The 2022 ChowNow Marketing Calendar for Restaurants
Give your diners reason to celebrate with you year round! ChowNow’s calendar of marketing moments goes beyond the official holidays and gets your restaurant ready for the smaller but no-less-significant moments that everyone can relate to. (Soup season may not have a date—but we all know that familiar fall craving!)
Pair this marketing calendar with our included best-practice marketing timeline, and make this year your restaurant’s best one yet. Plus, these moments are just the start–make sure to add in the big days for your own community to personalize your success. Read on for tips on how to make the most out of this marketing calendar at your own restaurant.
Get the free 2022 calendar of restaurant marketing moments today.
How to Create Great Marketing Moments At Your Restaurant
1. Look beyond the “big holidays.”
We’re not saying you shouldn’t market for Mother’s Day or Thanksgiving—but there are a million moments in between that need your food to elevate the celebration! By marketing year round for occasions both big and small, you’ll train your diners to think of you as the obvious choice for any gathering.
2. Think local.
Restaurants are what make our dining communities so unique. Look for ways to involve your local community in your marketing moment—for example, in addition to gearing up for the Big Game every February, check out your local school’s game schedule too!
3. Jump on the bandwagon.
Sometimes, everyone’s doing something for a reason! Get more momentum out of seasonal trends by leaning into what diners are clamoring for. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t get a piece of that pumpkin-spice pie, and by referencing something that’s already popular, you get a head start on marketing.
When you put your own twist on a trend, you get the double marketing benefit of referencing something that many people will already understand, while giving them something unique to get excited about. To use the pumpkin spice example, everyone knows about the famous pumpkin spice latte—but have they tried your pumpkin spice bread, or soup, or cookie?
4. Don’t be afraid to innovate.
Limited-time offers are a great way to test out new items to gauge long-term viability. When you offer (and promote) a menu item that’s “only available today,” not only do you drive demand by playing up that FOMO aspect, you can also see if it’s worth adding to your menu on a more regular rotation. If it’s a success, great! If not, at least you won’t have extra stock or sunk costs weighing you down.
5. Ultimately, let your diners lead the way.
Tastes and trends change all around the country, and what works for one community might not work for another. You know your diners best–what they want more of, what they’ll order in a combo, and how they experience your restaurant.
When you collect and leverage your customer information, you can look to the data to find ordering patterns and marketing opportunities for an even more robust strategy. By creating promotions that target your best selling menu items, your most frequent diners, or most used ordering channel like social media or your branded app, you’ll be giving your guests an experience that feels like it was tailored to them. And, hey–that’s because it was!
