Mother’s Day can be an enormous money maker for your restaurant if you know how to market it.
In this post, I’ll show you how we generated $5,645 from selling 240 tickets to a Mother’s Day Brunch at Smoke Justis in Covington, KY.
Note: The tickets only included food. Drinks, alcohol, and gratuity were on top which means the 240 guests will likely bring in over $10,000 during brunch alone.
Once again, we used a single Facebook post to do it.
Let’s take a deeper dive and break it down.
The campaign had 4 easy steps:
Craft an irresistible offer.
Create a page on the website to sell tickets.
Create a Facebook event.
Boost the Facebook event.
Step 1: Craft an irresistible offer.
A month in advance, Smoke Justis crafted their “Mother’s Day Brunch” idea. It was simple.
Design a family-friendly brunch buffet.
Sell tickets on the website.
The buffet menu included Scrambled Eggs, Bacon, Breakfast Potatoes, French Toast Sticks, Blueberry Compote, Biscuits, Croissants, Sausage Gravy, Brisket Carving Station, Caprese Salad, Goetta, Fresh Fruit, Yogurt & Granola, Macaroons, Mini Cheesecake, and Mini Muffins.
Tickets were $25 for adults and $15 for kids (ages 2–11). They had two reservation windows available. The first went from 10AM - Noon, and the following went from Noon - 2PM.
$25 tickets are very easy to sell online.
Guests would also be able to enjoy drink specials include $16 mimosa pitchers, whole bottles of champagne, and featured cocktails like our fan-favorite espresso martinis. Alcohol was not included in the tickets.
Step 2: Create a page on the website to sell tickets.
When you’re selling on your website, there are only 2 things that matter:
Words and images, in that order. And words are much, much more important.
As you can see below, we…
We started off by talking about Mom. “Give Mom the day she deserves.”
We listed out all of the menu items that would be available in the buffet.
We got specific about how tickets worked within each reservation window.
We added the cherry on top with drink specials, like $16 mimosa pitchers with full bottles of champagne. Go crazy, Mom!
We use Squarespace, so creating new product pages is easy.
Step 3: Create a Facebook event.
This step is important. The Facebook event is how you get people to your website ticket page.
There are 3 key elements to your Facebook event:
A scroll-stopping cover photo design.
A description that makes people want to learn more.
A link that takes them to the website. (This is key)
A scroll-stopping cover photo design:
For today's distracted scrollers, your message must be instantly recognizable. Our most effective approach uses clean, straightforward graphics featuring bold, centered text paired with relevant imagery.
Your design should immediately answer three essential questions:
WHAT: Mother's Day Brunch
WHERE: Smoke Justis
WHEN: Sunday, May 11th
A description that makes people want to learn more:
Write event descriptions as if you’re writing a caption, because when you boost the event with ad dollars, the event description will serve as the caption. Here’s our formula for the perfect event description:
First, call out who you’re addressing. This will help to stop the scroll, as if you were to say someone’s name. e.g. “HEY BOURBON DRINKERS!“
For our Mother’s Day event, it was a bit more general, so we started with “TICKETS ON SALE NOW“ to build intrigue and reinforce that buying tickets were necessary.Next, hit them with the benefit/purpose of the event.
For our Mother’s Day event, we wrote “Give Mom the day she deserves: cocktails, a brunch buffet, and a damn good time!“
Another example could be, “Want to get first dibs on our new barrel pick bottle from Old Forester?“List out everything they will get from purchase.
For us, this meant getting specific about the reservations and buffet.Finally, answer “How?“
If folks need to purchase tickets from the website, tell them how much tickets cost, and how they can purchase it. This final copy needs to include a clear Call-To-Action (CTA) such as “Click the link below for tickets.“
A link that takes them to the website:
When setting up a Facebook event, you have the option to include a ticket URL. The reason this is so important is because the Facebook event ad will shows up on people’s feeds, and when they click it, rather than taking them to the Facebook event, it takes them directly to the link destination.
Basically, including this link is a great way to optimize your cost-per-click, because people think they’re just clicking a Facebook event for more information.
Step 4: Boost the Facebook event.
With the ticket page and Facebook event set up, there was only one thing left: get eyes on this thing.
Nowadays, you have to do more than share the Facebook event to your followers. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “boost,“ it just means spending money to promote your Facebook event as an ad.
By clicking “Boost Event“ in Facebook, you will be brought to a screen where you can adjust your ad copy, ad targeting, and budget.
If you followed our Facebook event description formula above, no need to edit the ad copy. It will populate your event description.
By “targeting,” I’m talking about who your ad “targets“ - or which feeds your ad will appear. You can select a number of attributes, such as age, geography, interests, behaviors, etc.
For a Mother’s Day brunch, you can keep the geography and age range wide open. For the interests, get creative about who frequents your establishment! For us, that was people that liked cocktails, bourbon, smoked meats, etc.
We also added the attributes of “Parents“ to further reach the right audience.
In total, we spent $157.50 to boost the event, resulting in 240 tickets sold. So in theory, we spent 65 cents per $25 ticket. (Or $15, for kids)
Just set everything up right, and then you can relax and watch the success happen!