn't perfect or up to your standards of quality, it makes me wonder if you actually believe in what you're selling. The fact that you probably don't want to do the work necessary to scale your business or communicate properly online with social media is telling. 
   
• You're making excuses about time. Yes, doing real storytelling of your brand is hard, but it's also something that can and should be done in 60 minutes per week without fail. If you're having trouble with time excuses, then that usually means trouble with some of the other work you're doing. You lack discipline, not time. 
   
• You're afraid that trying something new might actually work. This is the most arrogant of all excuses, because it means that some company higher up doesn't want to admit that what they're doing to acquire new business is actually outdated. It might have something to do with company culture, but it says a lot about you. Get over yourself.
   
• You have a romantic vision of your work. Someone hired your company because you exhibited a pretty good vision, a product or service that stood out, or because the price was just right. You're excellent at your craft and your brand logo is sexy. Great. But the customer probably doesn't know that or care. So treating your marketing the same way is foolish. Yes, your social and online content stuff should reflect your brand, but in forcing yourself to be so perfect, you're just leaving the door open a new startup to walk all over you. 

How to create content for your business at scale. An example plan for you.

Now what if you were to, say, outline your social media posts once a week. Take a 10 minute meeting on Monday with a couple key people in your organization. Here's an example of what I'd do regardless of industry:

1. FACEBOOK LIVE. Start with a live streaming video from your company page to Facebook on Monday morning. This means pull out your phone and record a live video for 2-3 minutes. Use a microphone, or don't. Who cares. Create an outline for it and stick to the bullet points. Say what you're going to say, say it and then say it again... Some people use a blog, higher performing vlog, or podcast as a piece of "GOLDEN CONTENT," to use as an anchor, but I like using Facebook Live because of the ease of use and automatic upload it provides. 
2. CREATE A BLOG POST BASED ON THE VIDEO. Use your blog to take the video you created and write 300-450 words. Use key SEO terms that you can get from a service like Ahrefs.com or a simple Wordpress.com SEO tool to build some keywords. Send out the blog posts to your newsletter subscribers. Post the blog to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn using a service like Buffer or Hootsuite. If possible, create two blog posts based on the live video you create. Post these on Tuesday and Friday. Share the post on LinkedIn as a long-form post (just like the one you're reading, or a shorter one in the timeline) and to Medium.com as a full article. 
3. RE-PURPOSE THE VIDEO. CUT IT IN TWO OR THREE. Take that video and quickly edit it into 2 or more other videos to repost later in the week. Link back to the blog post in each video you post. 
4. CHOP UP THE BEST POINTS. Take the best points of that live video and chop it up into manageable soundbites. Take your best lines and use those as tweets and LinkedIn nuggets. Link out to the blog post after your quotes or nuggets that way as well. 
5. CREATE IMAGES. Create an image, meme or quote that fits the purpose of the video and post that to Instagram. Use one of the images I use canva.com for free to create quick Instagram-ready images and usually one of the templates they have there. Use appropriate hashtags to spread the message to a wider audience. 
6. USE THE LIVE VIDEO AND CREATE A PODCAST FOR BONUS POINTS: This takes a bit more coordination, but don't poo-pooh it. Create a 3 minute podcast using the same Live video you created above. Share it to Anchor, Soundcloud, Sticher, iTunes, etc. If one person listens to each, you've done your job. 
7. FACEBOOK ADS. Take the best performing post of the week and boost it to your Voltron List. What's a Voltron List you ask? So glad you asked. Visit my post on this subject for a more advanced look at how to maximize efficiency with your ads.

All of the above takes 3 people about 55 minutes per week if you're efficient about it. 10 minutes to prep/outline the video. 5 minutes to shoot the live video. 10 minutes to create images. 25 minutes to write a blog post based on the video. 5 minutes to schedule all the posts on Buffer.com. 

So you have this romantic vision of your business and brand. Great. But instead of just creating and getting feedback from customers on it and engaging with your audience in real time, you're living in the past.

You're forgetting that in the social space, creating content on the fly and improving on that the next time is so important to staying top of mind. I don't care how huge your organization is or how important you think your brand is.

Regardless of if you want to pretend you're a huge agency or a two person shop.

The time that you're wasting on making it perfect or being too fancy is distancing yourself from creating the type of scale you need to make social content actually work. 

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of progress.

How Facebook Live Can Increase Revenue for Your Bar, Restaurant or Retail Business as much as $36,600

Facebook Live can drive business to your restaurant or bar.

Want to add $36,600 in revenue to your business per year in 5 minutes per day?

Of course you do. How?

Do Facebook Live videos.

Okay, bear with me here. 

Let's assume a live video video gets you on average about 1,000 or so views. So doing 5 of these per week will earn you 260,000 views per year. If 0.3% of these people come in once per year, we’re talking 780-800 people. Let's say you're a restaurant or bar. Assuming you average $25 per customer, we’re talking $19,500 in annual revenue. Boosting these posts with a targeted ad to your fans to double the audience costs $200 per month or $2400 per year. If you double the audience, you see a net revenue return of $36,600.

It's just a numbers game. If you can drive up the amount of people who are seeing your posts, then you'll drive more customers on average to your business.

(This is based on surveys that were done in June and July 2017 from Good Milkshake clients. Out of 210 surveyed, 4.7% of paying customers noted that they saw a Facebook Live video from the client in the past 6 months)

Facebook Live of me talking about how to increase revenue for your business using...Facebook Live. How meta, I know.

**This is a conservative estimate.** The nature of these videos is that if you're decent in them and they're of ok quality that provides VALUE to the person watching, you're going to get even more views. And then what if you also uploaded them to YouTube, your blog, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram stories? How much wider could you spread them? See where I'm going with this? Facebook wants to PRINT MONEY FOR YOU and you're complaining about it being too hard. But it's incredibly easy. You HAVE a smartphone, so it's the best thing you can do to consistently bring in more customers.

There's a whole strategy for how to make this work for a bar or restaurant. Which types of Facebook Live Videos work the best for restaurants or bars, for example? We'll explore that in a future post. 

In the meantime, just get started. Do live videos and do them consistently.

Welcome to Digital Media Analytics 101: The only metric that truly matters

👨‍🏫 Welcome to Digital Media Analytics 101

First lesson: ‪
👎 Likes don't matter. ‬ ‪👎 Engagement or shares matter very little. ‬ 👎 Comments? Meh. ‪👎 Video views? Nope. ‬ ‪

The only metric that matters?‬ ‪ 👍 Customers. 👨🏼‍🍳👩‍🌾💃🏽‬

Don't let some smart digital media person convince you otherwise.

This photo has nothing to do with this at all, I was just always told that you should have an image in your blog post. So there. 

Target those ads. Quit advertising like it's 2009.

As we've established on this page, Facebook ads are currently the single greatest dollar that you can spend on marketing if you're a restaurant. Well, I'd argue that there's nothing better that you can spend your money on almost anywhere. 

So why are you still advertising like it's 2009?

They're ads that don't show up on the page timeline, but only in the timelines of those you target with the ads. So they're "dark" to the public. Pretty easy to do, just spend a few minutes on YouTube to research them. 

"Cohorts" are fancy names for groups. For example, I have a client who has a cigar smoking room in their bar. For those ads, I have a few different cohorts. First are cigar smoking men age 25-35, different ad for 35-55, etc. Then golf playing women who drink alcohol age 25-35, 35-55, etc. Then single men who drink Guinness/single malt scotch, single women on Snapchat, African American men who drive fancy cars within 5 miles, etc. For each, I use a similar image adjusted for demographics, but the ad copy is aimed at the different cohorts. 

Test, then retest and retest until you have a solid 8,000 person list that you can hammer for a month or so to go along with your 5-10,000 person "Voltron List." Then repeat the cycle the next month, and the next eliminating the worst performing ads and testing out new groups. And so on...

Doing this will make your clients happy and will allow you to charge more once they feel the difference.