After perfecting your menu, contracting suppliers and training staff to prepare and serve the food, how do you actually get customers in your door? It all comes down to marketing, whether it’s a social media post or an email blast. Regardless of the size of your budget though, a restaurant marketing plan is what establishes your marketing goals and keeps you on track to measure your progress and achieve success. 

A restaurant marketing plan is a critical component of your overall business plan. It outlines your marketing strategy and helps both new and established restaurants to:

  • Attract new diners 
    • Obviously, more customers are better for your business! However, with so many dining options available to customers, you need a clear and actionable plan to boost your brand awareness and visibility. From a Sprout Social survey, 68% of consumers say they use social media to learn about products and brands.
  • Drive repeat business 
    • Loyal, repeat customers are hugely important. Marketing efforts such as personalized outreach or promotions help keep your business on the top of diners’ minds and keep them hungry for more. According to Epsilon research, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase if a brand offers personalized experiences.
  • Increase revenue 
    • Marketing efforts can help influence what and how much customers order. Special offers and upsells let you shine a spotlight on your most profitable items. Additionally, you can protect your profit margins by encouraging customers to order from your preferred margin-friendly channels.

How to Create Your Marketing Plan

As with all aspects of your business, it helps to have a clear strategy in place to reach your marketing goals. We’ve outlined a few simple steps to set your marketing plan up for success.

Define Your Marketing Budget

Remember that money spent on marketing is an investment in future customers. Based upon your business’s cash flow, decide how much money you’re able to set aside for marketing efforts each month, quarter or year. There’s no one-size-fits-all here, but your budget should be flexible to accommodate unexpected advertising opportunities. For example, you may want to take advantage of a social media trend related to the food you serve, so having money set aside for that purpose lets you act on that marketing opportunity in a timely manner.

As with all budget concerns, marketing expenses can add up quickly if you’re not monitoring your costs regularly or forecasting future costs. Investing in an automated marketing solution, like ChowNow’s automated email marketing, can help keep expenses predictable and manageable.

Automated marketing partnerships like ChowNow’s email suite help keep your marketing expenses predictable and easy to manage.

Define Your Marketing Audience

It’s a lot easier to hit a specific target than to aim at everything and hope something sticks. Consider who your target audience is by using metrics like demographics (age, gender), location and lifestyle. You should also consider behavioral factors like interests, values and dining preferences. Finally, researching your local market and competition is a great way to narrow your focus to the most relevant audience possible. Check out our market analysis guide for more details on how to research your target audience and how to utilize that data in your business plan.

Once you have a defined target audience, meet them where your marketing efforts will have the most impact. Young diners are more likely to find new restaurants to try by searching or browsing online, so it’s important to have an online presence. That includes having a social media presence and showing up on web searches.

Define Your Marketing Goals

You need to have some way to measure the success of your marketing strategy. That means creating a firm goal that lets you collect data to make an objective judgment of how effective your marketing efforts have been. This is usually done by establishing Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. Here are some example KPIs you might want to consider:

  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of sales and marketing efforts divided by the number of customers acquired. You want to ratio to be low, i.e. you’re not spending too much per new customer.
  • Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI): The total increase in revenue minus marketing costs divided by marketing costs. This shows how much increased revenue your marketing efforts are bringing in.
  • Repeat Customer Rate: The number of customers who have purchased before divided by the total number of customers in a set period of time. If your marketing efforts are focused on increasing loyalty, this is a great KPI to measure.
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Multiply three values: your customers’ average order value, the average number of orders in a set period and the average customer retention time. This can be useful to calculate initially as a baseline that you can then measure future growth against.

Define Your Customer Data Capture Plan

Similar to defining your market audience, you’ll want to leverage customer ordering habits and demographic data for more effective marketing. This lets you identify trends and create personalized outreach that customers will want to engage with. If a customer only ever orders vegetarian pizzas, it wouldn’t do much good to offer them a discount on a meat lovers pizza! 

You’ll typically be able to collect customer data from your POS system and online ordering system. When choosing a POS service or order service to partner with, be sure to confirm that you will have full access to your customer data. These kinds of data analytics are a vital part of any industry—according to research, businesses that use big data analytics to drive decision-making see an average 8–10% increase in profits.

Leverage Marketing Tools & Channels

You don’t need to be a social media pro or a marketing executive to take advantage of the multiple ways businesses reach out to diners. Even a small amount of attention on various marketing channels can yield useful results, and you can always increase your marketing efforts/budget over time. There are two major categories here: attract new diners and bring back loyal customers.

Marketing Tools to Attract New Diners

Person searching for a restaurant on Google using a phone

Here are some of the most valuable ways to attract new diners and boost your brand’s visibility online:

  • Restaurant Website
    • First impressions matter, and it is critical to have a web presence so customers can browse your menu, see your brand’s personality and ideally place orders. ChowNow can help create a premium branded website to maximize your brand awareness and profit potential. Once you have a web presence, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps ensure diners are actually finding your site.
  • Local Search Marketing
  • Social Media
    • Ideally, you should be on all platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) using your profile to post about specials, share stories and promote online orders. Simply showcasing an item can be a great way to whet a customer’s appetite. Check out more of our social media posting ideas here. You may also consider paid online ads. Although they’re useful for reaching a wide audience, they’re not always the most cost-effective solution for restaurants with a limited budget.

Marketing Tools to Drive Repeat Orders

Example of ChowNow's automated email marketing feature

To bring customers back and drive loyalty, you’ll want to use more direct or personal marketing channels, such as these top tools:

  • Email Marketing:
    • Encourage diners to order again by staying at the top of their inbox. A personal touch or promotion adds even more value with minimal effort. Check out ChowNow’s automated email marketing which can drive up to 60% more orders.
  • Text Marketing:
    • Take advantage of the phones already in every customer’s pocket! Personalized text offers and updates provide a direct line to diners’ minds and stomachs. Check out how Renegade Burrito used text marketing to see a 17x return on investment.
  • Loyalty Program:
  • Print Marketing:
    • Printed materials are a useful way to both promote specials and convert in-store diners to online ordering, i.e. remind them about the convenience of takeout and delivery. Plus, if you’re not sending printed materials directly to customers, print marketing can also be used to attract new customers and boost brand awareness. 

Execute Your Marketing Plan

You don’t need to execute all of these marketing tips at once! For new restaurants or those with limited budgets, focus on the channels that best align with your business goals and take advantage of automation tools to take the stress off your plate.

Once you have your strategy set, it’s time to put your marketing efforts into practice. One of the easiest ways to keep yourself on track and on budget is to develop a marketing calendar. That means planning out the next few weeks of what you will promote and which channels you’ll use to promote it. This is especially useful for social media marketing to ensure your brand has a consistent presence online, but it’s also valuable for any channel. Just remember to maintain some flexibility to adapt to new trends or opportunities as they arise.

Your restaurant marketing strategy is the key ingredient that brings all your hard work together into a complete, successful restaurant. From drawing in new customers to retaining loyal ones, a thoughtful restaurant marketing plan is a vital benefit to your business.