Blog / June 22, 2023
A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing a Restaurant Marketing Plan (Free Template)
Stephanie Schalow
Whether you’re opening a new restaurant or promoting your existing concept, a restaurant marketing plan can help guide your promotional efforts so that you reach the right customers, and keep them coming back.
Providing customers with a memorable dining experience can get them hooked. However, it’s getting them in the door for the first time, or encouraging them to place that initial online order, that’s the tricky part. Fortunately, our guide and free template to creating a restaurant marketing plan is designed to give you a head start on your marketing efforts.
Keep reading to discover:
- What a restaurant marketing plan is and why you need one
- What to include in your marketing plan
- Restaurant marketing strategies to consider
What’s a Restaurant Marketing Plan and Why Do I Need One?
A restaurant marketing plan is a document that outlines and informs your marketing strategy. It typically covers topics like who your ideal customers are, how you’re going to reach those customers and how you’ll compete with your competitors.
Creating a restaurant marketing plan is a helpful exercise in understanding how your business compares to other similar businesses in your area, including your competitive advantages. While you don’t need a restaurant marketing plan, having one can help you be deliberate – and more successful – in your marketing initiatives.
If you plan to grow, a marketing plan is also an asset if you’re seeking investors. Any smart investor will ask you for your marketing plan in addition to your business plan. Together, these documents prove that you’ve thought through the ins and outs of operating and promoting a restaurant.
Going through the exercise of creating a restaurant marketing plan helps you take all of the creative promotional ideas you have in your head and put them in writing so that you can share your vision with collaborators and hold yourself accountable.
What Should be Included In a Restaurant Marketing Plan?
Here’s a detailed look at what information your restaurant’s marketing plan should contain.
Overview
Write a brief introduction to the business that covers the basics, like your restaurant’s name, location, service style and concept.
Then, summarize highlights from the rest of the marketing plan. We suggest writing this part last, so that you can reference the rest of the document.
Goals
Explain your restaurant’s marketing goals and what key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll be using to measure success.
Need inspiration? Here are some sample goals to get you started:
| Goal 1: Reach new customers | KPI: Have 100 customers attend the restaurant’s grand opening celebration. |
| Goal 2: Increase customer retention | KPI: Double the number of customer accounts in the restaurant’s CRM |
| Goal 3: Boost brand awareness | KPI: Increase the restaurant’s social media following by 15% every quarter. |
Mission Statement
A restaurant’s mission and values are a large part of your brand identity — it informs your business decisions, branding, voice and processes. Simply put, a mission statement explains why your restaurant exists, and it needs its own space in your restaurant marketing plan.
Unique Selling Proposition
Write down your restaurant’s unique selling propositions (USPs): what makes it different from the competition. Keep your USPs in mind when crafting your marketing strategy; they should inform everything from branding to your social media posts. It might also help to refer back to your mission statement when defining USPs.
Target Customers
Who is your ideal customer?
While you may be tempted to answer with “anyone who eats,” having such a broad client base isn’t conducive to crafting a marketing strategy.
Get really specific. Think about who would get very excited about what only your restaurant can offer. Knowing who you want to target with your marketing efforts will help you create marketing campaigns that resonate with that audience.
For example, you might want to target suburban families that are looking for a quick meal for dinner at a good price. Or you may want to serve high-paid, urban professionals looking for an exclusive restaurant at which to entertain clients.
Pro Tip: The more you know about who’s dining with you and why, the better you can deliver personalized experiences that keep them coming back. SevenRooms’ restaurant CRM can help you build out guest databases — like Brodeur’s Bistro did, when they added 9,000 guest profiles to their CRM in just six months with SevenRooms.
Competitive Analysis
Research your market. Get to know the competition to source ideas from them and understand how to make your business stand out.
Answer questions like:
- What similar businesses already exist in the area?
- How does your restaurant differ from them?
- How can your restaurant improve on what similar restaurants are doing?
SWOT Analysis
Conduct a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) to identify what you’re doing well now as well as strategies for how to improve in the future.
Consider the following:
| STRENGTHS Internal attributes that can help your business. Example: You use your grandma’s original recipes from her homeland. Example: Your executive chef has trained with one of the best chefs in the world or has won a Michelin star. | WEAKNESSES Internal attributes that can stand in the way of your goals. Example: You don’t have experience running a restaurant. Example: Your restaurant’s location does not get heavy foot traffic. |
| OPPORTUNITIES External attributes that can help your business. Example: Falling commercial rent prices mean you’ll be able to afford a prime location for your restaurant. Example: Matcha is rising in popularity, so this is the perfect time to open a matcha cafe. | THREATS External attributes that can stand in the way of your goals. Example: Obtaining a liquor license in your area is difficult. Example: Labor shortage means staff will be hard to come by. |
This exercise will help you be more aware of advantages you should leverage and obstacles you need to overcome.
Branding
Include your restaurant’s branding guidelines in your marketing plan.
Incorporate key branding assets, such as:
- Your logo and an explanation of what it means
- Your brand’s colors
- Your restaurant’s mission, vision and values
FYI: Take inspiration from burgers. beer. bourbon., which makes its branding guidelines publicly available online.
Pricing and Positioning Strategy
Explain how your restaurant’s prices compare to competitors’ and how you’ll position your business among the competition.
Let’s say, for example, you run a healthy fast food restaurant chain. Fast food restaurants aren’t known for having healthy options. You can leverage your higher prices to show that you use better ingredients and position yourself as the leader in healthier fast food.
Marketing Channels
List any and all digital and physical marketing channels that your restaurant uses or plans on using, and explain how you’ll use each channel to achieve your marketing goals. Feel free to borrow these ideas:
- Social media: Use Facebook pages, Instagram and Twitter to share updates and encourage customers to make reservations and place online orders. Link to your direct booking and ordering platforms in your bios.
- Email: Use restaurant marketing automation software that can send customers hyper-personalized marketing offers, automatically.
- Printed flyers: Reach customers at home by mailing them your menu or a special offer.
- Your restaurant’s website: Optimize your website to convert visitors into guests through online orders and reservations. Pop-ups and prominent buttons will help.
- Google listings: Maximize your Google My Business and Google Maps listings by adding buttons that allow visitors to place orders and make reservations.
Pro Tip: For marketing channels where you own your presence, like your website and Google listing, push direct booking and ordering instead of third-party platforms. (SevenRooms has a solution for this.) There’s no reason to have a middleman on channels that you have control over!
Marketing Calendar
Your marketing calendar should identify holidays, events, and other important moments. Every season offers a unique opportunity for restaurants to engage customers and drive sales — if you plan ahead and track every date. Create a simple marketing calendar to help ensure you celebrate every important, revenue-generating milestone.
FYI: Need help coming up with new ideas for timely events? Check out our UK Marketing Calendar and our Australian Marketing Calendar to get the creative juices flowing.
Restaurant Marketing Strategies
Use this final section to synthesize all you’ve discovered about your business by writing this restaurant marketing plan and come up with marketing tactics. This is the heart of your restaurant marketing plan, so don’t skimp on the details here. Brainstorm actionable strategies like long- and short-term plans across specific channels.
As you strategize your marketing plans, know that confining yourself to one channel alone won’t work. To reach today’s guests, you must be where they are, which means expanding into multiple channels and creating a consistent brand experience. This is called an omnichannel marketing strategy. Read our omnichannel marketing guide to learn how to implement it.
Whatever channels you decide to leverage (and you should choose several), remember to create a consistent brand experience. Here are some ideas to get you started on a successful omnichannel marketing approach:
- Email Marketing: Convert first-time customers into regulars by collecting guest data and then using marketing automation software to send targeted marketing messages to guests. Events that might interest them, loyalty program invites, review requests — it’s all fair game.
Playbooks & Guides
- Social Media by Channel: Some restaurant owners might focus all their time on one channel, while others have the bandwidth to promote across all platforms. No matter where you decide to live online, commit to a consistent posting schedule to generate awareness. Better yet, hire a social media consultant to work with influencers to promote the restaurant.
- Loyalty Programs: Even a small loyalty program can boost sales significantly. Brainstorm ways to build a loyalty program unique to your business that caters to your most loyal customers and offers incentives to return.
- Press Releases: If you’ve recently opened or rebranded, plan a grand opening event and invite family, friends, press, and influencers to spread the word.
- Website/SEO: Hire a digital marketing agency or SEO company to help you optomize your restaurant’s website and drive more traffic.
- Paid Ads: A successful social media marketing strategy includes paid ads. While, you don’t need to boost every post, it’s wise to promote your business across specific demographics (this is why guest data is important), to advertise new menu items or take-out options. Hashtags can also help ensure more people see your post.
- SMS: Texts have a higher open rate than email. After collecting phone numbers through online booking processes, send targeted text messages advertising offers, promotions and even waitlist notifications.
- Events: Whether you host events for all customers or reserve special occasions for your VIPs, celebrations at your venue help generate excitement and word-of-mouth.
- Direct Mail: Sending coupons, takeaway offers and event invites to a select group of people in the mail is still an effective marketing strategy. But before you send mailers, be sure your website and other POS systems are prepared to track the success of your campaigns.
- Video: TikTok and Instagram are great social media channels for engaging potential customers and maximizing online presence. Reels have high open rates, so it’s worth dedicating some time to posting on these channels.
Pro Tip: As you build out your marketing strategies, remember to track the success of your campaigns to determine what’s worth allocating more time to and what isn’t. Digital marketing tracking links will help to determine the return on investment (ROI) of each partnership.
Marketing Budget
To continually engage with and respond to your guests via social media, paid ads, events and via email, you’ll need to establish a marketing budget you can stick to each month or quarter. You don’t need a lofty budget; you can maintain social media platforms for free, or pay to boost your most impactful posts. There’s no set amount we’d recommend, but we do suggest allocating it across your most profitable channels.
Stay Focused With a Restaurant Marketing Plan
Restaurateurs have a lot on their plates. If you don’t develop a marketing plan, it can be easy to get caught up in day-to-day operations and neglect promoting your business. Take the time to put together a restaurant marketing plan. Then, schedule time for regular reviews of your marketing efforts.
SevenRooms’ marketing automation and email software help you put your marketing efforts on autopilot. Request a demo to see how.
Restaurant Marketing FAQs
How Do You Promote a Restaurant Using Digital Marketing?
A successful digital marketing plan for restaurants requires a well-defined mission and target audience. Once you know who you want to target, you can develop strategies to promote your website across social media channels, Google listings and your website.
What Should Be Included in a Restaurant Marketing Plan?
Your marketing plan should list marketing goals/KPIs, deadlines, budgets, long-term objectives, target audiences, core marketing messages, and ways to track your metrics. The plan should be detailed and written to evolve as you grow and learn. Most importantly, your marketing plan should clearly identify your venue’s strategic vision and the action steps you’ll take to achieve them using various marketing efforts.