13 Tips to Help Marketing Your Pizza Business

Pizza is something which is loved by all. If you don’t know what is pizza then it means that you are not a fast-food lover. Pizza is so common today that you will find it in most of the hotels’ and restaurants’ menus. Most of the hotels and even fast food centers are providing you with this great fast foodstuff with special ingredients and in more than one variety.

There is a good variety of pizza that is now available in the market. You can find hundreds of varieties in pizza according to the taste, ingredients, stuffings, and many other factors. All of these seem to be better than the others.

You will never keep yourself out of pizza if you see this exotic fast food. All varieties you can get are tasty and have different ingredients. Most of these are handmade and are prepared on the fresh dough.

The pizza industry has come a long way over the last few years and it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down any time soon. With the incredible statistics quoted above, it’s easy to assume that pizza is so popular that it will sell itself out.

Well not so much. The inherent challenge is running a pizza place, especially if it’s independently owned. This challenge comes in the form of competition you have to face from other independent pizzerias and other big chains.

Also, many pizzerias are located in small communities or neighborhoods with less population and traffic, which makes it even more difficult to make long-term profits. Therefore, your business should be paramount with your customers when they think of pizza. Increasing sales in the pizza business are not that difficult. You have to use traditional methods to increase sales and you also have to think outside the box.

To generate more sales in any business, the role of a well-designed marketing strategy cannot be overstated. Your pizza marketing strategy should include proven and reliable conventional restaurant advertising methods, newer innovative marketing technologies, and strategies tailored to your situation. Here are some strategies you can use to increase sales and revenue for a pizzeria.

Here are tips to help marketing your Pizza Business

Use social media

Good, quality advertising certainly doesn’t come cheap, but there is always a way to increase our company’s popularity without spending a penny, and that is through the use of social media. This method allows you to grow your business right from your smartphone.

Once you start your pizzeria, you should try to open accounts on major social media platforms and protect your name there. If your business name is already in use, you can add the city where your pizzeria is located or other records that refer to your business.

Being on social media is of no use if no one knows that you are there. To alert your customers or potential customers of your presence, you can place a sign on the cash register, on the table, menu, or by just letting people know verbally that they can follow you on social media.

Also, you should encourage your customers to check-in at your restaurant and join the conversation. If you harness the opportunity well, you will find out that your customers will do a lot of the social media work for you especially if they are loyal customers.

There is nothing too technical about using social media as a marketing tool. Do not feel too pressured to constantly make the overly creative post. Just be yourself and let things flow naturally. Make sure that you always share pictures of the various pizzas you make, your restaurant, happy customers, specials and discounts, coupons, new additions to the menu, new signs, and any other thing you think that will interest pizza lovers and your customers.

Make sure that you do not overload your customers with constant posts. If you are using Facebook, it is advisable to limit the number of posts you make per day to just one. This is because making a lot of posts can force the hand of the customer to hide your posts, which will imply that you have lost that customer.

Twitter does not have a hidden button and the customer will have to unfollow you to stop seeing your post, so on that platform, you can get away with posting as much as five posts per day.

Always remember to interact with your followers. If someone asks you any question through your social media, make sure that you reply as soon as possible. Interacting with your customers builds a relationship with them which will ultimately make them visit your pizzeria more often. It is also advisable to try using giveaways to get more customers.

For example, you can make a post saying that the next person that calls will get a free pizza or a certain percentage of discount or a free drink. These giveaways help to increase your popularity and make your presence felt on the platform.

You should note that building up your social media audience can take some time and as such, a lot of patience is required. Even if your account is not growing at the rate you would prefer, you should also be consistent with your posts.

Make professional visuals

Your customers will always appreciate and prefer to see your pizza in quality images. Mouthwatering pictures of your pizza with melted cheese and perfectly baked crusted will make them want to spend their money on it. To succeed with the aid of social media like was mentioned before, a visual aid is a necessity.

No one wants to read about a delicious pizza on social media as opposed to seeing the said pizza for themselves. Analytics have shown severally that posts with images get a significantly higher proportion of engagements when compared with text-only posts. So, irrespective of if your preferred platform is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest, the power of a quality picture cannot be over-emphasized.

As much as the use of pictures has been advocated, you should never use stock pizza pictures because people will get disappointed when they notice the disparity between the food they have ordered and the food in the picture. To get high-quality images, you should employ the services of a professional food photographer. These pictures can be used on your menu, fliers, websites, and social media platforms.

Offer pizza by the slice

Different customers have different needs. This is reflected in the type of pizzas they go for. It is also portrayed in the fact that some customers will want to order a full pizza while some will want to go for something less. By offering pizza by the slice, you can take advantage of these customers who cannot consume a full pizza or do not have enough cash to afford one.

Having a combo of a slice of pizza and a pop for about 4 to 8 dollars will attract a lot of people especially during lunchtime. This idea will also attract a younger crowd who are just looking for a bite and not something to take home. To let people know about your pizza by the slice offer, you should have a neon sign in your front window that can be seen from the access road.

Online ordering

According to research that was carried out by LevelUp ( an American mobile payments platform) customers who have placed an online order visit the restaurant 67 percent more frequently when compared to customers who have not. Also, studies have shown that customers who order online tend to spend more money on each order than those that come to the pizzeria.

Larger chains already seem to know this and have keyed into it to further grow their business, but most independently owned pizzerias are yet to fully take advantage of digital payment. In other words, to remain relevant in the pizza business, you will have to create an avenue by which your customers can place their orders online.

Focus on the millennials

Millennials are a generation of “foodies”. A study that was conducted in 2013 found that at least 50 percent of millennials consider themselves to be lovers of good dishes. Another study that was carried out by PMQ in 2016 found out that millennials spend over 95 billion dollars on restaurants. Smart Flour Food in their poll also discovered that about 54 percent of this same class of people has taken a photo of their pizza and posted it online.

That study also found out that they are highly loyal to brands and restaurants if they feel a connection to them. All this data just goes to show the necessity of targeting millennials to increases sales. There are two ways to get Millenials to key into your business:

Ensure that the mobile platform is your primary medium of customer communication 

As opposed to emails or any other platform. This is because at least 90 % of millennial smartphone users have their phones within arm’s reach at every second of the day. So, you cannot go wrong with using this medium.

 Stop using plastic/punch cards 

If you still make use of them in your pizzeria. Instead, you should embrace the use of digital check-in. The advantage of this is seen in the fact that it will relieve the inconvenience that your customers face in carrying around the card with them, it will also help to reduce the cost that will normally have been spent on expensive plastic printing costs and of course maintenance.

Do not be scared to increase prices

When catering to the need of the millennial, you will realize that they appreciate exotic, natural, and artisanal ingredients. Chances are that these ingredients will constitute a pizza that costs more than a common recipe like say pepperoni.

A study that was carried out by Smart Flour found out that 77 % of pizza lovers believe that natural ingredients are important to them. 29 % say that they try to avoid meat that has added hormones and 28 percent avoid high fructose corn syrup.

As a pizzeria owner, you can input the need of your customers into your menu and raise your price accordingly. Millennial customers will be willing to pay more for a pizza as long as they are satisfied that the increase in cost is justifiable.

Make Giveaways

You can imprint the name of your pizzeria in small and inexpensive gift items and give them to your customers as a form of appreciation for their patronage. Such gift items may be pencils, pens, and magnets. These gifts are perfect for various holidays, special sporting events, or back-to-school promotions.

Leverage an institution: 

You can contact various academies such as schools, colleges, and universities and ask them if they will be interested to sell your pizza in their cafeteria during their lunchtime.

Design an effective coupon offer

Coupons and deal advertisements have always been quite popular among pizzerias. Well, utilized coupons can be a very effective strategy for increasing the number of people that walk into your pizzeria. Coupons that have specific incentives attached to them can drive more customers to your business more than the regular forms of advertisement that have no incentive attached to them.

Even though giving out coupons from time to time is encouraged for pizzeria owners, the coupon deals should be for only a limited amount of time. It will be wise to delineate the terms or conditions of any promotion that you are running so that your customers will not abuse the privilege that you have provided them.

Create an email list

Building an email list is one of the various ways in which a pizza business can connect to its customers and re-market to them at very little cost. To be able to engage your customers and ensure that your emails convert to sales, you will have to nurture your email list using relevant content so that your open rates and click-thru rates will be high.

Keep your returning customers happy

Returning customers are the lifeblood of every company. If your customers think your pizza is good and like your service, there’s a big tendency for them to become regular customers who patronize you when they have to eat pizza. You need to strive to consistently deliver what your customers love, which in turn can make them repeat customers.

In conclusion, to increase sales in your pizza business, you need to do your best to make your pizza place and pizza for the first time what comes to your customer’s minds when they need pizza. Your company should also be able to acquire new customers using the techniques above. Be number one in your client’s mind and you will always be successful.