Contemporary Italian restaurant brand Gusto has boosted bookings and increased revenue thanks to an updated social media strategy implemented by digital marketing specialist Airship.
In a three-month trial, Gusto, part of the Living Ventures group, saw revenue from bookings through social media increase by more than £20,000 a month across its 12 restaurants.
Offering a combination of classic and contemporary Italian dishes, Gusto’s restaurants are inspired by the traditional Grand Cafés of Europe. Such grand sites require plenty of customers to fill them, and with social media increasingly important to the casual dining sector, Gusto turned to Airship.
The Airship strategy has significantly increased customer engagement with Gusto across key social media platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and trained Gusto staff to post messages, pictures and offers more effectively.
Crucially, this has not only seen an increase in the number of followers for each Gusto restaurant, but, as the revenue figures demonstrate, has also led to an impressive uplift in the number of customer engagements that convert to bookings.
Highlights of Airship’s successful three-month trial programme include:
More than 3,000 additional customer ‘likes’ on Facebook;
- More than 3,800 additional Twitter followers;
- More than 8,800 customer engagements with Gusto’s Instagram content;
- A 478% year-on-year increase in customers coming to the Gusto bookings web page through Facebook and Twitter;
- A 96% conversion rate of attributable social media traffic to the Gusto site into bookings.
Jon Batty, content services director of Airship, said: “Social media has changed the way consumers engage with brands, including restaurants. Any strategy has to be two-pronged; it has to offer consumers interesting and engaging content, but that needs to be balanced with content that converts into revenue, in this case in the form of restaurant bookings.
“We’ve worked with Living Ventures for some time, but every brand is unique, and in the case of Gusto we worked with their restaurant teams to ensure that the content, timing and consumer appeal of their social media post was focused on persuading customers to book a visit to ‘their’ Gusto.
”We’ve also built robust measurability into the system, so both we and Gusto can be confident that it is the social media strategy that is delivering the very significant upturn in bookings.”
Charlotte Solomon, group marketing manager, Living Ventures, said “Airship has delivered an extremely impressive return on our investment, whilst providing continual training and support. We’ve seen an exponential increase in followers, engagements and impressions across all platforms – in addition to being able to directly attribute how many sales we have acquired from social media.”
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