Many restaurants still rely on reactive marketing strategies. An Instagram post goes up when the bookings look thin, a discount blast goes out the moment a slow week lands and the same message goes to every name on the list whether that person came in for Mother's Day or has never walked through the door. These mass marketing tactics can show you some results, but the problem is that they target nobody in particular.
A restaurant marketing plan turns reactive marketing into a proactive, repeatable process. The goal isn't to market more. It's to know what to do, who to target and when to do it, using the guest data your restaurant CRM already collects at every service.
In this guide, we'll show you how to build that plan in six steps, starting with Australia's dining calendar and using the guest data your venue already collects to make every campaign more targeted.
What’s a restaurant marketing plan?
A restaurant marketing plan is a cross-channel marketing strategy built around the guest lifecycle: attract new diners, convert them into higher spend, then bring them back. Run it as a system and it survives a bad week, a staff change and a busy December.
What you're building is an ongoing plan your team can pick up at any time without needing to be briefed: who you're targeting, on which channels, during which dates, and with what offer. It sits alongside your restaurant business plan rather than replacing it, and it's the one document you actually use consistently.
What to include in a restaurant marketing plan
Six steps, run in this order. Copy the headings into your own plan and fill each one with your venue's dates.
1. Map the year: mark the quiet fortnights before they arrive, so EOFY and the February lull have a campaign booked against them.
2. Find your channels: track bookings by source, not impressions, so you know which channels bring diners in and on which days.
3. Attract: social media, local SEO and partnerships, aimed at the guest personas your booking history already shows you.
4. Convert: prepaid upgrades and set menus sold inside the booking flow, plus one loyalty program that applies across dining in and ordering delivery.
5. Fill quiet nights: one ticketed event with its own page for each calendar moment, from footy finals to NYE.
6. Retain: segmented email and SMS aimed at what each guest actually did last time.
Step 1: Map your dining calendar for the year
Most Australian venues already have Christmas trade, Mother's Day and EOFY circled. Melbourne Cup and footy finals go on without much prompting either, and NYE sells itself.
The big dates are the easy part. The ordinary Tuesday in late February is the one nobody plans for, so this step is about knowing which weeks run slow before they arrive instead of reacting once the dining room is half empty.
Two market trends make those quiet weeks heavier than they used to be. Australians are dining out roughly 12% less often than they did before 2020, while spend per head has climbed 8% to 15% depending on the venue, according to Restaurant & Catering Australia.
Fewer visits at a higher average spend puts more pressure on each one. A soft fortnight costs you more now than the same fortnight cost you three years ago.
You can analyse historical trends to uncover slow periods, since last year's traffic by week repeats more closely than most operators expect. Review your reservation platform and pull covers by week for the past 12 months, find the fortnights that sat well below your average, then mark those same weeks on this year's calendar.
Each one gets a campaign booked four to six weeks ahead instead of a discount thrown at it on the Monday. Fill the quiet weeks first, then build the peak dates around them, because Cup Day and Christmas trade will likely sell more easily.
SevenRooms reporting lets operators compare current and historical sales data across venues to find areas for improvement within the family of venues.
Step 3: Attract diners who have never heard of you
Use your reservation platform and guest data to identify two or three customer personas that already dine at your restaurant. Your booking history has them handy: the Sunday family table, the weekday lunch trade, the group booking that lands twice a year.
A restaurant CRM like SevenRooms captures guest data at scale, so those personas come out of your own clientele rather than an assumption about your suburb. Every booking, walk-in and delivery order adds to the guest's record automatically.
Then you can go looking for more people who resemble your personas, whether that's a lookalike audience built from your guest list or a partnership with a business those guests already spend with. Working through a restaurant customer journey map takes an afternoon and it changes what every campaign below says.
Social media
Repost real diner photos and tag the guest within 24 hours of the visit, while the night is still fresh in their feed. It's best to ask permission first, then post the photo as it is, because a diner's own photo is more compelling as social proof rather than a more polished promotion.
Keep your brand identity consistent across social media platforms, use two or three location hashtags rather than 20 generic ones, and let the guest's own photo do the selling on Instagram and TikTok.
Put a booking link in your profile and in the posts themselves, so the interest converts easily. A diner who has just watched your Cup Day video should be able to book from that post, with the booking landing directly in your guest database.
Local SEO
Claim and work on your Google Business Profile before you spend anything on social ads or paid search. More than half (54%) of Australian consumers used Google or another search engine when they last tried a new restaurant, according to the 2026 SevenRooms Australia holiday guide.
Accurate hours, a current menu, live photos and replies to online reviews keep you visible in Google Maps at the moment somebody two suburbs over is deciding. Being discoverable is only half the job, though. A profile with no way to book sends that diner off to hunt for a booking link, and a share of them never come back.
Turn on Reserve with Google before you spend anything on ads. It puts a “Reserve a table” button on your profile with live availability pulled straight from your reservation system, so it converts attention you're already getting for free. Here's how Google reservations work and how to switch them on.
Local partnerships and cross-promotions
Local events give you an opportunity to reach somebody else's audience. A footy finals pairing with a nearby pub or brewery, a Melbourne Cup partnership with a milliner or a florist for pre-race lunches, both put your name in front of people already spending on that exact date.
Make it measurable. Give the partnership its own referral booking code and put that code everywhere the partnership appears, including the joint social post. A code in a social caption is trackable in a way a like isn't, so once the date has passed you can see how many covers the brewery actually sent you.
Step 4: Turn bookings into higher spend
Prepaid upgrades in the booking flow
The moment a guest books is the moment they're deciding what kind of night this is going to be. A Mother's Day set menu, a Cup Day table upgrade or a bottle on ice can be offered right there, priced and paid for as part of the booking, not left as a note on the reservation.
Two things follow from taking the money upfront. The revenue is banked before service, and a guest who has already paid for the bottle is far less likely to no-show. It also shows up in the average check: Australian venues that adopted prepaid upgrades last December saw a 46% increase in average check per cover, according to SevenRooms data.
Build those upgrades into your restaurant reservation system as part of the booking, priced and paid upfront. The guest arrives already committed, and your floor team stops carrying the upsell on top of service.
Delivery as a bridge into dine-in
If you offer delivery, treat it as a way into your dining room rather than a separate revenue line. Almost three in five (57%) Australian consumers have ordered delivery in the past six months from a restaurant they first dined at, and 55% have dined in at a restaurant they first ordered delivery from. Among 18 to 24 year olds, 46% discovered a new restaurant through a delivery app in the first place.
Most venues can't see any of that. Only around a third (34%) of Australian food service operators say they can definitely identify the same guest across on-premise and off-premise orders, and connecting the two changes what you can send them. A delivery regular who has never sat down is a different segment from a weekend booker who has never ordered in, and each one gets a different offer.
DoorDash and SevenRooms connect delivery and online ordering history, plus reservations into one SevenRooms guest profile so you can see customers' preferences and past activity in the same place.
Step 5: Fill quiet nights with ticketed events
A dedicated page for every event
Take the AU dates you mapped in step one and give each one its own event page: a Melbourne Cup lunch, a Mother's Day set menu, a footy finals viewing package, NYE. Sell them as ticketed events rather than taking ordinary bookings and hoping the spend follows.
A dedicated page does two jobs at once. It gives your restaurant event management a proper landing point for paid ads and email, and it gives you a guest list you can market to next year. Limited-time offers work here because the deadline is real.
Put the pricing on it. Group and private bookings are worth roughly 23% of the average Australian operator's annual revenue, and 85% of consumers who organised one last year hit a frustration doing it, most often pricing, deposits or minimums that weren't clear (36%). An event page that answers those questions before anyone has to ask wins bookings a phone number doesn't.
Upgrades attached to event tickets
Attach prepaid upgrades to event tickets the same way you attach them to standard reservations. Over a quarter (28%) of Australian consumers will pay more for the chance to customise their experience ahead of time. This might include adding a drinks pairing, upgrading the menu or choosing their table.
Your clientele's specific asks point to opportunities for upgrades. Take inventory of requests, and offer those things at the point of booking rather than waiting for someone to ask during their visit.
Step 6: Bring guests back after their first visit
Segmented email and SMS
Segment on behaviour, not just demographics. A birthday offer, a win-back sequence for a guest who hasn't been in since March, VIP early access to Cup Day for your top spenders and a first-timer follow-up 48 hours after the visit are four separate sends to four separate segments of your email list.
The difference between a segmented message and a generic one is important. Personalised, automated emails generate 12 times more revenue per send than mass emails, according to SevenRooms' 2025 Australia Restaurant Industry Trends Report, so those four customised sends are worth more than one blast to the whole list.
Email marketing carries the longer story: the new menu, the summer series, the Cup Day announcement that goes out six weeks ahead. SMS marketing is for the tight dates, a day-before reminder or a last-table release on a sold-out night.
Beverly Rooftop in Melbourne sends events and offers to its VIPs first, then to the wider database. Its campaigns drove $257,784 and 2,846 covers in six months at a 41% open rate. “Personalised first-visit thank-you emails and cancellation follow-ups have been our best performers,” affirms Alyse Tsaptsalis of the events and reservations team.
One calendar to plan against, one CRM behind it
Every reservation, walk-in and DoorDash order builds a guest profile inside SevenRooms automatically. The segmented emails, SMS and upgrades in this plan don't start from a blank list every silly season, they run on what your venue already knows.
That's the CRM and marketing automation platform sitting behind every restaurant marketing strategy above, in one system instead of five disconnected tools. Nothing in this plan needs a sixth.
The busiest weeks deserve their own playbook. Our 2026 Australian Holiday Revenue Guide pulls from a survey of more than 2,000 Australian diners and 500 operators to show what wins a holiday booking, where private dining revenue gets held back by slow admin, and what brings a first-time festive guest back in January.
Restaurant marketing plan FAQs
How do I make a marketing plan for my restaurant?
Run six steps in order. Map your dining calendar for the year. Find which marketing channels bring in bookings by tracking how many arrive from each channel. Attract new diners through social media, local SEO and local partnerships. Turn bookings into higher spend with prepaid upgrades in the booking flow. Fill quiet nights with ticketed events. Then bring guests back with segmented email and SMS.
What should a restaurant marketing plan include?
Three stages of the guest lifecycle rather than a static checklist: attract, convert and retain. Attract covers social media, local SEO and partnerships. “Convert” covers your booking flow, prepaid upgrades, online ordering and loyalty. “Retain” covers segmented email and SMS. Each stage needs an owner, a channel and a date to run against.
Do I need a SWOT analysis or a business plan before I write a marketing plan?
No, and neither should delay step one. Both sharpen the plan if you already have them: a SWOT analysis for restaurants tells you which strengths a campaign should lead with and which nights need the most help, while your business plan sets the revenue targets your marketing has to hit. Start with your dining calendar and add the other analyses later.
How do I build a marketing plan around Australia's dining calendar?
Start with the fixed dates: Christmas trade, Mother's Day, EOFY, Melbourne Cup, footy finals and NYE. Then use your reporting to find the quiet weeks between them, like the February lull, and plan a campaign into each one before it arrives. Peak dates get ticketed events and prepaid upgrades. Quiet weeks get win-back sends to guests who haven't been in for a while.
What's the most effective marketing channel for restaurants in Australia?
Different channels do different jobs. Google Business Profile and social media attract diners who have never heard of you. Your booking flow and online ordering convert them. Email, SMS and loyalty bring them back, and that last group usually returns the most per dollar because it markets to people who already know your venue. Tracking your bookings by channel will tell you which one is underperforming for your venue specifically.
