Sponsored Posts and Push Campaigns: Reaching People Directly

There are two different problems hiding under "reaching customers", and they need different tools.

The first is people who have never heard of you. The second is people who have, and who have stopped thinking about you. Advertising at the second group as though they were the first is the most common waste of money in hospitality marketing.

Who it is for

Venues with something specific to say: a new menu, a chef, a season, an event, a reason to come this week rather than eventually.

It is not for venues with nothing to announce. Paid reach applied to "we are still here" is money spent reminding people of a fact they were not disputing.

Sponsored posts: people who do not know you

A sponsored post puts something you wrote in front of people near you, inside Mosey, while they are looking for somewhere to eat.

The difference from a Boost is what is being promoted. Boost promotes a thing — your venue, a dish, an event. A sponsored post promotes something you said: the new menu, the story about the supplier, the fact that the chef changed.

That makes it better for anything with a narrative and worse for anything with a price. If the message is "we have a thing and it costs this", boost the thing. If the message needs a sentence to land, write the post.

What works: a photograph of food, and one specific thing to say. What does not work is a post written like an advertisement. People scroll past advertising all day and have become extremely good at it; they do not scroll past a decent picture of a plate and a sentence that sounds like a person.

Push campaigns: people who already know you

A push goes to customers who agreed to hear from you. It arrives on their phone, which is both why it works and why it must be used carefully.

You will see customers you cannot send to. An offer is marketing and needs actual permission — an existing relationship is not consent. That gap is the system working rather than failing, and the way to close it is to give people a reason to opt in, which usually means running something worth opting into.

Send rarely. This is the discipline that separates venues who get value from this from venues who burn it. Every push carries a risk that somebody turns notifications off, and that removes them from every future message including the ones they would have wanted — a booking confirmation, an order that is ready. A venue that sends weekly has traded its permanent channel for a few weeks of reach.

Two or three times a year, with something genuinely worth saying, will outperform monthly sending by a distance.

Both show you the audience first

The estimate is shown when you set the campaign up, before any payment.

This is the opposite of how most advertising works, and it is deliberate. The useful moment to discover that your budget buys less reach than you hoped is while you can still change it — not in a report a week later when the money has gone.

If the number is not worth the spend, change the budget, change the audience, or do not buy it.

Members are the cheapest audience you have

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

They are the most likely to act, the most likely to bring somebody, and the least likely to be annoyed — they are paying you for a relationship and a message is part of what they bought. A members-only night that sells out is usually a members-only night somebody actually told the members about.

Measure the right thing

Reach is what you bought. It is not what you wanted.

The number worth watching is what happened afterwards — bookings, orders, covers on the nights you were aiming at. A campaign with excellent reach and no change in trade tells you the message was wrong, and that is useful; a campaign judged on reach alone tells you nothing and will be repeated.

The cheap discipline is to decide before you start what would make you call it a success, and to write the number down. "More people saw it" is always true and never actionable.

What it costs

You set the budget. No rate, no minimum spend, no contract, and the estimated audience is shown before you commit.

A worked example

A restaurant launching an autumn menu.

It writes one post with a photograph of the best dish on it and sponsors it for a fortnight with a modest budget, aimed at people nearby. Separately, it sends one push to the customers who opted in — the only push it will send that quarter — saying the menu has changed and naming the dish.

The first reaches people who did not know the restaurant existed. The second reaches people who did and had drifted. They are different audiences with different messages, and conflating them is what makes most restaurant marketing feel like noise.

What it connects to

• Boost — promoting a venue, a dish or an event rather than a post
• Your customer list — who has gone quiet, and who you may message
• Run a venue membership — the audience worth having
• Automatic customer messages — the messages that send themselves
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page