Restaurant Marketing Strategies That Bring In More Diners

Restaurant marketing strategies are crucial in putting a restaurant in front of potential diners. You need to choose marketing approaches that meet your business’s needs and goals. Not all strategies will communicate your unique offerings as you intend or help you reach a target market.

Tailoring marketing campaigns to the uniqueness of your business is integral to achieving the best results. With the advancement of technology and the constantly evolving nature of diners, you should always obtain more information to stand out from the competition.

Importance Of Effective Restaurant Marketing Strategies

The restaurant industry is one of the most highly competitive ventures, since it has relatively low barriers. Consequently, it reports a significant number of new entrants yearly. It’s also a great opportunity to venture into — the startup cost is usually lower than the amount one needs to open other types of businesses. 

Additionally, a restaurant owner can easily switch between different options, including cuisine, price points, location, and so on. While these flexibility factors can be advantageous, they are leading elements that result in competition in the industry. For instance, many restaurants use pricing as a competitive advantage.

Many restaurants are typically located in the same area. These areas are strategic, as they generally have high foot traffic, targeted demographics, and a strong demand for dining options.

For these reasons, it’s vital to employ effective restaurant marketing strategies. Even if you are in the middle of other restaurants, diners should know about your menu, service, and reputation.

Proven Strategies To Attract More Customers

While numerous marketing strategies for restaurants exist, not all will work for you. Select approaches have been proven to attract more customers. To increase your visibility, you need to:

Leverage Social Media

Research shows that 90% of customers use social media to research restaurants before dining, and 72% of consumers specifically use social media to find new restaurants. Therefore, leveraging social media can help catch the attention of thousands of potential customers.

Through social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, you can build brand awareness, create stronger connections, and build trust. To do these, you need to have a strong online presence, which means posting regularly, responding to comments and inquiries promptly, and posting different types of content.

You can leverage social media by promoting your menu on your pages. Post visually appealing photos of the food options available in the restaurant. Learn more about video shooting angles and lighting to post high-quality content. 

Every post should have an informative and engaging description. Talk about the unique flavors and ingredients in the dish and let your viewers know what to expect when they order the food.

Posting behind-the-scenes photos and videos is also vital. Document your chefs and bartenders making a dish or drink and post it. This type of content showcases the hard work that goes into preparing dishes, which can help consumers appreciate those dishes more. Additionally, such content can provide a sense of authenticity. Posting behind-the-scenes content can also help you humanize your brand, which is critical for any business.

Don’t forget to post seasonal menus to increase engagement. For example, post visually appealing photos of soups, stews, roasted vegetables, casseroles, and hot drinks in winter. You can post spicy foods, chilled soups, cold drinks, and fresh vegetables during the summer. Foods made with spring-related ingredients, such as asparagus, radishes, strawberries, carrots, peas, artichokes, and apricots, can be showcased in your spring menu content. Lastly, your fall menu content should include dishes made with pumpkin, apple, butternut squash, pears, Brussels sprouts, and mushrooms.

It’s important to include a link or QR code to your menu on your social media pages as well. This way, customers can easily access it without calling the restaurant to find out if you are serving a particular dish.

Moreover, you can use your social media pages to promote events. Post about an upcoming cooking class, wine tasting, food festival, cooking competition, or fun event for the community. Pushing the event on social media can increase the number of attendees who may become new customers or refer you to a diner who will love your food options.

Lastly, reviews on social media are important. When going through a restaurant’s social media pages, most potential diners read the comments or the reviews in the designated review section. You should offer quality services to get positive reviews from customers, and you need to actively encourage customers to leave you reviews.

Offer Exclusive Promotions

Restaurants that offer diners unique promotions daily, weekly, monthly, or seasonally have a competitive advantage. Discounts are a good form of promotion. Examples include happy hour, buy-one-get-one, buy-one-get-one half off, a percentage off for first-time customers, and free menu items, such as free desserts, free drinks for ladies on particular days, and free meals for kids with a paying adult on particular days/certain times of the day.

Post all ongoing promotions on your social media platforms and the website. You should also advertise them in the restaurant by having your staff inform customers, displaying posters, placing cards on tables, and using digital screens.

Having a loyalty program is another way to reward customers. It not only improves customer satisfaction, but it’s also a proven marketing strategy. When customers sign up for the program, they will earn points for every dollar they spend in or by simply visiting the restaurant.

Customers can redeem their points for menu items and buy dishes or merchandise. Customers participating in the loyalty program can also enjoy perks like discounts, complimentary appetizers, birthday discounts, and early access to new menu items.

Tiered levels on the loyalty program can increase purchases and visits, as customers will want to earn more points to move to an upper tier. You should make it possible for customers to move to a higher tier by having an achievable point system. Different tiers should also have personalized offers — with those at the upper tiers having better rewards, such as larger discounts, access to exclusive events, and discounts at businesses you partner with, such as a parking lot or movie theater.

Use enticing tier names to create a sense of exclusivity, making customers feel valued. Work with your team to come up with unique names personalized to your brand’s image.

Invest In CTV Advertising

Connected TV (CTV) advertising is the use of video ads through internet-connected TVs or mobile phones. It’s different from over-the-top (OTT) advertising, whose ads appear on various devices, including TVs, phones, tablets, computers, and gaming consoles.

CTV ads are shown on smart TVs, gaming consoles like Xbox and Playstation, and streaming platforms like Hulu, HBO, Apple TV, and YouTube. These ads appear when someone is watching a TV show, movie, or any other video content. 

CTV ads are substantially beneficial because they utilize data collected from internet-connected devices. This form of advertising assesses users’ interests, habits, demographics, and location to send personalized ads, making it relevant for restaurants, so you are more likely to reach out to an audience interested in your menu or promotions with a CTV ad. 

For example, during happy hour, IP-based targeting can send a CTV ad to those with internet-connected devices near your location. The technology uses IP addresses to identify audiences in a particular area and then pushes the advertisement to them. You can also use IP-based targeting when advertising deals related to delivery, like free delivery and welcome discounts, for those who place an order for the first time.

Geographically focused CTV ads yield better results than advertising to everyone, including those who can’t make it to the restaurant to enjoy the happy hour deal or are not within your delivery radius. Besides, sending ads to a targeted audience can be inexpensive.

CTV ads provide immediate analytics on how an ad is performing. You can see how many times an ad has been shown to viewers, how many unique households have been exposed to your ad, how many users watched the ad from start to finish, how many people clicked on the ad, and how many made an order using a QR code or link included in the ad.

You can use these metrics to determine the success of an ad and make the necessary changes to increase your conversion rate.

Showcasing visually appealing photos on a CTV ad and maintaining brand consistency can increase the chances of viewers taking the intended action, such as online ordering or visiting the restaurant.

CTV advertising for restaurants is renowned for increasing brand recognition, convenience, sales, and customer experience. Furthermore, since a CTV ad reaches an audience highly likely to interact with it, it can have better conversion rates than traditional ads.

Explore CTV strategies for your restaurant today.

Encourage Online Reviews

Positive reviews can increase the likelihood of a new customer choosing a restaurant when researching, as they can boost trust. Although having a strong social media presence and offering top-notch services is vital, a customer may not choose you if they can’t find the experiences of past diners. Your potential diners need to know about the quality of your food and services from other diners. That’s why it’s critical to encourage reviews.

You can do this by politely asking customers to leave their reviews on your website and trusted platforms like Yelp, Google, and Trip Advisor. You can also have cards or posters on the tables with a QR code or a link to your website and review platforms to make work more manageable for customers. Include a call to action as a headline on your poster. For example, “Please leave us a review” or “Share your experience.” Below the QR code or link, thank the customer for giving their feedback.

It may be unwise to actively reward customers in exchange for reviews. However, if your customer service is of quality through discounts and in other ways, you can naturally attract reviews.

After receiving reviews, respond to them respectfully and promptly. Appreciate those who leave positive reviews and highlight specific aspects of their experience. Acknowledge the concern of a customer who leaves a negative review, apologize for their experience, and explain the steps that will be taken to solve the problem.

It’s essential to have reviews on your website and social media pages. Nonetheless, being reviewed on trusted platforms can give you more exposure and increase your rankings on search engines. Customers can also trust you more when you are positively reviewed on review platforms. 

Consider highlighting positive reviews on your websites and social media platforms as a form of social proof and guaranteeing a remarkable dining experience.

Optimize For Local SEO

Restaurants primarily depend on local customers. While it’s not uncommon for people to travel for a dining experience, you need to pay more attention to the people who pass by your restaurant daily or live/work nearby — those who can come in during their lunch break or order food from you. Accordingly, you need to focus on local search engine optimization (SEO). 

The strategies you use when optimizing for local SEO should aim at attracting the attention of local customers. These include:

• Optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP) by ensuring your name, address, and phone number are accurate across all your platforms and adding your business to Google Maps.
• Having a profile on Bing Places for Business, which serves the same purpose as GBP.
• Having location-specific landing pages on your website and using location-related keywords on your content to help search engines understand the pages’ relevance to users in particular areas.
• Listing the restaurant on review sites and encouraging customers to leave reviews. You should also list your restaurant in business directories like YellowPages and Foursquare.
• Earning backlinks from other businesses.

CTV ads are another way to optimize local SEO. Using the previously mentioned example, sending a CTV ad to people in a particular location can help increase your restaurant’s visibility to a targeted audience.

You should also make your website mobile-friendly. Search engines prioritize websites that adapt well to different screen sizes. An ad on a mobile-friendly website is likely to be viewed by many people. Similarly, when you send an ad during the day, for example, a happy hour deal, chances are many people will see it on their smartphones when moving around.

Use Email Marketing

Your restaurant can benefit from email marketing, as you get to directly engage with customers on your email list. You can send promotions, information about upcoming events/new menu times, and reservation reminders.

To maximize the benefits of email marketing, you need to grow your email list. Have a sign-up form or a subscribe button on the website. You can also get more emails from when customers join the loyalty program and through in-store sign-ups. Consider asking customers for emails when they make online reservations and request to include them in your newsletter. 

It can be beneficial to segment the diners in your email list according to certain characteristics, including dining frequency, menu preferences, location, and spending habits. Promotions on vegan menus should be sent to vegan diners, welcome emails should go to new customers, frequent diners should receive exclusive deals, information about events should be sent to customers who live near the location of the event, and so on. Segmenting your email list ensures you send targeted emails. Targeted marketing campaigns are crucial in helping businesses build stronger connections with customers.

Personalize all your emails by including the name of the recipient. Ensure your headings are compelling enough to encourage a customer to open the email. Include a clear call to action, such as:

• Order online
• Make a reservation
• Come enjoy great music with us
• Claim your free appetizer
• Join our loyalty program

Engage With Influencers

Influencers help restaurants reach a wide range of customers. Since they have a following that trusts them, an influencer can increase foot traffic to your restaurant by reviewing your food or discussing their genuine experience at your restaurant.

You need to consider certain elements when choosing an influencer. It can be better to work with a food content creator than one specializing in another field. While the latter may have more followers, the conversion rate you can get from the former can be higher because the chances are their followers are food enthusiasts. However, don’t overlook the advantages you can gain from being mentioned by an influencer with a huge following, even if their content is not about food.

Effective communication with the influencers you work with is important. You should be on the same page about campaigns while allowing them to express authenticity. Moreover, the performance of the post should be closely followed, such as by looking at the numbers and reading the comments. An influencer who helps you achieve your goals can be valuable for future campaigns.

PPC Campaigns

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is when advertisers (businesses) pay publishers each time their ad is clicked. With this option, businesses bid on the keywords customers will likely use when searching, for example, restaurants in (city) or (neighborhood). 

When a user searches for the chosen keywords, the publisher will determine the advertiser with the highest bids and put their ad on top. If the user clicks on the ad, they will be taken to the advertiser’s website, and in turn, the advertiser will pay the publisher.

PPC campaigns are cost-effective, attract more customers, and increase your restaurant’s visibility. Additionally, your ads can reach a highly targeted audience since you perform keyword selection.

How Levy Online Can Help

Levy Online has a team of specialists who can help your restaurant employ practical marketing approaches. We are skilled in numerous marketing strategies, including CTV Advertising, SEO services, local SEO, and social media marketing services. Our team will help you reach your target audience, build brand awareness, and increase your visibility.

Contact us to determine the restaurant marketing strategies that meet the needs of your business.