Many of my customers used the supermarket and newspaper vouchers, as we had an older clientele and price conscious customers, so these were the places they saw the vouchers and would use them to come into our restaurant.
I constantly tried Facebook, Twitter (Instagram was launched at this time), and there was no activity at all from promotions, yet there was a lot of activity by customers on these sites. So a lot of effort for very little return.
I also tried different offers with the different supermarket chains, to test and measure the offers to see what customers would use more. The ‘buy one get on free coffee’ had 10 times more redemptions than a ‘2nd meal at half price’. But it was only after running these campaigns for several months and tracking all the information, that I could exactly see what the returns were for each type of campaign.
When first starting with these offers, I discovered that the sales reps for many of these companies will try to sell you what is the easiest for them, or whatever else your competitors are doing too, as they say this is what works and has been proven.