How to create a restaurant marketing plan

A good marketing strategy for a restaurant starts by thinking through your branding. That includes defining your unique positioning: what sets your restaurant apart from other options. To work that out, consider what you most want to be known for. Then proceed to think through what you want the look and feel of your brand to be. You’ll want to work out a visual style, including a brand color scheme and logo. You can hire a good graphic designer to help with this process or look into free online design options that let you do it yourself.

To help you visualize what this all looks like in practice, we’ll create some restaurant marketing plan examples based on a fictional pizza place called Pizza Finzione. For their unique positioning, the restaurant team emphasizes creating Neapolitan-style pizza that uses only the best ingredients. Their visual branding incorporates the colors of the Naples flag (red and yellow), as well as images and stock photos associated with Naples, Italy. All of that helps communicate what the brand does and what makes it special.

No restaurant works in a vacuum. Your customers will often be deciding among several options in the area when choosing what to eat, and you want to understand where you fit in with them. That doesn’t mean you have to research every single restaurant in your city—for businesses in a big city, that would be a nearly impossible task. Instead, focus on those that are similar to you.

For example, Pizza Finzione would want to learn what other pizza and Italian restaurants are doing nearby to position their business to customers. Its team may want to further identify the restaurants selling food at a similar price point within a couple of miles.

Once you’ve identified your top competitors, research their marketing:

• What does their website look like? Can you tell what keywords they’re targeting for SEO (search engine optimization)?
• Can you tell what their unique positioning is?
• What marketing channels do they use? For example, do they have a presence on multiple social media channels or third-party apps? Do they have an email list? Can you see any promotions they’re running?
• What do their reviews look like? What do customers praise and criticize?

By seeing what’s working for your competitors, you can learn what your audience might respond to. You don’t want to copy them, but you do want to take what insights you can from their results. For instance, the social media sites where they get a lot of engagement may be those where your audience is most active and therefore worth your time.

Your restaurant has limited resources, so you want to focus on the marketing channels likely to provide the best results. These are some of the main channels to consider for restaurant marketing:

With marketing, it’s easy to have big ambitions when you’re in the planning stage. It’s harder to follow through on them consistently over the long term. But that's what it takes for a restaurant marketing plan to get the kind of results you want. One of the most important tools for helping you stick to your plan is a marketing calendar.

Once you have your marketing channels selected, devise a strategy for what you intend to do on each and how often. For example, Pizza Finzione may decide to release a video to YouTube twice a month, publish blog posts weekly, post on Instagram 3 times a week, and send emails to their list once a month.

Keep this realistic. You probably won’t be able to publish a blog post or video every day on top of all your other responsibilities, but a couple times a month may be feasible.

Start entering your promotion and content ideas into your calendar, so every initiative has a clear timeline. Break down each item into clear steps. For instance, a blog post will require a written draft, a review process, and an image to publish with it. Assign responsibility and a deadline for each step—even if you’re doing a lot of the tasks yourself. That will help you better visualize how much time each action will take and keep the schedule realistic.

Work to keep those deadlines and stay on top of your calendar. You may need to update the plan over time as you realize how long certain things take. It’s OK to switch from daily Instagram posts to 2 a week, if you find that’s the pace you’ll realistically maintain. What you want to avoid most is letting your marketing plan end the moment things get busy.

With the investment marketing requires, you want to make sure your work is paying off. Set clear goals as part of your restaurant marketing plan. This can include high-level goals like growing brand awareness, gaining new customers, and increasing overall sales. It should also include channel-specific goals for each of the channels you choose to pursue, such as social media followers, email open rates, and loyalty program signups.

Marketing requires a lot of guesswork early on, but tracking metrics is how you refine your strategies based on data. If your blog posts draw more traffic to the website, which contributes to an uptick in online orders, then you know that channel is paying off for you. If you devote hours to creating TikTok content, only to see low engagement on the platform, then shift that time back to one of the channels getting better results.

No marketing plan should be set in stone. Learn what works as you go, and be willing to branch out and try new things based on changing trends. Over time, you’ll gain more data and feedback on what kinds of marketing work best for your audience and brand, which will let you improve results as you go.