💸 Paid Social vs Google Ads: The Smart Split

Your media budgets aren’t big enough to waste guessing where to spend the cash.

Paid media is a tool, not a tactic and using the wrong platform for the wrong goal is like pouring Prosecco into a pint glass. Wasteful, messy, and not what anyone ordered.

Use your historical data to base your channel split. Starting from scratch? Here’s how to break it down:

📣 Meta = Hype Marketing.

Use it for buzz. New menus, themed nights, birthdays, bottomless brunches, late-night events. This is where you grab attention before intent. Great for storytelling, retargeting, and building brand heat.

🔍 Google = intent.

Use it for decision moments. When someone’s typing “best rooftop bar Manchester” or “pizza near me tonight,” you want to be right there. It’s built for capturing action-ready traffic - no scroll, just book.

📊 Here’s the split we’ve seen work:

• 60–70% of spend on Meta for high-energy, visual-first campaigns that build awareness + traffic
• 30–40% on Google to hoover up that booking intent and convert already-warm prospects

Smarter still? Use your Meta campaigns to drive site traffic and build audiences, then retarget those visitors via Google Search and Performance Max. It’s a one-two punch, reach + relevance.

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Because “always-on” doesn’t mean “always the same.” It means putting the right message on the right platform at the right time.

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🧩 One Email, Five Audiences

Dynamic CRM is your most underused superpower.

You’ve nailed the dishes, the names, the vibe. But if your online menu’s a fuzzy PDF? You’re invisible to search.

You don’t need five emails for five customer types. You need one smart email that shape-shifts.

 Hospitality brands are finally using dynamic content blocks inside their CRM platforms to send highly personalised campaigns without doing 5x the work.

Here’s how it looks:

📆 “You came last Friday? Here’s what’s happening this Friday.”

🥞 “You booked brunch? Here’s the next daytime event.”

⏳ “You haven’t booked in 90 days? Here’s a drink on us..”

Using merge tags, behavioural data, and conditional logic, the email literally rewrites itself based on who’s receiving it.

More relevance. Less unsubscribes. More bookings.

Because blasting everyone with the same offer is lazy and frankly your guests deserve better.

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🪞 Mirror Pages for Multi-Site SEO

One brand. Multiple venues. Infinite ways to mess up SEO.

If you’ve got more than one venue, your SEO strategy cannot be one-size-fits-all. Yet we still see hospitality groups stuffing multiple locations into a single page or worse, duplicating content across subpages. That’s a fast track to cannibalisation and missed local traffic.

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The fix? Build mirror pages:

🔗  Unique URL for each venue

🏙️  City/location-specific keywords

📋  Individual menus, reviews, CTAs and Google Maps embeds

🧠  Schema markup for structured local data

This isn’t just good SEO hygiene it tells Google that your Liverpool bar isn’t the same as your Manchester one. And it helps you rank in both cities.

We're giving away 5 free SEO audits, on a first-come-first-served basis. Drop us a note with your URL, and we'll come back with a top-line SWOT of your current SEO.

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🛒 ChatGPT x Shopify - One To Watch

The future of e-commerce might be one chat away. Are bookings next?

Rumours are swirling: OpenAI is reportedly developing a native Shopify checkout experience within ChatGPT. Leaked code snippets like shopify_checkout_url, buy_now, and product_offer_ratings hint at a seamless shopping journey: search, compare, and purchase, all within a single chat interface.

Imagine asking ChatGPT for the best wireless headphones under £100 and completing the purchase without leaving the conversation. No redirects, no external websites; just a streamlined, conversational shopping experience.

If this goes live, platforms like Google, TikTok, even traditional product pages could lose their grip on the buying journey. This isn’t just a UX update; it’s the merger of search and checkout. ChatGPT becomes the storefront.

And that means brands including those in hospitality retail, need to stop optimising just for SEO and start thinking AI-first visibility. How do you surface in a conversation instead of a results page?

No official announcement yet, but it’s already got TechRadar, DTC newsletters and LinkedIn buzzing. We think if this lands, integrations with wider transactional systems (eg booking systems + CRM) will be next.

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🤳 Reel Over Perfect - Instagram Users Don't Care

Why UGC is outperforming polished ads on Meta, and how to make it work for your venue.

Glossy videos look great on your website. But in the world of Meta Ads, real beats perfect every time.

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We’re seeing it across the board:

📱 Raw phone-shot content → lower CPAs

👯 Customers on nights out → higher engagement

🗣 Real voices in Reels → stronger CTRs

This isn’t a fluke. People trust people. And Meta’s algorithm? It loves content that feels native, not manufactured.

The best performers right now:

• Friends clinking cocktails with a loose caption
• “Come with me” TikTok-style night-out POVs
• Messy pizza slices, disco lights, crowd shots, laughter

And guess what? That content already exists.

Your guests are posting it every weekend, you just haven’t asked for permission to use it (yet).

How to do it right:

🔍 Find your best tagged content

📨 DM for usage rights (or automate this via a form)

🎯 Plug it straight into your Meta ad campaigns with a simple headline and CTA

💥 Watch the numbers climb

Better yet, get your content teams to create content as if it wasn't their own brand. Less budget on creative. More credibility. Better performance.

This isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about showing your venue the way your guests already do.

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