Restaurant Marketing Guide: Strategies for Growth in 2024

Restaurant marketing is your ticket to increase sales by expanding your customer base and turning visitors into regulars. It’s a chance to own your reputation and showcase what you have to offer, whether you specialize in authentic, homestyle Italian dishes or a first-class dining experience. 

People in your city can choose from hundreds of local restaurants, and you need to make it clear why you’re the best choice for dinner. And while it’s easy, a handful of flyers floating around town might not cut it.

We’ve worked with thousands of restaurants, driven over $100 million in sales for customers, and talk to owners like you each and every week. I’ve learned a thing or two about great restaurant marketing from them, so I’m going to walk you step-by-step through marketing your restaurant so you can:

1. Think about restaurant marketing in new ways that nobody talks about.
2. Stop wasting cash on expensive tactics without a foundational strategy.
3. Create a strategy with goal-oriented tactics that work. 

This is the exact process we’ve provided restaurant owners for years, growing their online orders by an average of 270% in just 90 days. We can help you do it, too. 

Restaurant Marketing 101

In a nutshell, restaurant marketing gets the word out about your food, restaurant and customer experience. But, marketing that will help your bottom line isn’t as simple as promoting yourself on Instagram with #InstaFood hashtag (though Instagram has its place). 

Don’t get us wrong — promotions are important. But jumping into how to promote your restaurant without the why won’t get you very far. Luckily, you can use marketing frameworks to direct your strategy. . 

Let’s use the classic four P’s in the marketing mix — product, place, price and promotion. 

This framework provides a nice look at your restaurant offerings, showing you the smart way to build a marketing strategy based on your restaurant specialities, local market and goals. 

Here’s a marketing mix overview for reference, but we’ll dig into the meat of this framework later. 

If you don’t use a framework, you risk investing in promotional tactics that just waste your time and money. In our experience, that is a major mistake you don’t want to make. 

Your #1 Restaurant Marketing Mistake — Promoting Without a Plan

Marketing is not just promoting your restaurant, which is a common pitfall I’ve seen owners stumble into time and time again. 

A proper marketing strategy includes all of the four Ps we mentioned earlier, not just promotion. Here’s a simple example of how each P impacts your marketing:

• Product: What makes your food different, and what do customers love? Use this in your messaging. 
• Place: Who has access to your restaurant and would enjoy the vibe? Consider how you can reach these specific customers. 
• Price: How does your menu pricing compare to competitors? How much is too much for your target customer? This can narrow your customer base or apply to your promotion strategy. 
• Promotions: Instead of deciding that untested coupon mailer strategy will definitely work, focus your efforts (and marketing budget) on who you’re trying to reach and why. 

If you want to use this framework properly, you need to know more about your target audience to speak directly to their needs. Otherwise, you won’t know how to convert them into customers and increase your sales. 

The best place to start is by creating your own customer personas.

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Who is Your Customer? Build Personas For Your Restaurant

You need to know who you’re talking to for effective restaurant marketing. Otherwise, you’re just throwing time and money at the wall, hoping something sticks, and that’s not consistent enough to be worth the effort.

To know your customers, what they want and how you can satisfy them, start by identifying these traits and behaviors:

Demographics: 

• What’s the average age of your customers?
• Does your customer base skew towards a particular gender identity?
• How much money do your guests make?
• Are you more popular with locals, tourists or both?
• Do you typically serve friend groups, couples or families?

Behaviors: 

• When do you customers typically visit?
• How often do customers return?
• How much do they spend on average?
• What are their favorite menu items?
• How long do they spend in your restaurant?

Your POS or online ordering system likely collects customer data you can pull from to make this easy. Validate your findings with your restaurant manager and servers that see guests day-to-day.

An example persona details your target customer’s needs, habits and communication preferences so you can effectively reach them with marketing.

Once you’ve identified core habits, group them to create buyer personas. You want to identify key demographic details and buying behavior for each. This clues you into what your customers want, which you’ll apply to create enticing marketing messages and promotions.

Buyer personas likely include:

• Persona: A named group of common customers that share similar behaviors.
• Likes: What this group likes about your restaurant and dining experiences in general. 
• Dislikes: What this group dislikes about your restaurant and dining experiences in general. 
• Behaviors: Shared habits core to the persona, like meeting for lunch.
• Messaging Channels: How you can reach this group and their communication preferences. 

Consider a memorable name to help your team remember and identify target audiences. 

It’s not just about marketing, after all. If your staff understands your customers and their behavior, they can customize their service for each persona’s preference and make smart upsell recommendations. 

Target Customers to Save Time

Buyer personas are so valuable because they create a marketing bullseye. You know exactly where to aim your efforts to craft a custom conversion strategy. It’s the secret to effective marketing without wasting your effort trying to appeal to everyone with little success. 

So take your customer profiles a step farther. Once you’ve built your key customer personas, determine:

• Who’s most profitable?
• Who’s most loyal?
• Who’s easiest to reach?

The answer to these questions is your ideal target customer.

Center them when you finally dig into the marketing mix framework, which we’ll dive into next.

Focus Your Efforts With The 4 P’s of the Marketing Mix

The marketing mix framework helps you evaluate your restaurant’s strengths and positioning so you can tailor your marketing messages to grow your customer base, average sales and other goals for the year. 

Most owners focus on promotions above all else, but each P in the marketing mix is a valuable part of your strategy. It might seem straightforward now, but there’s plenty more to cover below. 

Product

As a restaurant owner, your product is your food and service and it’s the core of your marketing. This includes all of your menu items, experiences like hibachi and events, like a Friday Night Fish Fry. It also includes services like online ordering and your customer experience as a whole.

It’s important to be as specific as possible when you think about your product and how people enjoy it. Nailing this can unlock the holy grail of marketing — positive, organic word of mouth. Because if your customers are excited about your restaurant, they’ll post on social media, invite their friends and family, and keep coming back. 

It’s all about having a novel or well-executed product. You might be one of several American comfort food restaurants, but if you’re the only one with seasonal farm-to-table ingredients, that’s a powerful one-up on the competition. 

Work through some of these questions to drill into your product specialties and better understand how your product can stand out from the crowd:

• What’s your restaurant concept?
• What are your specialty dishes?
• How do you serve food to customers?
• What dining options are available to customers?
• Do you have special events or menus like happy hour?
• What is your ideal customer experience?
• Where does your product come from?
• How do you prepare your meals?
• Is your restaurant upscale, casual, family-oriented or exclusive?

You want to advertise what you do best. You can add badges on your Google Business page, highlight top-sellers on your website and promote your unique brand experiences on social media.

But don’t forget to apply your customer personas. 

If Adventurous Alice is your biggest spender and she’s focused on new and unique flavors, you’re better off giving her your seasonal menu than sharing your Happy Hour specials.

And you can attract more customers like Alice by promoting your seasonal best-sellers on your website homepage and online ordering menu. Don’t forget to include the customers that already love your restaurant with email marketing. 

Ultimately, you’re trying to find your product market fit. Determine what’s in high demand and what’s offered in your area, then find a way to fit yourself into that gap. These highlights differentiate your brand and offer something new to customers, and that should be the core of your marketing message. 

Place

Your location and service area are major considerations for your marketing strategy that are easy to gloss over. You want to target locals — otherwise, your great messaging doesn’t really matter.

For example, social media seems like an obvious choice, but it’s a trap. You can have 100,000 global followers who like all of your posts, but they’re not coming in for dinner. So how do these followers benefit you at the end of the day?

It’s not easy to make changes to your physical real estate, but your digital presence can still boost your IRL foot traffic. In fact, most of your customers are looking online to find the new hot spot in town instead of walking down Main Street. 

So, how do you target your local audience online? 

Tap into the power of restaurant search engine optimization (SEO). If you’re unfamiliar, SEO is how you can get your restaurant and menu to the top of Google search results so your audience easily finds you. 

SEO is our specialty and we’ve seen how transformative it is for small businesses. Just read how Rahul, owner of Saffron Indian Kitchen, earns 700 new customers a month from Google. 

Include your product, place and restaurant names in keywords to attract local diners already searching for what you offer.

How? Because his site is optimized to rank for relevant keywords, including their top menu items and localized phrases like “best Indian restaurant in PA.”

Getting started with SEO might feel intimidating, but we have plenty of resources for you, like this guide to getting your restaurant to rank #1 on Google. It’s well worth the effort and one of our favorite marketing tactics for independent owners like you. 

Price

Price relates to your profits as well as your appeal to customers. If your price doesn’t match your quality and guest expectations, people won’t visit no matter how good your marketing is. 

On the flip side, you can use a great deal to your advantage and attract new customers with targeted marketing. 

First, let’s talk profit: 

• How profitable is your business?
• What services (breakfast, lunch, dinner) are most profitable?
• What days and seasons are most profitable?
• What menu items are most profitable?

This is a nice peek into your business performance, but it’s also valuable once you start planning your promotions. For example, if your restaurant is always packed on Saturday nights, you don’t need to encourage more diners to come out. 

Instead, target your least profitable seasons, hours and days. Is Wednesday lunch always dead? Offer a two-for-one deal or happy hour special to get people in the door. Sometimes a new pricing strategy is more effective marketing than printing fresh flyers.  

Smart suggestions can also increase sales without actually changing the menu prices. That’s why we built automatic upsells into the Owner.com online ordering platform to market your most popular and profitable dishes to bank more cash from each order. 

Now, let’s dig into prices from your customers’ perspective:

• Is your food affordable, costly or just right?
• How do your menu prices compare to your competitors’?
• Do you increase prices for third-party orders through Doordash, Uber Eats and Grubhub?

It’s a classic Goldilocks situation. If your prices are too high, you can turn customers away. If they’re too low, you eat into your profit margins.

Find that just-right price that’s profitable for you and appropriate for your customers, which can be tricky with rising expenses and a slim profit margin. 

Your buyer personas will help you see what items are popular and how much folks typically spend, so you can adjust your full pricing strategy to better align with what they’re looking for. 

For example, if you know your guests are looking for a deal, consider a Date Night Dinner special. This includes a free appetizer with the purchase of two entrees and drinks. It speaks to what your customers want, gets more people in the door and boosts average ticket size with high-profit drink purchases to offset the appetizer cost. 

And if third-party apps are digging into your profit margins, consider investing in direct online ordering instead. This way, you own all of the customer data and can set fair prices without sacrificing your profits to commission costs. 

Promotion

Finally, the moment you’ve been waiting for — let’s chat about promoting your restaurant. This is ultimately how you reach target customers and what you offer them.

We’ve seen some amazing promotions that grow customer bases and increase sales, and there’s one thing they all have in common. 

A well-fleshed-out strategy is your marketing BFF, so if you skipped ahead to this section, back up and check out the rest of the post. And if you’re looking for promotional tactics, you can jump ahead. 

Your buyer personas play a significant role here, too:

• How does your target market like to be reached? Online, in-person or directly?
• What motivates your customers? Are they more likely to come through for a new chef’s special or too-good-to-be-true deal?
• How can you convince your ideal customer to try your restaurant? Real reviews, local features and product photos can help. 

Applying this to your customer personas might look like:

Focus on what excites your customers, and they’re more likely to respond. 

In many cases, you’ll find that digital marketing is bigger than ever nowadays. You’re better off with a custom mobile app on your customers’ phones than passing out flyers on the street. Not only does a promotion like “15% off your first app order” encourage new customers, but the easy-to-order mobile app and notifications encourage diners to keep coming back. 

Don’t overlook the importance of converting a regular, which is far more valuable than a new customer that might order once. So keep up your email marketing and loyalty programs to reach past customers directly and give them something to look forward to. 

Social proof is important, too. This is where review sites like Yelp come in. It’s particularly valuable when you’re trying to build trust with new customers. You can talk about how much you love your food, but honest word-of-mouth promos are hard to beat — even in the digital age. 

In fact, Yelp is the second largest source of new customers for restaurants, and we have a YouTube video to help you get started here.

Connect the Dots With a Marketing Strategy

At this point, you have all of the ingredients for a successful marketing strategy thanks to the four P’s marketing framework. We’ve covered:

• The importance of creating a strategy before investing in tactics
• How you can build customer personas
• How the marketing mix framework directs your strategy considering your product, place, price and promotion

Now, you just have to follow the recipe and put it all together. But there are still some important details you need to know to create a fully-realized marketing strategy.

Use what you’ve gathered so far to finalize these key concepts below.

📚 Learn more: Restaurant Failure Rate in 2024: Why Do Restaurants Fail?

Campaign Goals

What are you hoping to achieve with this strategy? 

Use SMART goals (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound) and key performance indicators (KPI) to measure your performance. 

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

What are you measuring to determine success?

Your KPI is directly tied to your goal. So, if you’re trying to increase your sales, your KPIs could be: 

• Number of new customers
• Number of online orders
• Average daily profit
• Average ticket size

We’re putting together a solid restaurant marketing strategy overview here. But if you need a little more support, check out our restaurant marketing plan resource, too. This digs a little deeper into your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats analysis (SWOT) competitor analysis and budget breakdown.

Now that you’re clear on what you’re trying to achieve and have a little more direction, you can choose specific tactics that fit into your strategy. Check out some of our top tactics below. 

Timeline

How long will the campaign run?

Be specific about when your campaign will end and how each stage is broken down. Use a calendar to track both one-off tactics like local event tables as well as consistent messaging like email blasts. 

A clear campaign timeline allows you to track your performance over time, see what’s working and what’s not, and revise your strategy to improve future outcomes. If you don’t know what you’ve done and how effective each step was, your marketing won’t improve and it will be a lot harder to grow your restaurant sales. 

Marketing Channels

What communication channels are you using to reach your audience?

This can be pretty broad, but the more specific you are, the better the payoff. Your options include everything from direct-mail flyers and local magazine ads to social media and Google ads. 

Luckily, you determined your customers’ preferences when you built your customer personas. Always revisit your target customers, what they like and how to reach them when you get into the strategy specifics. 

A lot of marketing ideas are floating around the internet, but what works for one owner won’t necessarily work for you. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, so your marketing tactics have to make sense with your overall strategy. 

I’m sure you can relate to spending a pretty penny on a local magazine ad or a social media intern without much to show for it. That’s why I’m such a stickler for custom tactics according to your customer targets and goals, so that every cent invested in your marketing is well spent. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You might not realize it, but your digital presence and website is as much of your “place” as your actual restaurant location. And just like you don’t want a restaurant on the edge of town with little traffic, you don’t want a restaurant website floating around in digital-no-man’s-land.

Every day, thousands of potential customers in your area hop on Google to find the best “Indian food near me,” and Google directs these searches straight to local restaurants. 

People searching Google to find something to eat are the MOST primed to become a customer. So, how do you reach and convert these customers?

It all comes down to who has the best local SEO. 

SEO is the process of setting up your online brand, website, and individual website pages to show up in Google when people search for anything relevant to your business: your cuisine, food items on your menu or even just a list of great restaurants in your area.

Mastering SEO is complex, but you don’t need to become a master to benefit. Here’s the basic SEO guide for restaurants:

• Optimize your Google Business listing.
• Optimize your website and online menu.
• Get more reviews on third-party sites like Yelp as well as direct reviews for your site.

“Optimize” is just the steps to improve each feature specifically for search. The gist is that you want to provide as much information as possible about your business, including your brand, menu, location, etc. 

Especially considering your target customers and how your product appeals to them. If you want Adventurous Alice to place an order, you need a well-designed site that promotes your top-sellers and specialty flavors on your homepage and online ordering platform. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing like this is incredibly effective for restaurants because it’s fairly easy to get email signups, and you can expect around 30% of your email subscribers to open any email you send out.

Working with thousands of restaurants over the last few years, I’ve found that two emails per week are the ideal frequency for the average subscriber. That means I want every single customer on your email list to hear from your restaurant at least twice per week, even if they don’t order anything from you.

I have a few favorite emails to send:

• Prompt email: A simple invitation that promotes your restaurant and gets your brand on customers’ radars.
• Loyalty reminder: Let guests know that they have points available to redeem.
• Popular items: Promote your best-selling products to encourage a new order.

It’s worth the investment. Research estimates that for every $1 you invest in email marketing, you can expect a $36 ROI. This is especially important when you’re trying to convert customers into regulars, which is far a more valuable and effective promotion than trying to get net new customers. 

SMS Marketing

In terms of performance, text marketing is like email marketing on steroids. Customers will open over 85% of texts you send them and click on text offers significantly more often than email based on offers.

The downside is that fewer people are willing to receive marketing texts, and those who do won’t want to be sent texts very frequently. I recommend only texting your customers twice per month.

That also means it’s extra important that your texts target your customers interests and behaviors. If you’re promoting happy hour time and time again, but most of your customers don’t order from the bar, you’re wasting your time. 

We send out all of these texts and emails for restaurant partners using Owner.com, but you can send these yourself using any of the email service and text marketing providers.

It takes some time to get everything written and set up, but out of everything in this guide, email and text marketing are probably the simplest to set up yourself.

Loyalty Programs

You’re probably familiar with loyalty programs and might already have one in place, but is it as effective as it could be?

Helping our restaurant partners build a strategic, intentional loyalty program, supported through technology with automated offers and updates, is the single biggest reason our partners grow an average of 50% in their first 90 days with us.

• Encourage repeat customers with personalized product promotions.
• Collect customer data to build customer personas and communicate directly.
• Increase sales with rewards points that incentivize larger orders.

Instagram

There are a lot of social media platforms out there, but if you aren’t running paid marketing campaigns, the only platform that truly matters for restaurants is Instagram.

Restaurant customers respond overwhelmingly to visual marketing, and Instagram makes it very easy to get visuals of your products, including food, setting, brand, events, etc., directly in front of local customers.

“Local” is the keyword here. Targeting local customers builds social media as part of your digital “place” rather than just a public photo album.

If you’re active on Instagram and follow a few easy steps outlined in this section, you will get in front of real, local customers. That means you won’t need 100k followers to make $100k extra revenue through Instagram. 

That said, you should prioritize some of our other fave tactics before investing too heavily in Instagram. 

Talkin’ Tacos completed $262,000 in online sales within 11 months with just 24,000 Instagram followers at the time. Their key to success?

Posting food photos 4-5 times a week with relevant hashtags. That’s it. No sneaky marketing here, and it’s just one part of our Instagram playbook for restaurants:

• Post your food several times a week
• Post Stories and pin your Story highlights
• Repost customer photos you’re featured in
• Follow your competitors’ followers
• Create a simple “selfie station” to drive user-generated content
• Coordinate promotions with your social media posts

If you’re concerned about keeping up with fresh photos, find someone on your staff who enjoys social media and pay them an extra $100 per week to post pictures of your products and quick little stories throughout the day. Just keep an eye on things to ensure everything goes through the restaurant account and is appropriate. 

Delivery Flyers

Digital marketing is more important than ever, but nondigital efforts still have an important role to play in your growth. Our team has found massive wins for our partners using physical marketing, and delivery flyers are the most successful.

For each of our restaurant partners, we design, print out and send 1,000 flyers for them to place in delivery orders from third-party apps. The intention to convert customers to direct ordering from you, which is why this works better than general promotional flyers. 

Every time a customer orders through DoorDash, UberEats or GrubHub, losing you 30% to commissions in the process, you throw one of these flyers into the bag, seal the bag so the delivery driver can’t see it, and give that customer a great reason to order commission-free through your website the next time around.

This is a very simple step that can have shocking results. It promotes your online ordering “place” and encourages repeat orders while building brand recognition with customers. 

When Talkin’ Tacos started using Owner.com, they were booking 90% of their orders through UberEats. Within three months, they reduced that amount to just 45% using this flyer strategy and booked $41,000 worth of orders through our platform, saving nearly $12,000 in fees.

In-store Posters

We’ve also seen early success with two additional types of physical marketing collateral: wall posters and table tents in-store. 

Initial results for these have been very promising. Partners using both the posters and table tents have been growing their subscribers — aka loyalty program members — 2-3 times faster than they were previously.

As a standalone promotion, they might work okay. But connecting your physical marketing assets with your digital infrastructure can really elevate your marketing returns. 

It creates an intentional, direct connection with your customers because you can reach them through the app and learn a little more about them with customer data. That’s a lot more valuable than promoting your products in-store when they’re already enjoying your food. 

Restaurant Marketing Grows Your Customer Relationships

Restaurant marketing isn’t just about what you do — it’s about understanding your brand, goals and customers, then identifying the best tactics to reach your customers and objectives. 

We’ve been in the business for a while and know that digital marketing is a huge, often untapped opportunity for independent restaurants. You can get started yourself with social media, email and text marketing to build your customer base. 

If you want a proven strategy without all of the work, consider partnering with Owner.com. 

Our restaurant marketing platform automates your digital marketing with effective tactics that have helped thousands of restaurants, including a branded loyalty program, mobile app and automated email and SMS marketing.

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