01 Jan Little Italy Annual Case Study
About Little Italy
Little Italy is a family owned and operated Italian restaurant. The restaurant has been opened since 1983 serving San Antonio families for over 30 years. Catering, private dining, and take out are all available at Little Italy. The Visocaro family is originally from Palermo, the capital of the Italian island of Sicily. They began introducing the flavors of the traditional Italian dishes in New York city with a modest pizzeria, “Paola’s Pizza Restaurant.” After 12 years of tiring cold and snowy weather, they decided to move to the much warmer city, San Antonio, Texas. In April 1983, Little Italy Restaurant & Pizzeria opened its doors with authentic New York style Italian cuisine. For more information about Little Italy, see below to check out their website and social media.
Little Italy
824 Afterglow St.
San Antonio, TX 78216
210-349-2060
http://littleitalysatx.com
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
Project
Little Italy sought to enhance their brands digital presence, build a customer database, and increase overall sales. Together with Embark Marketing, they teamed up in 2017 to achieve these goals through use of social media, website development, public relations & email marketing.
Social Media Marketing
Embark Marketing focused on three social media platforms for Little Italy: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We felt that these platforms would be the most beneficial in order to reach the desired audience. The goal of Little Italy’s social media was to preserve the authenticity of the restaurant while reaching out to newer generations. Below you can see our overall improvements and engagement of Little Italy social media.
Facebook:
Facebook page likes increased by over 700 users.
What is a Facebook like?
When a Facebook user “Likes” your page, they are essentially subscribing to see all content that you post on the timeline of their personal Facebook account.
What does this mean?
Increasing likes on a Facebook page helps with overall marketing by being able to expose your content to a targeted audience. It validates that the posts are being seen, it shows loyalty to the business, and it can show the improvement of the business.
Charts:
These charts help with the visual representation of the Facebook account over the past year.
Twitter/Instagram:
What is a Twitter and Instagram follower?
A “follower” is similar to a Facebook “like.” Followers are people who like the business, content of the page, and can see everything posted once they are a follower. Followers are able to engage with posts by “liking” or “commenting” on anything posted.
What is a Twitter impression?
An impression is the delivery of a post or tweet to an individual Twitter user’s account. Twitter described this as, “The total number of times someone interacted with a tweet.” Anytime someone clicks on the business’s username, profile, replies, likes, links, hashtags, or media an impression is made.
Why is a Twitter impression helpful?
Many users do not directly follow, reply, or like a tweet on Twitter. An impression helps by showing that the posts are reaching consumers. With this number, we can see that more people are engaging with the social media content, and this increases the overall people reached.
Twitter followers increased by 530 users.
Twitter impressions tripled.
Instagram followers increased to over 1800 users.
Charts:
These charts help with the visualization of the Twitter and Instagram accounts.
Email Marketing:
We implemented an email marketing program to stay engaged with new and interested customers. We implemented a strategy to collect emails and grow their database, which resulted in an increase in both subscribers and in-store sales.
Over the year we had over 100 new users subscribe to the email program.
Public Relations:
Embark Marketing utilized local media contacts in San Antonio to help promote and create an aware audience for Little Italy. Over the past year, Little Italy’s public relations grew substantially. The results of the public relations are evident in the many articles published, awards won, and statistics from social media that are directly linked with PR articles.
We achieved 55 articles across 23 platforms.
Awarded Best Italian by San Antonio Magazine Best in 2018
Awarded the Bronze for Best Italian AND Best Wine Selection by the San Antonio Express News
Awarded Best Italian by the San Antonio Current
Listed #2 Best Personal Pizza for Elder Eats KSAT 12
What is Organic Reach?
Organic reach is the total number of different people who saw your page, posts, or websites without boosting a post.
Why is Public Relations important?
Public relations is what drives more people organically to your brand. Without PR, the traffic to the business’ site and social media sites would decrease tremendously. In the chart below, you can see that the public relations were a direct cause and effect for the month of May.
In May, our statistics jumped for organic reach by over 3,000! During May, Little Italy was listed on KSAT 12 as the number 2 place in San Antonio for the Best Personal Pizza.
Over the course of a year, the average number of people who were reached organically have doubled!
Website Development & Maintenance:
Little Italy did not have a website presence over the past 30 years. We designed a responsive website to that provided a fresh look that was user friendly, mobile compatible & SEO enriched. With the new website, Little Italy was able to capture more organic traffic, generated through web browsers such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.