6 Game-Changing Restaurant Marketing Strategies

Keeping your restaurant packed even when it’s not a Friday or Saturday doesn’t have to feel like you’re rolling a boulder up a hill.

With the right marketing strategies, you can keep your tables full, and servers busy, and keep your happy customers coming back for more.

When done properly, you can even get them to refer your restaurant to other people.

If you’re looking for ways to get more people to come to your restaurant, you’re in the right place.

In this guide, we’re going to break down 6 game-changing restaurant marketing strategies that keep you from wasting time, money, and energy filling your tables.

By the time you’re done reading, you’ll know exactly what to do right now to start laying the foundation for month-over-month growth in your restaurant.

And it all starts with making sure you’re showing up where people are looking for you.

Create a ‘Google My Business’ Listing

Right now, when someone’s in the mood to go out to a new restaurant, one of the first things they’re going to do is search for “restaurants near me” in Google.

If you’re not showing up in these search results, it’s near impossible to get those people sitting down at one of your tables.

These search results are generated from restaurants who have a Google My Business listing.

If you aren’t familiar with what Google My Business is, it’s a free tool you can use to manage your online presence on Google — helping their algorithm make it easy for you to show up in the search results.

When you set up your Google My Business listing, you can increase your visibility on both Google Search and Google Maps.

This helps you connect with more people in your area.

When someone searches for “restaurant near me”, it’s a hyper-targeted search that lets you know they’re specifically looking for a business like yours.

On top of being more visible, a Google My Business listing also gives you a chance to start collecting more reviews — which leads to even more people seeing your listing.

Here’s an example of what a search that contains Google My Business listings looks like:

You can see, if someone is looking for a sushi place near them and you haven’t already created your listing, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

If you haven’t already created your Google My Business listing, you can get started now by going to https://www.google.com/business.

Once you’ve created your listing, the next step will be to optimize it so that it appears in the searches you want it to appear in.

That means you’ll need to fully fill out your profile, including everything from your contact details, hours of operation, location, what you serve, pricing, etc.

You’re also going to want to include photos of what you serve.

(Remember, we eat with our eyes first!)

Include photos of the ambiance of your restaurant as another way to grab attention when you’re showing up in the search results.

When you do it right, your listings will be full-featured and give your potential visitors everything they need to decide whether or not they want to visit your restaurant.

Here’s what a full-featured Google My Business listing looks like:

After you’ve set up your listing, the next step is to start encouraging your patrons to leave a review.

These reviews can help your listing appear higher in the search results.

As you start getting reviews, you also need to make sure you’re responding to each and every one of them, ESPECIALLY if they’re negative reviews.

When you start doing this, it will pad out your listing, give the algorithm more insight into what you do and who you serve, and give potential patrons a way to check you out before they visit.

Here’s what these reviews look like on your listing:

Don’t make the same mistake that most restaurant owners make with their negative reviews.

Respond to all of them so future patrons can see how you handled the situation.

Here’s an example of a great response to a negative review:

If future patrons see that you respond positively to negative reviews, the chances of them visiting your restaurant dramatically improve.

The key to utilizing your Google My Business listing revolves around these reviews.

When patrons are in your restaurant, you want to encourage them to leave a review letting people know how their visit went.

You can do this by putting QR scan codes on your receipt or incentivizing their participation with a discount during their next visit.

Your focus should definitely be on getting creative with how you go about obtaining reviews — and how you go about responding to them when you get them.

As a general rule of thumb, there’s two factors that determine how high you rank in the Google My Business search results: how close you are to the person and how many reviews you have.

When you’re closer to where the person is searching, you tend to rank higher for them.

However, when you have more reviews than your competition, you can push them down in the search results, making sure that you’re the top listing.

Collaborate With Local Influencers

Another great way to drive more business into your restaurant is through collaborating with local influencers.

These influencers can help spread the word about how amazing your food is and how great your ambiance is — essentially making you a local “must-visit” restaurant.

Becoming well-known in your local area is one of the easiest ways to ensure your long-term success.

If you aren’t familiar with influencer marketing, it’s a partnership or collaboration between your restaurant and popular social media personalities, where they’ll promote your business.

In exchange for this promotion, they’ll typically require payment of some sort.

Here’s an example of a collaboration between an influencer and a restaurant:

Collaborating with influencers can be incredibly effective at helping grow your restaurant.

They already have a built-in audience that may be interested in visiting your business, which gives you instant access to a wider audience as quickly as possible.

With recommendations, though, with the added visibility you also get increased credibility.

Think about what happens when you ask someone for a recommendation.

You tend to trust it, right?

With these collaborations — and the recommendations you receive — the influencer’s audience will inherently trust the recommendation being made to them.

Then, as a bit of icing on the cake, you get new content you can use on your own social media pages.

And it all starts with finding influencers who may be open to promoting your restaurant.

To get started, you’ll want to do a search on your favorite social media platforms using keywords or hashtags you think they’ll use to describe restaurants like yours.

Many times, you’ll find that they’ve already done collaborations with other restaurant owners.

Here’s an example from the “#foodbloggernyc” search on Instagram:

To help you see what these collaborations could look like, let’s take a peek at one of their posts.

Below, you’ll see that they’re already promoting a restaurant in their post.

That means the chances of them being open to collaborating with you are pretty high.

When you click through and take a look at their profile, you can see that they’ve built a healthy following already.

With more than 78,000 followers, if you collaborated with them, you may be able to convert some of those followers into patrons for your restaurant.

You’ll also notice they’ve included their email directly on their profile.

You can use it to reach out to them in an effort to start your collaboration.

If they don’t have their email available, you can also send them a direct message.

When you do, you’ll want to let them know what you’re reaching out for, what you hope to accomplish together, and how to move the conversation forward.

To help you get started, here’s a quick template you can use:

Hey, [name]!

I’m reaching out from [restaurant name], and I’ve got to say, I’m a huge fan of your work on Instagram. Your posts tell stories, and that’s the kind of authenticity we love. It’s been inspiring to see your interaction with your followers, and it’s pushing us to step up our own social media presence.

We’re in the business of serving up soul food that speaks to the heart, with a focus on [your mission statement]. I’d be thrilled to have you come over, try our dishes, and explore how we might team up for something awesome.

If this sounds like something you’d be into, please reach out at [emailaddress] or call me at [phone number]

After you’ve sent them a message, you’ll want to comment on a few of their posts.

And when they start responding, they’ll likely have a specific set of terms that will need to be met before they’re open to collaborating with you.

In most cases, that’s a form of payment.

You can offer them an invitation for free meals, or vouchers for them and their family in exchange for making posts about your restaurant.

In some cases, if they have a large audience for instance, you may even offer direct payment in exchange for shoutouts and other content related to your restaurant.

The extra reach that you get (and the new patrons) is worth it, though!

Collaborate With Strategic Partners

Another type of collaboration you can do is with strategic partners in your local area.

By partnering with other businesses that aren’t your direct competition, you can work out deals, specials, and exchanges where you send them visitors — and, in return, they send you new visitors, too.

The key to making this strategy work, though, is making sure you’re partnering with complementary businesses, NOT your direct competition.

These partnerships could range from working with local farms and breweries to bakeries and even other restaurants.

If you have local creators in the food space, partnering with them can help you gain more exposure, too.

To see what this looks like in action, take a look at the example below:

In this example, a local creator — called the foodnewsagency — is promoting a dinner mashup between multiple different restaurants in the area.

Pretty cool idea!

(If you don’t already have one of these in your area, starting one could give you amazing reach!)

The goal of these mash-ups is to share co-branded menu items and products.

And while they’re extremely effective at introducing new people to your menu items, they’re not the only type of collaboration you can do.

You can also do joint events or pop-ups.

For instance, if there’s a local arts and crafts fair happening in your city, you can run a pop-up booth in the fair and introduce people to your menu items.

Or you can connect with other restaurant owners to do social media cross-promotions and social media takeovers.

Your creativity really is the limit when it comes to partnering and collaborating with strategic partners.

To help get your wheels spinning, check out this example:

In the example above, you can see an Instagram post from PLANTA, showcasing their collaboration with Nicole Berrie on a new Kimchi Firecrackers menu item.

Then, when you check out Nicole Berrie’s Instagram profile, you can learn more about collaborating with her on projects.

There are a few things to be learned about the collaboration between Nicole Berrie and PLANTA.

First, the collaboration works because they’re both targeting trendy, health-conscious people.

PLANTA gets to tap into that audience because Nicole Berrie is a cookbook author, and recipe creator, and happens to own a Korean mart that sells kimchi.

Second, it creates excitement by offering an exclusive, limited-time menu item that isn’t available anywhere else.

Third, because they share similar target audiences, PLANTA gets promoted to Nicole Berrie’s 104,000 followers, dramatically expanding their reach.

All that is happening because of a win-win collaboration between a restaurant and a local Korean mart owner / social media influencer.

PLANTA is known for collaborating with other businesses and influencers like this.

Here’s another example from a joint venture between them and Fancy Peasant:

You can see from the comments and likes how much traction the collaboration received:

PLANTA even promoted the collaboration on their website — extending both their reach and Fancy Peasant’s reach:

There are a few reasons this collaboration is as effective as it is.

The biggest reason is because both PLANTA and Fancy Peasant share similar target audiences.

They’re both looking to attract the attention of people who are seeking plant-based recipes and products.

By offering 20% off of all purchases for PLANTA and Fancy Peasant, the campaign raises awareness for both brands while driving more customers at the same time.

Then, exclusive menu items and nourishing, plant-based angles align perfectly with Fancy Peasant’s brand, making it easy for her to create new content her audience wants to see — while getting paid.

Creating scenarios like this make it profitable for restaurant owners to work with influencers, especially when you look at long-term business growth.

Increasing your follower count (with the right people) helps your business’s credibility while increasing your reach, giving you more opportunities to convert people into new customers down the road.

The big takeaway here is that restaurants can partner with brands and relevant personalities that share their values and target audience to help drive awareness through a special offer.

Email Marketing

Now, while each of the strategies we’ve just given you works AMAZINGLY well for generating buzz and grabbing attention for your restaurant, there’s one small problem…

…the attention you gather isn’t actually yours — yet.

In the case of your Google My Business listing, you’re hoping that someone sees your restaurant first and wants to visit it instead of one of your competitors.

In the case of collaborations on social media platforms like Instagram, your audience will always be on Instagram and you’ll always be at the whims of the algorithm.

Will the algorithm show your content to them today? Will they see someone else’s content, instead?

Only the developers of the algorithm know, for sure.

So while it’s highly recommended that you set up your Google My Business listing and properly optimize it to show up high in the search results and that you do collaborations with other businesses and social media influencers, it’s even more recommended to actually capture the attention you’re generating.

When you capture the attention you’re generating and get it onto a platform that you own and control, you can almost guarantee that you’ll get your content in front of your audience.

The easiest way to do this is through email marketing.

When you move the audience you’re building on other platforms over to your own email list, you have a direct line of communication with them.

On top of that, it’s incredibly cost-effective and gives you an opportunity to target your message directly to them without algorithms getting in the way.

To get started, the first step you’ll need to take is to include a signup form on your website.

You want to make sure you’re giving people a reason to sign up.

That could be special discounts or even VIP treatment.

Then, you want to make sure you’re only collecting the information you need. In most cases, that will be their email and possibly their name.

When you attempt to collect too much information out of the gate, you’ll decrease your conversion rate and get fewer people signing up to your email list.

To see what this looks like in action, here’s a great example of a signup form:

When people enter their information on the form, they’re able to receive a $15 discount code.

Here’s another example that offers VIP access instead of a discount:

Then, when it comes time to email your list, there are quite a few different types of emails you can send.

For instance, here’s a great welcome email example from Starbucks:

By welcoming people onto your list, you can give them access to different members-only perks.

One of which we’ll talk about later in this guide.

For now, though, if you aren’t already building your email list, you can use a tool like ClickFunnels to build your landing page, sign-up form, and email the audience you’re building.

Click here now to start your free 14-day ClickFunnels trial.

When you do, you’ll be able to easily create and edit your emails using the built-in ClickFunnels drag-and-drop email editor:

You’ll also be able to fully automate your email marketing campaigns, making it easy for you to send new subscribers their welcome email and claim their members-only perks:

You can also build campaigns specific to different events throughout the year.

For instance, Cracker Barrel runs special holiday promotions to drive even more business into their restaurants during the holiday season:

If you offer special holiday discounts or menu items, you can promote these to your email list:

To help get your wheels spinning even more, here’s a list of email types you can run right now:

• Weekly or Monthly Newsletter: Share upcoming menu items, updates on your restaurant, and events happening in your area where you’ll be
• Share limited-time offers
• Highlight customer reviews, press mentions, and awards
• Feature behind-the-scenes content or staff highlights
• Include recipes or cooking tips to provide even more value
• Announce exclusive deals, coupons, and discounts for subscribers
• Promote gift cards, catering services, or private event options
• Offer a loyalty or rewards program for frequent visitors

And so many more.

You can also send out event invites to special events like wine tastings, live music nights, chef’s table dinners, or even collaborations with other strategic partners.

When you have your own email list, you’re only limited by your creativity.

If your audience may benefit from what you want to send or may be entertained or educated by your content, send them an email letting them know!

Introduce Loyalty Programs

Each of the strategies we’ve discussed so far serve a couple major purposes.

The first is to raise awareness and generate buzz and attention for your restaurant.

The second is to be able to stay in contact with people once you’ve gotten their attention.

But when you’re focused on the long-term growth of your restaurant, you want to implement strategies that can keep people coming back again and again.

One of the easiest ways to do this is through a loyalty rewards program.

These programs reward your most loyal patrons with special perks, benefits, and discounts each time they visit.

They help you get more repeat customers — because it’s easier to retain a customer once you’ve gotten them than it is to find a new customer.

Your most loyal patrons will also bring their friends and family into your establishment, giving you even more opportunities to turn them into long-term fans and loyal advocates.

There are a few different types of reward systems you can use, too.

For instance, Starbucks uses a points-based system.

Every purchase that a patron makes earns them points, which they can then redeem for free food or drinks down the road.

Here’s an example of the Starbucks points program:

With the Starbucks points program, patrons have access to multiple different tiers — Green & Gold.

Depending on their tier, they get access to more (or better) benefits.

As a loyalty member, they get free refills, birthday rewards, and other special perks.

Then, taking this one step further, when patrons are using the Starbucks app, they get increased convenience, easy tracking of their loyalty points, and even easier redemption.

Another great example of a loyalty program is the Chick-fil-A program:

With Chick-fil-A, patrons can earn points for every dollar they spend and then redeem those points for food and brand merchandise.

They offer a similar multi-tier structure to Starbucks, ranging from Red, Silver, and Signature, with increasing benefits as patrons elevate through each tier.

Here’s how Chipotle operates its loyalty program, offering patrons a way to use their points toward food, merchandise, or even giving back to a charity:

Panera Bread’s “MyPanera” takes its loyalty program to the next level.

Not only does it offer a similar points-based system but it also includes surprise rewards.

Patrons are able to earn rewards for every visit they make plus they can receive personalized rewards based on their personal preferences.

Then, Panera offers them a free birthday treat and early access to new menu items:

Once you have your loyalty program in place, you’ll want to start promoting it.

This can be on your website, your social media profiles, to your email list and at your checkout or on your receipts as guests pay their bill.

Advertising your program using these free strategies will help drive more patrons to use it.

The more you let people know about your loyalty program, the more they’re going to use it.

And every time they use it, they’re in your restaurant either increasing the number of points they have or redeeming points they’ve earned.

Introduce Gift Cards

Once you’ve started building loyal brand advocates (and rewarding them for it), the next strategy you can use to grow your restaurant is gift cards.

Giving your patrons the ability to purchase gift cards is a great way for them to introduce people they know to your restaurant — giving you even more new patrons.

A HUGE perk for gift cards, though, that many restaurant owners don’t think about, is that these are advanced cash for your business.

Each gift card you sell injects cash into your business now and then gets redeemed later.

On top of acquiring new customers (and getting paid to do it), gift cards also help increase your visibility and give you a ton of branding opportunities.

They’re one of the most convenient types of gifts your patrons can give, especially when they may not know the recipient’s preferences.

The recipient will have the option to pick and choose what they want to order and when they want to use the card.

These can be physical cards that you offer in your restaurant, or they can be digital cards offered through your website (or funnel, if you’re using ClickFunnels).

Here’s an example of a digital gift card from Girl & The Goat:

When it comes to designing and rolling out your gift cards, there’s 3 things you need to do.

The first is designing attractive cards.

You want to incorporate your branding elements and visuals so that the recipient can immediately recognize your business.

You can also think about using different designs for holidays or other special occasions. 

Then, you’ll want to create a structure for your gift card pricing and denominations.

You can choose from either fixed amounts (like $10, $20, $50, etc.) or custom amount options.

You’ll need to set minimum and maximum limits, too.

After that, you’ll have to establish gift card policies.

You can apply expiration dates to cards that are ordered, as well as determine different redemption methods — in-store, online, mobile, etc.

Make sure that you clarify the terms and conditions of the gift card so people who are purchasing understand when and how they can use them.

Once you have all of that in place, the next step is promoting your new gift card program.

Letting people on social media know about it (and the perks they can get by using it) is a great way to get the ball rolling.

The combination of all 6 of these strategies, though, when put together, makes for a healthy foundation for growing your restaurant month-over-month.

Get started by claiming your Google My Business listing.

Then spend a bit of time looking for influencers and strategic partnerships in your area.

Once you’ve found them, make sure you’re making the most of the attention you’re generating by using ClickFunnels to get them onto your email list.

After, you get an opportunity to wow them with your menu items and service, turning them into loyal brand advocates for your business — the type that use loyalty programs and purchase gift cards.

When you do this, you can experience the type of growth that most restaurant owners want to experience, without racking your brain figuring out how to pull it off.