Boost: Put Your Venue in Front of People Nearby

You have a menu, a listing, some good photographs and several thousand people within a few kilometres who have never heard of you. Boost is the paid route between those two facts.

Who it is for

New venues with nothing behind them yet. Established venues with a quiet night, a new chef or a new menu. Anybody running an event or a promotion that needs more people to know it exists than currently do.

It is not a substitute for being good, and it is not a substitute for a complete listing. A boost pointed at a venue page with one photograph and no menu spends money to show somebody a reason not to come.

What you can boost

The choice matters more than the budget does.

• Your venue — the broad option, best when you are new or have genuinely changed
• A single dish — usually the strongest, because a photograph of one specific thing is what actually makes somebody hungry
• Your menu — when the range is the selling point
• An event — the clearest case, because there is a date and a reason to act
• A promotion — the offer and its distribution, together
• A food trail — when you are part of one

If you are unsure, boost a dish. "Somewhere nearby does a good lunch" is a weaker thought than a picture of the thing.

Where it appears

Inside Mosey, to people near you, while they are already looking for somewhere to eat.

That last clause is the whole argument for it over social media. Paying for reach on Instagram means interrupting somebody who is watching videos and hoping they are hungry, in a town you serve, this week. Paying for reach here means appearing in front of somebody who has opened an app for the express purpose of deciding where to eat.

The audiences are different sizes and they are not comparable per impression. One of them is a guess about intent; the other is intent.

You see the estimate before you pay

Open the Boost screen and the estimated reach is shown before any payment.

This is deliberate, and it is the opposite of how most ad products work. The useful moment to discover that your budget buys less reach than you hoped, or that the thing you picked has a smaller audience than a different thing, is while you can still change your mind — not in a report a week later.

If the number looks wrong, change the budget, change what you are boosting, or do not buy it.

Boosting your own members

If you run memberships, you can aim a boost at your own members.

It sounds redundant and is not. Members are the people most likely to act, and the cheapest audience you will ever reach, and the ones most likely to bring somebody else. A members-only night that sells out is usually a members-only night somebody actually told the members about.

Finish the free half first

Boost is the fastest way to waste money on Mosey if the listing behind it is not ready.

Everything a boost does is send somebody to a page. If that page has one photograph, no menu, no opening hours and four ratings, the boost has paid to show a stranger a reason to go elsewhere — and the money is spent either way. The venues that get the most out of paid reach are the ones that did not need it most.

Before spending anything, the checklist is short: a menu that is actually on the page, several photographs of food rather than of the room, correct opening hours, and enough ratings that somebody believes other people have been. All of that is free.

How long to run one

Long enough to cover the decision, and no longer.

For an event, that means the fortnight before it, weighted towards the last few days, because most people book late. For a dish or a venue, a week is usually enough to tell you something; a campaign running quietly for a month is a campaign nobody is reading the results of.

The useful discipline is to decide, before you start, what would make you call it a success. Busier Saturday. Twenty more covers. Ten ratings. Without that, the report afterwards is a set of numbers with nothing to compare them to.

What it costs

You set the budget. There is no rate, no minimum spend and no contract.

A worked example

A new café in a town of 15,000 has been open three weeks and has forty ratings.

It boosts one dish — a photograph of its cardamom bun — with a modest budget, for the week before a bank holiday. The estimate is shown up front, so the owner knows roughly how many people nearby will see it before spending anything.

What matters afterwards is not the impressions. It is whether Saturday was busier than the Saturday before, and whether any of those people came back the following week without being paid for. Boost reports the first part; your loyalty programme tells you the second.

What it connects to

Boost is distribution. It works when there is something worth distributing:

• Get discovered on Mosey — the free half, and the thing to finish first
• Run restaurant promotions — the offer a boost carries
• Sell event tickets — the clearest thing to boost, because it has a date
• Menus and AI menu scanning — the menu a boost sends people to
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page