It’s been a wild couple of years for the restaurant industry. Restaurant owners have navigated numerous disruptions in customer behavior, supply chains, staffing, and food costs.
In addition, while the specifics of offering a high-quality dining experience haven’t changed too much, the way restaurants reach and grow their customer base has shifted dramatically in the last decade.
There’s a whole new generation of digital-first marketing tactics that successful restaurants are incorporating into their restaurant marketing strategies. Word-of-mouth has been largely eclipsed by positive reviews on review sites like Yelp.
Your restaurant’s online presence matters more now than ever before, and traditional advertising techniques have largely been supplanted by social media marketing. If your restaurant needs to pull in more new and repeat customers, it could be time to refresh your approach.
Here are 12 marketing tactics to get you started.
How do you start a marketing strategy for a restaurant?
Before we get into our 12 actionable ideas, we need to talk about your restaurant marketing plan. The ideas we’ll share can all help, but they do more when plugged into a well-crafted overall strategy.
If you’re not sure whether your marketing plan is working (or whether you have one in the first place), start with these six areas.
Create a brand identity
First up is creating a brand identity. Usually, this involves:
- Colors
- Fonts
- Imagery
- Your own voice
The goal is something cohesive and recognizable so that every piece of content your audience sees immediately registers as being yours. Everything you do, whether online or offline, needs to look consistent, enhancing your brand awareness with potential customers.
Here’s an example: If you’re Freddy’s Pizza, It’s not enough to get a flier out there that reminds people about pizza. You need that flier to remind them about Freddy’s Pizza. When that flier looks like your menu, which looks like your Facebook ads and social profiles, you’ll know you’ve created a brand identity.
Define your marketing goals
Why are you doing marketing for your restaurant at all?
Many businesses dive headfirst into marketing efforts without stopping to ask “why.” If you don’t ask why, you’ll never know if you answered it.
These will immediately lead to some “what” and “how” questions. (Answer those, too!)
Once you know what you want your marketing to achieve, why you want to achieve it, and how you plan to start, you’re most of the way there.
Identify your target market
Your target market is the segment of the population that you want to go after, or that you consider to be your ideal customer. In the food and beverage industry, it’s not that you want to limit yourself, but identifying your ideal patron helps you to focus your marketing efforts.
For example, if you’re going after the business crowd, advertising on social media platforms dominated by Gen Z isn’t a good use of your marketing budget. Knowing who you’re aiming for helps you sharpen your approach.
Conduct market research
Market research fills in two more missing pieces of the puzzle:
- What your target market does, thinks, and knows
- What your competitors look like
On the first piece, it’s not enough to know who your target market is. You also need to know their attributes, habits, opinions, and preferences. A restaurant can decide to target the high-end business crowd, but actually attracting that group requires knowing what they want.
Regarding the second piece, you need to know who else in your market is competing for the same target clientele.
Methods for conducting market research include competitive assessments, focus groups, and online surveys.
Determine your unique selling proposition
Your unique selling proposition, or USP, is the one thing setting you apart from others in your category. The key word here is “unique”: If your proposed USP is just as true about another restaurant across town, it’s not a good USP.
Once you land on a good one, it can serve as a sort of North Star. If any initiative or idea would hurt or damage your USP, say no. Instead, focus on the ones that reinforce or highlight your USP.
Choose your marketing channels
The last step in forming a basic marketing plan is determining where you will spend your marketing budget. SMS marketing campaigns, paid social media campaigns, and search and maps advertising can make an outsized impact.
You can’t market everywhere, though. So now is the time to narrow down to marketing channels with either the best track records or the highest potential ROI.
- Who is your target audience?
- Where do those people engage with advertising?
These two questions should immediately help you eliminate some options and prioritize others.
12 restaurant marketing ideas to try
With your marketing strategy started, you’re ready to start implementing specific ideas and tactics like the 12 we’re about to share with you.
If you’ve read our previous post on 12 free marketing ideas that boost brands and drive growth across the general market, you may notice a bit of overlap. However, the ideas listed below are methods tried and tested specifically in the restaurant market.
1. Have a business profile on as many platforms as possible
Make sure you set up a business profile on as many platforms as you can, but maintain a degree of control over them. If you don’t, some of the sites listed below may automatically generate (or allow users to create) a page or profile for you—and this type of listing rarely makes you look very good.
Setting up business profiles is the best way to be visible on a given platform. Here are some great ones to consider:
- Yelp
- Zomato
- OpenTable
- Zagat
- TripAdvisor
King of all the rest is your Google Business Profile. This online platform (formerly known as Google My Business) is free and relatively easy to set up.
It’s also the key to getting your restaurant to display on Google Maps and in local search results. If you decide to do local or search-based Google Ads, a Google Business Profile is required.
2. Optimize your website for SEO
Your restaurant website is one of your main representations online. So you want it to look good, and you need people to be able to find it.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is key to the latter. SEO is a set of principles and techniques for how you build or set up your website so that search engines (like Google, DuckDuckGo, and Microsoft Bing) can understand its structure and “ingest” the content.
If the search engine bots can’t understand your site or see certain parts of it, then you’ll be penalized in search results (if you even show up at all).
3. Regularly post engaging content on social media
Many restaurants find that social media is a big driver of foot traffic. It’s a great way to keep your brand in front of your most loyal customers’ eyes, and it can be a source of new customer acquisitions as well.
When you post regularly and interact with fans and commenters, you just keep hitting that “Oh yeah, I love that restaurant!” button in social users’ brains.
Bitly offers restaurants two powerful features to enhance their social media efforts:
Branded short links
Branded short links allow you to create a shortened link that looks and feels like your brand. You can include short links in social posts, put them on graphics, and more. They’re easier to remember and type, and will increase the likelihood of traffic clicking through to your website.
Bitly Link-in-bio
Some social media sites, including Instagram, limit the use of active, clickable links to just a handful of them in your company’s bio. Bitly Link-in-bio supercharges that link, sending viewers out to your own custom mobile-optimized landing page. It’s a great improvement over simply dumping users onto your home page.
4. Connect with your customers via email marketing
Email marketing is another important way for restaurants to keep their food and experiences top-of-mind for their most loyal fans. It’s a tested customer service strategy that is relatively easy to implement and doesn’t cost much to operate.
Consider these tips for your email marketing:
- A/B test your email campaigns (especially subject lines)
- Schedule emails for one to two hours before mealtime
- Showcase specials and promotions
- Include email-only discounts
5. Provide a user-friendly online menu
Next, be sure your menu is available on your website—and that it’s easy to use.
We know that 77% of diners check out restaurant websites or menus before showing up in person, and that more than 50% of all web traffic is now viewed on mobile devices.
So if it’s not there yet, get your menu up online as soon as possible, and make sure it’s formatted in a way that works for people’s phones. (Uploading a letter-sized PDF makes for a terrible phone viewing experience!)
6. Leverage geo-targeted online ads
Online advertising can seem scary, expensive, and difficult to navigate. But we promise it’s worth the effort!
When you advertise online, make sure you’re doing smart. It doesn’t matter how good your food is: No one from four states away is going to see your social media ad and immediately hop in the car for an eight-hour drive.
But the people who you know work or live within about 10 minutes? They just might make that snap decision.
Geo-targeted ads allow you to narrow your online advertising to only people who are in or have been in a specific geographic area. It’s a great way to stretch your ad spend!
7. Have an online food pickup and delivery system
Especially since the pandemic, online ordering has become a standard offering so widespread that you could be losing customers if you don’t allow it. Thankfully, given that popularity, there are a dozen or more services you can adopt that are basically plug-and-play.
8. Respond to online reviews
Online customer reviews can make a real difference—for good and for bad. Negative reviews aren’t always fair, but they can still do damage.
Responding to your online reviews makes you look like an active business, one whose leadership cares about their customers and experiences. Plus, responding to negative feedback gives you a chance to share your side of the story when needed.
9. Build a loyalty program
There’s a reason all the big brands and an increasing number of local businesses are implementing customer loyalty programs: they work.
Loyalty programs keep your brand front of mind, and they incentivize customers to come back for more by offering discounts, rewards, and incentives.
10. Make visually appealing dishes that customers will show off
Love it or hate it, people post their food on Instagram. This is what we call user-generated content, where a customer creates a positive post about your restaurant and willingly shares it with their network. It’s 100% free advertising that exposes you to new audiences. The better your plate appearance, the more likely you’ll get that free advertising.
11. Partner with influencers
Influencer marketing is another way to boost reach and visibility. Some of their audience may have never heard of your restaurant. Others have driven past it dozens of times, and a recommendation from a famous face they like could be all it takes to get them in the door.
12. Run discount-based promotions
Discounts are good at bringing people in the door, but they work in special ways with certain audiences. For example, people who eat out frequently can reach a sort of decision fatigue or restaurant fatigue.
A temporary promotion offering value or uniqueness could be enough to break them out of their routine and get them back to your restaurant.
Improve your brand visibility with Bitly
It’s more important than ever to stand out from a crowded field. Increasing your restaurant brand’s visibility starts with building a cohesive, consistent brand identity, and Bitly helps restaurants like yours all along the way.
Branded short links help your digital, print, and out-of-home ads direct readers to your website or landing page. QR Codes do the same, which you can create directly using Bitly’s QR Code generator. Also, Bitly Link-in-bio allows you to make a custom landing page—no coding or web development required!
Ready to leverage Bitly to help your restaurant thrive? Get started for free today!