More catering businesses today realize they need a strong paid ads strategy to drive website traffic, phone calls, and event bookings in an increasingly competitive marketplace. But not all have the in-house expertise to effectively set up, optimize, and scale paid search and social campaigns. That’s where bringing on a paid ads management service makes sense.
But finding the right paid ads management services like Websites That Sell requires careful vetting to ensure paid ad success. Here’s how catering companies can smartly navigate their options.
Define Your Goals Upfront
The starting point for selecting a paid ads agency partner for your catering business is to clearly articulate your campaign goals. Without defined objectives and success metrics established early on, you’ll struggle to optimize performance or even identify the right management service fit.
Typical overarching goals that caterers want from paid search and social campaigns include:
- Driving more highly targeted website traffic
- Generating more high-quality customer inquiries
- Increasing phone calls and event booking leads
- Building brand awareness and market visibility
Getting very specific with quantitative targets related to each goal can help better inform your evaluation process. For example, aim for a 15% month-over-month rise in booking inquiries, 10% more site traffic from your core metro area, or a certain number of new customer email sign-ups per quarter.
With tangible benchmarks identified, both your internal team and your potential agency partners can optimize every campaign element around hitting those marks. If an agency doesn’t proactively dig deeper into understanding your desired outcomes and KPIs, they likely won’t focus enough strategic effort on actually achieving them.
Vet Extensive Niche Catering Experience
Ideally you’ll seek out an agency with proven success managing paid search and social campaigns specifically for other catering companies similar to yours. Their major selling point should be showcasing expertise in the catering niche itself. Some digitally savvy but more generalist agencies dabble across too many unrelated verticals to ever specialize adequately.
The right niche-focused fit will intuitively understand your target customer mindsets, regional seasonality trends, competitive differentiators, average sales cycles, and conversion pain points innately because they’ve already activated and optimized campaigns around those dynamics for other catering brands before.
An experienced catering specialty partner should be able to highlight client case study examples and success stories from past agency clients demonstrating how their strategic best practices and tactical optimizations improved cost-per-click, boosted conversions, grew average order values, scaled budgets responsibly, and ultimately delivered the best ROI for invested ad spend.
If a prospective agency can’t readily showcase its measurable contributions to catering campaign success, proceed cautiously before buying in.
Compare Service Packages
Reputable agencies offer some type of defined service packages with deliverables, access terms, and fee structures generally transparent upfront. Comparing and contrasting options on exactly what’s included for the money can clarify which offerings best align to your internal resources, capabilities, and budget.
Typical models for ad management partnerships include charging an hourly consulting rate, a monthly retainer fee, or a percentage commission on total ad spend under management. Sometimes minimum ad spend commitments do apply as well, lowering effective commissions with higher scales of budget.
Weigh factors like the breadth of included services and specialized staff access against limitations like minimum contracts, ad spend thresholds before reductions or locked-in agreements. The most advantageously balanced package for your catering ad goals provides ample optimization attention without overpaying fees.
Audit Technical Capabilities
Managing paid search and social campaigns for clients has grown exponentially more sophisticated just over the last several years thanks to powerful technologies now enabling improved optimization Leveraging automation, predictive analytics, machine learning and conversion attribution modeling can elevate catering ad performance well beyond relying on manual optimizations alone.
During your vetting process, discuss specifically how potential partners actively employ today’s available tools to enhance campaign results for clients. Explore the types of technologies they regularly utilize. Things like automated bid management platforms, multi-touch conversion analysis, campaign performance forecasting powered by AI, business intelligence dashboards and reporting analytics all represent big advantages if applied effectively.
The right agency partner won’t simply go through the motions of placing ads and then reporting basic metrics each month. They’ll instead demonstrate how they leverage MarTech innovations to drive better campaign optimization around your key conversions over time.
Conclusion
By framing tangible success metrics, requiring niche experience, comparing service models and investigating their utilization of optimization technologies thoroughly first, catering brands can forge successful partnerships driving growth through paid ads.
