Tonka Pizza, published reels

A sample of the forty-two reels published for Tonka between March and August. Every one produced from concept through filming direction, editing, captions, and scheduling.

The Challenge

Tonka Pizza is a small pizza shop in Glen Lake owned by the same two people who own DelSur Empanadas. It has a good product, a delivery radius, and three bar stools. What it did not have, when I started in February 2026, was a brand.

There was no voice, no message hierarchy, no audience, and effectively no online presence. Instagram reached 88 people that month and Facebook reached 66. I did not have a current menu to work from, so that was the first thing I asked for.

The competitive problem was ordinary and genuinely difficult. A neighborhood pizza shop competes with every other pizza shop in the area and with delivery apps that take a share of every order. It needed two things at once: people nearby who knew it existed, and a way to reach the local businesses who order lunch for twenty.

The Approach

Write the voice before making anything. In February I set the positioning and the message hierarchy: we do takeout, delivery, or three bar stools, and seriously, we deliver; our delivery costs less than the apps; the only pizza for Glen Lake. The tone rules went alongside it. Brief, witty, and individual. Unpretentious on purpose. Function ahead of polish. A neighborhood staple with better taste than it needs to have.

Sell the choice rather than the product. Photographs of pizza look the same everywhere. Decisions do not. So I built the content around the small choices a customer actually makes: pan or thin, small or medium or large, wings or breadsticks, pay the app fee or call the shop directly.

Give the business two jobs, not one. Social would do the work of being known in the neighborhood. Email would do the work of winning catering, where one office lunch order is worth many individual pizzas and the buyers can be reached by name. Those are different audiences and they needed different tools.

The Work

A system, built first. An editorial calendar with post identifiers, dates, on screen hooks, captions, and line by line subtitle scripts. Fifty-three planned posts for Tonka. Sixty story ideas with the sticker type and execution written out. Shot recipes that broke a reel into a numbered list of up to eight shots with audio notes, so filming could happen on a day when I was not there.

Then the volume. I produced and published forty-two reels for Tonka Pizza between March and August, an average of seven a month, alongside twenty-seven for DelSur in the same period.

They went out under working titles that carried the strategy. Choose Your Fighter for the three sizes. Pan vs Thin, filmed as a staff debate. Stop Paying Fees on delivery cost. Three Bar Stools, Wings Deserve Respect, Cheese Pull Test, and Fugazzetta as a quiet nod to the owners’ Argentine side. The logo moved into the first three seconds of every reel, and the staff went on camera.

A twelve-email catering program. Built from customer data in the Toast point of sale system. Each email runs 100 to 175 words, opens with the recipient’s first name, closes in the owners’ names, and carries one call to action to the ordering page. Every send has a subject line, preview text, an image brief, and a produced image that I made. Nine went out.

Tonka Pizza catering funnel

Every email in the sequence pointed at one ordering page, so nothing leaked out a side door.

Where it stops, no tracking parameter on the link, final order was never tracked in analytics. One audience, one path, one endpoint. Every email in the sequence pointed at the same ordering page.

A self audit partway through. After the first four emails had run, I read them back against their own results and found the copy leaning on phrases that were not earning their place. I retired those phrases and rewrote the writing standard for the remaining sends before continuing. I would rather pause a sequence and fix the writing than keep sending into a list that has stopped listening.

A brand that held up. In June the owners commissioned a separate brand and marketing foundation from Arch Empathy through Elevate Hennepin. Their report landed on plainspoken, understated, no superlatives, and good neighbor. That is the voice I had been writing in since February, four months before the research existed. I asked for the reports to see what I could use, and so far the findings have been mostly product level. The direction did not need changing.

The Outcome

An audience where there was none.

Tonka began February with a Facebook page that reached 66 people and produced two interactions in a whole month. By June it was reaching thousands. For a business that started with no audience at all, that is the awareness problem solved.

Tonka Pizza, February to July 2026

An Audience built from nothing. Reach grew ~38x on Instagram and ~26x on Facebook.

Six months of growth on both platforms, from a standing start.

A catering channel that opened cold and worked.

More than half of a business list opened the first email, and nearly seven percent clicked through to the ordering page. Thirteen recipients replied directly, which for a cold list of local businesses is real interest from real buyers. Thirty-one dead addresses were cleaned into a separate list rather than left in place to degrade sender reputation.

Tonka Pizza catering emails, ten sends to 446 business contacts

296 people, 66% of the list, opened at lease one email. 46 clicked through and 9 replied directly.

Engagement trended down across the nine sends, though not smoothly. Noticing the pattern is what prompted the rewrite rather than another send.

A finding that shaped the strategy. Meta recorded no link clicks from either platform across the six months. That told me something useful early: for a neighborhood pizza shop, social was doing the job of recognition, not the job of taking orders. Clicks were never going to be where this business was won. It is why the catering program exists, and why every email pointed at one ordering page. The two channels were built to do different work, and each one did its own.

What I Would Set Up Differently

Three things, and I would rather name them than have someone find them.

There was no tracking parameter on the ordering link, so I can show that people opened, clicked, and replied, but I cannot tell you how many catering orders followed. That is the first thing I would change, because a click and an order should be joinable.

The merge file records every recipient’s status for every send but no send dates. I know the order because I built the sends in order. Next time each send gets a timestamp, since a result you cannot date is a result you cannot fully defend.

And I asked for access to the website to improve the path from a visitor to a catering order. That access never came, so I built the campaign around the ordering page that already existed rather than waiting. It taught me to plan around the access I actually have rather than the access I have been promised.