Elise Musumano

With over 1 billion users each month and more than 335,000 foodservice establishments on the platform, Instagram remains an essential marketing channel for today’s restaurateurs. That’s why we’ve scoured the globe to see what leaders in the hospitality space are doing to succeed on Instagram, and compiled our results to create this all-in-one Instagram template to help jumpstart your restaurant marketing.

Download it today and start saving time — every time.

The Background: Why This Guide Exists And How It Will Help You

When we deep dive into restaurant marketing, we learned that 92% of restaurants have an Instagram profile for their business. Here’s the full breakdown of marketing channels and what % of our customers use each:

We also discovered that restaurants have questions about How to Use Instagram for Business:

• When should we post on Instagram?

• What should we post about?

• What should our caption say, exactly?

Plus, restaurant marketers want an easy way to plan out posts in advance and organize everything in one place.

Solution: Easy Instagram Template + A Complete Guide With Examples

To get you what you need, we made two things:

1. A Google Sheets template (that you can download to Excel) where you can plan out each post and the date.
2. A PDF guide that shows you what other restaurants are doing, complete with text captions to copy and use on your own.

Resource #1: An Easy Instagram Scheduling Template

Here’s a sneak peek of what it looks like and what’s inside:

Tab 1: Planning Out Your Posts

• Upcoming holiday dates
• Automatic character length calculator
• Pixel dimensions for photo

Tab 2: Hashtags To Include

• Hashtags with traffic numbers for each

Tab 3: Accounts To Tag

• Accounts to tag in your post (includes tourism boards and food publications by city)

Tab 4: How To Enable Reservation-Booking Right On Your Instagram Profile

• 100% free way for SevenRooms users to set up a “Reserve Now” button

Pro Tip: To add new months, just “Command/Ctrl + A” in tab 1 to select everything, then “Command/Ctrl + C” to copy and then go to a new tab and “Command/Ctrl + V” to paste. Label this new tab for the following two months (i.e. “Jan/Feb 2022”).

Resource #2: A Complete Instagram Guide With Examples

Section 1: The Essentials: Everything You Need to Know About Instagram For Restaurants

This includes image size, ideas for captions, and tips that tell you what not to forget.

Section 2: The Best Instagram Examples for Different Situations

Here, we include 9 examples of instagram posts for different situation.

1. You need a filler post for a slow day.
2. The weather today is beautiful (or not).
3. A guest tags you in their photo.
4. You want to spread the word out about a new dish.
5. You’re trying to create FOMO with an item that’s especially Instagrammable.
6. You just introduced a new wine to your list or are stuck with surplus inventory of an old one.
7. It’s a national food holiday for an item on your menu.
8. You want to fill seats for an event.
9. You just redid your menu.

Section 3: 10 Ways to Keep Followers Watching Your Stories

Because posts are just a part of what you’re doing to represent your brand and drive reservations on your Instagram business profile.

Ready to get started?