Restaurant Marketing Blog

Restaurant Marketing Tactics

Mar 26, 2025

Restaurant marketing is the process of letting strangers know what you sell – the food, drinks, and experience they can expect when visiting your establishment. The more people know what you sell, the more they will eat at your restaurant. You are not getting enough customers because you are not marketing enough, and potential customers remain uninformed about your restaurant.

The key to increasing sales is employing a wide variety of restaurant marketing tactics. Think of it like fishing. The more lines cast, the greater the chance for a bite.

And just like fishing, you need the right bait for the fish. The message needs to match the medium – in-restaurant signage, social media posts, and email need different content to get the best results.

Online Restaurant Marketing Tactics

The starting point for digital marketing is that potential customers are overwhelmingly likely to research the restaurant’s website and read reviews before making a first visit. An optimized website and timely, responsive reputation management are not optional – they are a must.

An optimized website requires pleasing graphical design, easy navigation, enticing pictures of the dishes, local SEO and other content focused on the neighborhood, and clear contact information.

Reputation management for restaurants is making the most of the major review platforms (e.g. Yelp) – respond to all customer feedback in a timely manner with a positive attitude; have a complete business profile; include high-quality pictures of the food.

crowded dinning room with happy patrons after using a few restaurant marketing techniques to increase sales.

If budget and time are seriously constrained, put all your resources into the restaurant’s website and make responding to reviews a consistent habit.

Email is the second must-do restaurant marketing tactic. Even as the online world has evolved to include smartphones and social media, email marketing remains the tried and true strategy for tempting customers into repeat visits. Make sure to have a great subject line and take the necessary steps to grow the newsletter list. See our Restaurant Marketing Email guide for more tips to boost foot traffic.

Another promotion strategy is implementing an online reservation system. This directly addresses one of the top 3 reasons that causes customers not to return – long wait times. OpenTable and Resy are the big names, but can be a bit costly, so look around for other options. Make sure whatever system you choose has a way for customers to subscribe to the restaurant’s newsletter and their contact info (name + email) can be easily exported.

Next on the list of restaurant marketing tactics is taking advantage of social media. Get in the habit of posting on a regular basis. Content should certainly include specials and advertising happy hour. But don’t stop there. Step outside the box and maximize reach with funny memes, behind the scenes snippets, and personal stories. Use social media to connect with customers on a deeper level, not boring restatement of fact.

Want to take your restaurant sales game to the next level? Combine special events and paid ads on Google, Facebook, and/or Instagram to fill the place on a normally slow day and maximize red-letter day reservations. Make sure to use geotargeting to focus on patrons that live or work near the restaurant/bar, have a great visit-inducing headline, and use split testing to consistently improve ad text. This is easily one of the best ways to turn $200 into a $10,000+ sales day. Assuming you have newsletter subscriptions in place (email is the second restaurant marketing tactic after all!), this can pay off big time in the short and long term.

Real World Restaurant Marketing Tactics

Don’t get so caught up in online strategies that you forget in-person and other real world restaurant marketing tactics!

First and foremost, the establishment must deliver a great dining experience – great food for the price, outstanding service, and minimal wait times.

After delivering on the core restaurant/bar experience – delve into a bit of menu science. Place high-profit items in the upper right corners of each page, and as the first and last items in lists. Additionally, highlight them with borders, icons, heavy font-weight, or different font colors. Prices should omit the the dollar symbols as diners tend to spend more without those. Use evocative, appetite inducing titles that highlight what makes the dish unique. Keep the description to two lines max. Have clear headings and spacing between each section.

Once your done with optimizing the menu – focus on menu flyers. Like email, they are one of the tried and true restaurant marketing tactics that just works. Local businesses will often take them back to the office and keep them in a stack for employees to consider. Residents who live nearby frequently fish them out of a drawer when deciding what to eat.

Make sure the flyers have clear, large print; include the restaurant’s phone, URL, and address; and highlight the restaurant’s most popular/profitable dishes (like with the menu, use borders, icons, or different font-weight). Stick the flyers in every to-go order and doggie bag. If the restaurant is near a high foot-traffic area (e.g. near Golden One), consider hiring people to hand out flyers after big games and concerts.

Table tents are another tactic that work well – for the right establishment. Use the same menu science techniques to highlight the most profitable items – particularly with list placement (first and last) and font color and/or font weight. Also, make sure they have a QR code for subscribing to the newsletter with a clear benefit to the customer for subscription.

sketched restaurant showing happy bright image of patrons and wait staff brought together by restaurant marketing tactics.

A quick aside, one recent trend is QR codes for menus. Don’t do that. Restaurants and bars are fundamentally a social experience. Customers want to interact with a pleasant wait staff, that offers helpful suggestions and hopefully remembers their favorite drink or name. Save the table top QR codes for frictionless newsletter subscriptions, not automation.

Community engagements another of the old time restaurant marketing tactics that continues to work. Options abound. Sponsoring neighborhood schools sports teams, clubs (e.g. boy scouts/girl scouts), hosting a special charity dinner, or catering a special drive are all great. It shows you care about the community and builds appreciation from the residents.

For restaurants and bars with TVs, adding a service like Upshow.tv or Atmosphere.tv is great technique for advertising upcoming special events and highlighting high-profit items.

Other Restaurant Marketing Strategies

In recent years, two marketing tactics stand out as effective ways to increase restaurant sales – delivery service and loyalty programs.

Most customers still prefer to call the restaurant directly rather than use a third party service for placing orders. If you want to minimize or skip the third party fees entirely, use the restaurant’s website, email newsletter, and social media presence to let customers know that phone-in pick-up orders are an option. With most customers traveling less than 3 miles for a visit, this works surprisingly well. Make sure the to-go containers work well and staff know how to seal them correctly.

Loyalty Programs are the other hot trend. The big multi-store national chains base these programs on transactional rewards – get points for spending X dollars, use those points for discounts or free items. For smaller chains and one-off restaurants, focus on experiences and relationships that build authentic loyalty. Remember the 80/20 rule, 20% of your customers account for 80% of revenue. Make the top 20% of customers feel special, like they are part of an exclusive club. Instead of giving a discount, have a VIP night for your all-star customers, and treat them like royalty.

Loyalty programs can be done overlapping with email marketing efforts. Use a segmented list in the email providers system combined with the POS or reservation system to identify frequent visitors, and place them into unique email segments after spending certain life time totals or a certain number of reservations. For example, a fine dining establishment might have segments for diners that visit 5 and 10+ times. Then, using data from the reservation system, those customers can be identified and placed into the appropriate segment.

The other option is to contract with a third party app provider like Toast or UpMenu. They are costly, but make the process much easier to manage.