55 Restaurant Marketing Ideas – How to Promote Your Restaurant

In this article, we will list out 55 of the best restaurant marketing ideas in 2020. Some of them are things you can do within your restaurant, some you can do online, and some you can do in person at events. If you need any help executing any of these restaurant marketing ideas, reach out to us by filling out the form at the bottom of this article.

1 – Have Useful Table Toppers

We’ll start with some traditional restaurant marketing ideas and move on to more advanced and modern ways to market your restaurant.  Use table toppers to promote new items, get new members in your loyalty program, and to get more positive reviews. Try a QR code on it that allows them access to a video or a special offer.

2 – Strategic Seating

Restaurant marketing ideas for within your restaurant:  Sit people near the Windows first. Sitting your customers near the window will help show passersby that you’ve got customers eating. This concept is called social proof. These people in the window will, without knowing it, act as proof that your restaurant is worth visiting… even when you’re slower than you’d like to be.

3 – Menu Arrangement

You may not think this falls into the restaurant marketing ideas category but the arrangement of your menu can help you sell more – even though it’s someone already in your restaurant (in most cases).  Highlight higher profit menu items on your menu. You can do so by making items bold and placing them at the top of each list. Also, consider highlighting healthier items in green or with a lead symbol to symbolize the healthier options. Other things you could color coordinate are allergy-conscious items. And be sure to keep high contrast when it comes to colors… light background with dark, easy to read face.

4 – Offer Live Entertainment

Live entertainment will help create a liveliness that may set you apart from the rest. Hiring entertainment will help people that are walking by more interested to see what’s going on. Just make sure to dedicate very specific times of the day/night to have live music so your regulars know when they should plan to be there. Some like live music, while others don’t.

5 – Encourage Your Customers to Talk About Your Restaurant

Train your staff to encourage customers to share photos online. Offer special incentives if they show your staff that they’ve checked in or recommended your restaurant on Facebook. This is one of the word-of-mouth restaurant marketing ideas that we personally love!

6 – Flyers at Events

This is one of the classic restaurant marketing ideas most have heard of.  Taking things old-school, this method still works! Get some of your loudest, most outgoing, energetic staff members to come with you in bright-colored, branded T-Shirts, and hang out at local events. Come up with a few phrases to grab people’s attention that you can yell clearly. Something like… “Free pizza! Come get a slice!” or “Win free pizza for a year! Sign up here!”. I would even consider recording someone yelling this and blasting a few of these phrases on repeat on a speaker loudly so your staff members don’t wear out their voices and they’re able to properly address any questions people have. You need two parts…

1. Something to grab the attention of people far away, and
2. Staff members answering questions face-to-face.

Once people approach, have them either take a flyer, fill out a form, or scan a QR code to get the offer, or to enter for the chance to win. If you go the no-contact QR code route, have it open up an automated Facebook Messenger chat with your restaurant that asks for their email and phone number before it delivers the offer. From then on, you’ll be able to reach these customers and drive them into your restaurant with more offers. You’ll also know that those people are people that probably like attending big events – which means you can promote your restaurant toward them more heavily closer to big community events.

7 – Encourage Your Customers to Buy More

This is one of the in-house restaurant marketing ideas. Train your staff to ask questions like famous “do you want fries with that?” McDonald’s doesn’t make their money on entrees, they make their money on upsells and cross-sells! Think about what menu items pair well together and train your staff to suggest them at every table. If you enforce this, you will see a significant increase in sales. Customers love to hear suggestions from servers, especially when it’s believable that the server agrees with the suggestion.

8 – High-Quality Food Photography

This is one of the most underrated restaurant marketing ideas we’ve heard people talk about.  Having great photos of your food is a sure-fire way to promote your restaurant effectively. You have 3 great options for getting some good photos that will land you hungry eyes:

1. Hire a professional food photographer. We’re talking about a business that specializes in capturing those details that make your mouth water.
2. Learn how to take great high-quality photos using your phone. We wrote an article about it you can find here.
3. Post a gig on Craigslist offering photographers at local colleges the chance to photograph (and maybe eat?) your food to help build their portfolios. College kids would live a free meal/gift card for the chance to improve their skills and get more jobs. You’ll have a ton of photos to work with and if one is the photographer’s photos turn out exceptionally well, you can re-hire them or have some of the images printed.

9 – Loyalty Programs

Restaurant loyalty programs are crucial for increasing the value of the people that walk into your restaurant. Why put all your focus on getting new customers when the current ones you have haven’t been optimized for more than one visit? You should come up with ways to get customers to come back 2 or 3 times. There are a ton of loyalty programs out there when it comes to restaurant marketing ideas that track the number of visits and spend, or you can print some little punch cards yourself. Either way, you should be taking advantage of this because it will have a tremendous impact on your restaurant’s revenue and profit!

10 – WiFi Marketing

We don’t see this one as often but it’s an easy way to grow your customer list. Feature a QR code on a table topper at each of your tables prompting customers to scan it to join your free WiFi. To help generate more interest, offer a free drink or small appetizer for joining the network. Once customers scan, you can deliver a password to them via SMS, a web page, or a Facebook Messenger chatbot. You can even collect their info, like phone number, email address, their favorite menu item, etc. This will help you develop a stronger personalized marketing message in the future.

11 – Survey Your Customers

This is among the unconventional restaurant marketing ideas.  Surveying your customers is a great way to get them interested in your restaurant and gathering feedback about what they like and dislike about your business. This will enable you to better understand their preferences and help you improve your restaurant menu, marketing, and staff training.

12 – Check for Google My Business Listing Accuracy

Google My Business is the section on the Google Search results that show up when you search for your restaurant. Usually, there is a map and basic details about your restaurant. If you don’t ‘claim the listing’, Google will find details from other sources (including customers) and fill in the information on your behalf. Alternatively, you can “claim the listing” and control what is shown there. What others say about your restaurant is not always correct, so better to claim the listing and make everything accurate yourself!

13 – Post Regularly on Your Google My Business Listing

Once you’ve claimed your Google My Business information and it’s all accurate, it’s a good idea to make sure you post on it! Just like Facebook, they give you the ability to share updates about your business and share offers. Take advantage of this! Google is how most people find businesses online and if you’re posting on their platform, your posts will be highly likely to be seen over others that don’t have updates.

14 – Host Giveaways Regularly

Creating regular giveaways will keep your customers engaged and excited about your restaurant. Also, you don’t have to give away free food and drink… get creative! What do most of your customers like? Are they outdoorsy? How about making the prize a Yeti cooler? Do most of your customers include parents because you run a family-oriented restaurant? Why don’t you offer them the chance to win dinner for the entire family? Get creative and try hosting a new giveaway once every month or so to both your current customers and people that may not have tried you yet. Giveaways can also be a great way to grow your subscriber list by requiring an email address or phone number for entries.

15 – Run Geo-Targeted Ads

Ads that target people within specific zip codes or within a specific radius around your restaurant is a must! These are called Geo Targeted ads, or Geo-Targeting ads. Think of all the hungry people that drive by your restaurant every day?  If done right, this could be one of the most effective of the restaurant marketing ideas out there.  If they see a geo-targeted ad for your restaurant before they leave for work, or before they leave to go out with the family, they’ll be much more likely to consider you as their lunch or dinner choice.

16 – Use Social Media Stories

Stories are a great feature, first seen by Snapchat. Since then, Facebook and Instagram have adopted the feature. While customers are watching their friends’ stories, your business’s story will come up, too – right in the middle of the rest. Tell your customers’ stories by featuring them in your Stories and you’ll be sure to attract new business.

17 – Get Your Own Restaurant Chatbot

A restaurant chatbot is basically a chat assistant for your business. Usually they’re made by connecting third-party software to your Facebook or Instagram Page, and it helps answer your customers’ questions more quickly than you could get back to them to answer. These are a great way to make sure your customer service is in tip-top shape. You can be notified instantly if a customer has a problem with their order/service. You can also utilize them to communicate offers with your customers, driving them into your restaurant for more. We at Aycock Marketing specialize in this and can help restaurants get started with ease.

18 – Practice Omni-Channel Marketing

This is a fancy word for marketing to your customers on multiple channels at the same time. In other words, hitting your customers in the different places they are. They should be getting emails, Facebook ads, stories, Facebook Messages, etc. all from your business with a consistent message. This will help your restaurant brand become more memorable and get you more sales over time.

19 – Use Facebook Ads (Paid Facebook Ads)

Facebook advertising is our wheelhouse. Facebook has so much information about people, it makes it one of the best places to advertise. We recommend that restaurants put their marketing budgets heavily into Facebook. You can run offers to collect locals’ contact information, run ads for giveaways, and more. Facebook Ads allow you to reach people you wouldn’t normally be able to when relying on their algorithm. Facebook wants you to pay to play, so they limit how many people you reach with your regular posts. It stinks, but that’s just the way it is. They’re a business, and that’s how they make money. So to accept this fact and to find a way to adapt and play by their rules is the best way to take advantage of it. Target people by location, age, gender, habits, interests, and more. Just keep in mind that the more granular you get, the smaller your target audience will be – making it harder for Facebook to find people that actually will care. Most restaurants can get away with targeting only by location and age range (or gender) and have great success. Before you start, make sure you know how you plan to measure your success, too. Nothing is worse than spending money on an ad… and when it’s over, you scratch your head wondering if it was worth it. Know what you want before you even begin, and you’ll be in good shape. We tell our restaurant partners to spend a minimum of $5 per day on Facebook advertising. If you find something that works, up it to $10/day and up. If you need help with this so you never have to close your doors, reach out to us. We’ve been advertising on Facebook since 2015 and have increased sales for many businesses primarily by using Facebook Ads.

20 – Run Birthday Campaigns

A birthday campaign is where you send a special offer to those on your email list that has a birthday coming up. Many large chain restaurants have this in place, but it’s less common for smaller restaurants to have this… but we can tell you it’s not too complicated, we promise! If you’re continuing to grow your customer or subscriber list, you can collect their birthdays and set up an automated email to send a birthday gift to those whose birthdays are upcoming. Also, Facebook has an option to run paid ads to those people near your restaurant who have an upcoming birthday. This can be extremely powerful and we like to set this up for all of our restaurant partners.

21 – Use Snapchat Geofilters at Events

Snapchat Geofilters are a form of geo-targeting. Snapchat allows you, or anyone, to create a graphic that will become an option for them to overlay it on their Snapchat Stories. The coolest part is that it will only show to people that are within a certain perimeter that you choose. So when you set it up, you draw a perimeter on Snapchat’s Geofilter setup page. You pay based on the size of your area and how long you want the Geofilter to run. Prices start as low as $5 for several hours. We recommend having a graphic designer or marketing company create a geofilter for you when there is a big local community event going on nearby. If you can come up with something that looks less like an ad, and more like it was made for the event, you’ll have a higher likelihood of people using your geofilter and sharing it with their friends. Snapchat will give you a report of how many people saw your geofilter after 24 hours have passed. This is a great way to gain more awareness by locals that could dine at your restaurant.

22 – Update Your Yelp Listing

The infamous platform, Yelp, is a widely hated website by business owners – but it plays an important role in the restaurant ecosystem. It’s most known for haters to rant about petty things. They also tend to sucker you into paying for their advertising… if you don’t, they’ve been known to hide positive reviews, and only show negative ones. While they deny that’s the case, many restaurant owners have reported experiencing the same thing. Either way, it’s important to claim your listing and make sure all information on your listing is up-to-date and accurate. Many customers use Yelp to do research and you should at the very least make sure your page is accurate and consider this one of the essential restaurant marketing ideas on this list. Yelp offers paid advertising features, but we believe putting your ad dollars elsewhere is a better use of your time and money.

23 – Use Instagram Religiously

Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012 and it was a good purchase. Instagram is known for incredible photos of food people find at restaurants. Being active on Instagram is just as important as being active on Facebook – especially if you’re a restaurant owner. Keep your page updated daily by posting photos of food, customers, events you have going on, and your staff. Also, share to your Instagram Stories as you’ll get more and more people that will love to watch and anticipate your next post. Another way to use Instagram that is highly overlooked is the Search feature. Try this:

1. Tap the Magnifying Glass Search Icon
2. Tap places
3. Type the name of your city or tap the “Near Current Location” link.
4. You’ll now see a Top and a Recent section. Under the Top section, these are the most popular posts in your area. Tap on their profile and send them a direct message. Tell them you saw they are in your town and that you love your community, too. Invite them to take a visit to your restaurant for a free meal “on the house”. Most people won’t turn down a free meal, and these people are Insta-famous… so they’re very likely to share their awesome meal at your restaurant with all their friends and followers. It’s a great way to make friends with the most popular people in town and to spread the word for the small price of an entree. Not everyone will take you up on the offer, but if you do this every week, you’ll be sure to reach a ton of people with a strong recommendation by a local celebrity!

24 – Make Sure Your Local SEO is On Point

SEO for your restaurant is important. When people talk about SEO, they usually mention a bunch of technical terms that restaurant owners don’t know and don’t care to learn. All you care about is showing up when people search for you or your style of food in the area. If you’re not willing to learn or have the time to learn, hire a local marketing professional to help get you on the map with some basic SEO. This should cost somewhere between $1500-3000 depending on the company, but it is a well-worth-it investment… because if people can’t find you online, they’ll never find you!  That’s what makes organic SEO one of the many great restaurant marketing ideas in this article.

25 – Run Retargeting Ads

Paid advertising works great when you do it right, and let’s face it. You didn’t spend hours on courses learning the technicalities of Facebook advertising. But we did, and what we can tell you is retargeting is crucial! The concept is targeting people with ads that you know have already engaged with your restaurant online, or that have already visited you. To do so, Facebook lets you target people that have watched your videos and interacted with your page. These are the most valuable people and with retargeting ads, it won’t be hard to get those people into your restaurant. If you need help retargeting locals, let us know and we’ll help you set it up.

26 – Email Marketing Newsletter Campaigns

Some people claim that email marketing is dead, but we disagree. Sending customer-nurturing emails consistently is the best way to stay top of mind. You should be sending a new offer to your customers every month at the very least. Bonus points if you can share some of your company history, values, events you’re holding, etc. When these people are trying to decide on where to eat for dinner, you’ll be top of mind.

27 – Segmented Email Marketing Campaigns

Segmenting your email marketing list is the process of categorizing your customers based on their favorite menu items, their zip codes, their age, gender, etc. When you have this information, you can dynamically speak their language. Imagine getting an email about a restaurant’s beer can chicken, but you’re a vegetarian. The restaurant ignored the fact that you’re a vegetarian and are forcing meat upon you! This sucks, and it’s not personal at all! Now what if only the vegetarians got the email about a vegetarian dish on the menu? You’d be pleasantly surprised and pleased… and the fact that they know what you like so well would make you want to go that much more. This is super powerful and easy to implement.

28 – Email Marketing Automation

Email marketing gets much better when you have automated systems in place. These are the systems that allow you to automatically email customers on their birthdays, follow up with customers after they visit your restaurant to ask for feedback and remind customers about offers you’ve sent them that are expiring soon. If you don’t have this in place, you need to get on it because it costs no extra to set this up and it runs while you sleep! Send us a mess if you’d like more information on how to apply this to your business.

29 – User-Generated Content

Often called UGC, user-generated content is content from your customers. And by content, we mean anything your customers produce and share online. This could be a blog post someone wrote, a review, a photo, a video, etc. This works and is extra effective because it has a sense of ‘social proof’ that your own posts won’t have. And it’s a huge time-saver – you don’t have to worry about coming up with something to post. They’ve given you the content for you to use! To get UGC, we recommend you reach out to the creator/customer and ask their permission to use their photo or another piece of content. Another way to stock up on user-generated content is to run a contest and ask your customers to share photos they’ve taken of your food. This has an additional benefit as it gets your online community to engage with you and can create a murmur about your restaurant in the community. To get more entries, try offering a prize (or 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place) to you and your staff’s favorite photos.

30 – Share Press and Articles About Your Business

When the newspaper or other websites publish articles about your restaurant, make sure to share them with your fans. This will give you a credibility boost and help you stand out amongst the rest of the restaurants around you. #BraggingRights

31 – Highlight Staff Members

Customers love to hear about your staff members they see (and don’t see) that work so hard to serve them. Make an ‘employee of the week’ or ‘employee of the month’ post and share it on all your social networks you use. Post a photo/video and do a Q & A!

32 – Highlight Neighboring Businesses

Talk about how great your neighboring businesses are and recommend people check them out! People love to see local businesses supporting other local businesses. It truly shows that you care about your community and not just about yourselves. To add to this, you can film one of your employees walking into a neighboring business and handing the staff members food from your restaurant to sample. This has the potential to go viral!

33 – Highlight Customers

Do you have regular customers you know by name? If so, ask them if they’d be willing to let you share their photo on your social media pages and do a Q & A. Ask them about who they are, when they started going to your restaurant, what they love most about it, and what their favorite items on the menu are. People love seeing others getting the best restaurant experiences and it makes them feel they may be able to as well.

34 – Monitor Your Comments on Posts

Don’t forget to interact with your followers on your social media pages. Another one of the restaurant marketing ideas that doesn’t seem like “marketing” to some, but it totally is. Show others that you are an engaging company that people can have conversations with. This demonstrates a great form of marketing called social proof. Think “Jerry and 9 other friends like this”.

35 – Monitor & Moderate Reviews/Ratings

Make sure to respond to every review and recommendation. Thank the people that write positive ones, and reach out sincerely to the negative reviews and offer to make things right. If you want more direction or guidance on this, check out our article called How to Handle Bad Reviews on Facebook. When people see that you respond to all reviews, it shows others that you care about your customers and their experience and are willing to do what it takes to make things right. This lowers the barrier/objections potential customers may have when considering to dine with you the first time.

36 – Listen Well with Google Alerts

Can listening be marketing?  We think so.  So listen up to one of the coolest restaurant marketing ideas you probably didn’t know existed.  Set up Google Alerts with your business name so you’ll get email notifications when there are new articles written about your restaurant or that mention your restaurant. You can set it up by going here.

37 – Write Regular Blog Articles

This is one of the restaurant marketing ideas that is not as popular as others. It can require some serious time commitment and you (or whoever you delegate to do it) should enjoy writing. You can talk about updates you make, the events you have coming up, and more. This is only one step out of a content marketing plan, though. The second step is distribution. If you’re writing articles, publish them on Facebook and your Google My Business listing so people find out about them!

38 – Fishbowl Business Card Giveaway

You may have seen this at a restaurant before, usually located at the cashier’s counter. Your customers drop their business cards in a bowl or bucket and at the end of the month, you choose a business card at random who you’ll provide a free lunch to. This is a great opportunity to wow the winners and to offer their company an exclusive discount moving forward to help generate more revenue with more frequent visits. This will also increase the number of catering orders. In addition to making people feel special, the people that don’t win, you now have their information. It’s a good idea to reach out to all of them and let them know they didn’t win, but since they participated, you’ll offer them something free or discounted. If you’re really on top of things, add these emails to your email marketing subscriber list. Another way to run this whole thing is to instead have a sign with a scannable QR code – which will open a form or a Facebook Messenger chat with your business and collects their business info. This way, you can automate how long until they get a “we’re sorry, you didn’t win” message and start to drive some business lunches into your restaurant. This can save tons of time because you won’t have to manually enter each contact into your system. You’ll also be able to promote your offers to them on your regular email marketing campaigns, too!

39 – Make Sure Your Branding is Consistent in Each Place on the Internet

Go through your profiles on Yelp, Google My Business, Facebook, Trip Advisor, your website, etc. and make sure all the info is consistent. Having confusion between different listings on the internet can negatively impact where your business shows up in the search results (local SEO – search engine optimization).

40 – Offer Online Ordering

Allowing your customers to order from your website is HUGE. According to Toast, customers spend 23% more when they order online vs. ordering in the restaurant. This means you will increase your sales almost immediately! Now, a lot of restaurants don’t like the online ordering platforms because of several reasons: Some of them have people from other countries call in the orders as ‘to go’, some charge crazy commission fees, and others require purchasing outrageously expensive hardware. Aycock Marketing offers online ordering services that are managed for you, and at a flat monthly fee. We integrate it directly into your existing website and your restaurant gets notified automatically and immediately when new orders are placed. Notifications come through to a phone or a tablet that you already own. Easy right? Another benefit is you can finally justify the price you paid to have your website designed in the first place. It’s no longer just an ‘online business card’… now it’s a salesperson that takes (accurate) orders for you automatically!

41 – Make Your Menu Available on Your Website as Text and as a PDF

The truth is, some people like to view your menu on a PDF, while others would rather not download anything and want the menu visible on your website. To provide ease for both types of people, we recommend offering both as an option. At the top, have a button that says “View PDF Menu”, and below it, offer the menu embedded into the web page. One of our clients gets 10-30 PDF downloads per day – and they’re only open for Breakfast and Lunch.

42 – Optimize Your Website for Sales

Optimizing your website for sales is not easy for those who don’t specialize in internet marketing. If you’re looking for a few tips, we recommend putting a “Call Now” or “Order Now” button on every section of your website so when users scroll to a new section and decide they’re ready to order, there is no question on how to do so. Also list out your ordering process in 3 easy steps. The trick is to make everything a person is wondering super easy to find and understand. Make sure you have Google Analytics set up on your restaurant website so you can track the number of phone calls and the number of online orders you get. This can help you understand what needs to be fixed or adjusted on your website to make the “order” buttons more click-worthy!

43 – Build a Food Truck

Having a food truck is a big deal and obviously takes a lot of work. If you’re able to do so, this will help you get out in front of new audiences and make new customers for life. People love food trucks and sometimes will rather have the experience of one over going to sit down at a restaurant. If you do own a food truck and a restaurant, offer your food truck customers an exclusive discount for the next time they visit your restaurant. This will help cross-pollinate your customers and make revenue in both places.

44 – Partner With 3rd Party Delivery Services

Third-party delivery services like DoorDash, GrubHub, and Uber Eats are very important to the restaurant industry. While there is a lot of controversy about using them, they’re not going anywhere and they have large numbers of people who search their apps. Some charge anywhere between 15-30% of sales, and others charge a flat monthly fee on top of that – so your margins may be very low and cause you to have to increase your prices on those providers’ apps to offset fees.

45 – Offer Your Own In-House Delivery

Nothing quite beats offering in-house delivery. Save on commission fees and have delivery as an option for those who order online. You can even offer a discount to ‘first-time’ delivery orders. This will save you money, but will indeed require you to work out the logistics & insurance that third-party companies already have figured out. The younger the customers, the more likely they are to order online or order delivery, so you’d be reaching more of that crowd – which can sometimes be harder to reach with your restaurant marketing efforts.

46 – Offer BOGOs and Other Freebies

Free items are the number one way to drive new customers into your business. Offer a one-time use coupon for customers in your local area. Use Facebook Messenger or Email to mark coupons as “used” and easily keep track of how much your coupons earned. Customers will be able to only use the coupons once which means you won’t waste money on coupon abusers. We’ve tried $ off coupons with our restaurant partners before, but they never perform quite as well as a Buy 1 Entree, Get 1 Entree free, Free App, or Free Dessert. Getting a new person to try your restaurant is worth the cost to acquire them if you can make sure they are properly served and WOW’d when they arrive.  Learn more about how to use coupons here:  How to Use Coupons as a Marketing Weapon in Your Restaurant Marketing Arsenal

47 – Use Groupon or LivingSocial

We’re not huge advocates of using these sites because they usually take 50% or so of the revenue made, which leaves you with nothing. Plus, they keep the customer data so they can leverage it when marketing in the future – leaving you with nothing. However, some people live and breathe these websites and it might not hurt to get some exposure at least. For our restaurant partners, we almost always advise them to stop promoting on these websites and to shift most of their budget to Facebook.

48 – Offer Online Reservations

Offering online reservations is a great way to stay organized and to cater to those that prefer a more planned experience. Plus, it gives you a better idea when a big crowd is coming in. Offer online reservations via OpenTable and through your website ordering platform and you’ll be sure to increase your sales a bit.

49 – Let People Know You Use Local Ingredients

Do you pride yourself on using local ingredients? Let your customers know! People are very local-conscious these days and are willing to pay more if they know their local farmers had something to do with the meals they’re eating. Don’t forget to mention this when you’re talking about your food or menu!

50 – Offer Special Discounts to Nearby Businesses

Have a couple of your staff members trek out around 10am with some printed discount cards that are exclusive to those businesses. Let them know you are glad to share the community with them and that they’re always welcome to dine in with a discount during lunchtime. This will make you look great and help increase your lunch sales + word-of-mouth sales.

51 – Join the Chamber of Commerce and Participate

The Chamber of Commerce and other local networking groups will help you meet other business owners you can serve in the future. Get to know your community leaders and provide thoughtful information about the local food scene and you’ll be sure to gain new customers and catering opportunities.

52 – Use SMS Text Message Marketing

SMS Message Marketing isn’t new, but it’s underplayed. There aren’t enough restaurants doing it and taking advantage of it. Basically, it’s when your customers can send a text to a number and opt-in to get messages from your restaurant periodically. To unsubscribe, they just have to reply with the word STOP. We offer this to our restaurant partners and it has proven to be very effective when it comes to driving foot traffic into restaurants and tracking sales from your marketing efforts. Send us a message if you’d like to learn more about how we go about this.

53 – Run Google Search Ads

There are so few restaurants using Google Search Ads, it doesn’t make sense for you NOT to be there. When people are searching for your cuisine style, you can show up right at the top of the search results with no problems. All you need to do is set up Google Search Ads and target people in the area around your business. We only recommend this if you’re pushing online orders, or catering orders. If you don’t have a way for customers to contact you or place an order online, you may waste your money with these ads. The great thing about these ads is that the people finding them are people who are HUNGRY right now! So the more descriptive and juicy you get, the better it will be in persuading them to eat at your restaurant.

54 – Leverage School Sponsorships

Contact each local school individually and find out what sponsorship opportunities their sports and arts/music programs have to offer.  They are oftentimes looking for sponsors and can’t find enough sponsors. This is a great way to get your logo and menu in front of families. And families are usually 3+ people. If you can get something worked out with 5 school programs for a year, that could give you a substantial rise in revenue over time.  This is what makes this idea one of the best restaurant marketing ideas out there.  Also, consider hosting ‘spirit nights’ for school teams. You can offer a discount to families whose students attend the school and donate another percentage of their sales toward their program.

55 – Hire a Restaurant Marketing Specialist

Hiring a local restaurant marketing professional will allow you to fast track any of your marketing efforts and get results that you’re able to see clearly. You probably didn’t go to school for marketing, and you probably don’t have time to think about it too much. And if you think about it all the time, you might not have the time to execute. Hiring a restaurant marketing agency like Aycock Marketing will help you increase your sales and implement many of these restaurant marketing ideas without missing a step.

Summary: Restaurant Marketing Ideas

1. Table Toppers
2. Strategic Seating
3. Menu Arrangement
4. Offer Live Entertainment
5. Encourage Your Customers to Talk About Your Restaurant
6. Flyers at Events
7. Encourage Your Customers to Buy More
8. High-Quality Food Photography
9. Loyalty programs
10. WiFi Marketing
11. Survey Your Customers
12. Check for Google My Business Accuracy
13. Post Regularly on Your Google My Business Listing
14. Host Giveaways Regularly
15. Geo-Targeted Ads
16. Use Social Media Stories
17. Get Your Own Restaurant Chatbot
18. Practice Omni-Channel Marketing
19. Run Facebook Ads
20. Run Birthday Campaigns
21. Use Snapchat Geofilters
22. Update Your Yelp Listing
23. Use Instagram Religiously
24. Make Sure Your Local SEO is On Point
25. Run Retargeting Ads
26. Use Email Marketing Newsletter Campaigns
27. Use Segmented Email Marketing Campaigns
28. Use Email Marketing Automation
29. Share User-Generated Content
30. Share Press and Articles About Your Business
31. Highlight Staff Members
32. Highlight Neighboring Businesses
33. Highlight Customers
34. Monitor Your Comments on Posts
35. Monitor & moderate Reviews/Ratings
36. Listen Well with Google Alerts
37. Write Regular Blog Articles
38. Fishbowl Business Card Giveaway
39. Make sure your branding is consistent in each place on the internet
40. Offer Online Ordering
41. Make Your Menu Available on your website as text and as a PDF
42. Optimize your website for sales
43. Build a Food Truck
44. Partner With 3rd Party Delivery Services
45. Offer your own in-house delivery
46. Offer BOGOs and Other Freebies
47. Use Groupon or LivingSocial
48. Offering Online Reservations
49. Let People Know You Use Local Ingredients
50. Offer Special Discounts to nearby businesses
51. Join the Chamber of Commerce and Participate
52. Use SMS Text Message Marketing
53. Run Google Search Ads
54. Leverage School Sponsorships
55. Hire a Restaurant Marketing Specialist