Is your advertising flopping? Fix this.

If your restaurant, shop, or attraction and your advertising isn’t delivering new people to your door, it’s probably because you’re not giving people a reason to care, click, or show up.

Here’s how to fix it:

Get the topic right.

We have a saying here at Step Out - “Topic trumps everything”. Meaning if you have a killer topic, you can get almost everything else wrong and it won’t matter.

So what’s the key to getting the topic right?

Focus on what makes you stand out - but make it actually interesting, unique and differentiating. Now i know those 3 words might make your eyes gloss over… but blink 👀 and come back to me, because they are not just overused buzzwords, they are the truth.

You’ll have to go beyond the basic standards for doing business in 2025 (ie. cleanliness, good service, selection, passion, homemade) and actually get creative. Think seasonal / holiday / pop culture / trending topics and build your differentiators (which will become your advertisement topics) based around these themes.

Here’s an example of a topic that blew it out of the water during a recent Step Out Campaign for a local Mexican restaurant in Downtown Buffalo - Hombre y Lobo.

They promoted their “Tacos & Tinsel Holiday Pop Up Bar”, which was an ongoing theme night happening during their regular business hours throughout the holiday season. It consisted of themed cocktails, music, and tons of holiday decor. 🎄 

Let’s breakdown the anatomy of this 🔥 topic and how it played a huge part in more than doubling the marketing results compared to a post with a typical advertising topic:

For reference, when we compare these results to a promotion with a more basic restaurant topic (ie. images of food or the space and a general caption about the business), we would generally see about half the impressions (roughly 40,000) and a third of the engagement.

So yeah, that topic is gold right there.

I know, I know - easier said than done. Which is why we incorporate creative strategy into all of our Step Out Advertising Campaigns for local businesses. Our creative team meticulously plans out client campaign topics and execution to ensure the best possible return on ad spend (ROAS). We use local and industry insight to devise a plan to COMMAND people’s attention and move them to action → aka off the couch and into the bar! 🪩

If this sounds like something you could use help with, fill out this form to see if you qualify to advertise with Step Out Buffalo. We take the guesswork out of advertising for local brick-and-mortar businesses so that it works quicker, better, and long term.