Marketing Strategies for Restaurants in the UK

Marketing is a crucial element for every restaurateur or manager to master. It’s what will get your restaurant noticed by potential customers and to get people in the door. Restaurant marketing helps new customers find restaurants, learn about the mouthwatering signature dishes and can define what makes any restaurant special.

Restaurant marketing can take many forms; it can involve the way that a restaurant showcases itself to customers who enter the restaurant, the way a restaurant is presented online, and the way that customers or influencers promote it online. Here are some beginners tips and restaurant marketing ideas for restaurateurs and restaurant managers looking to grow their restaurant's presence, increase profit margins, and ensure success.

Create a Restaurant Marketing Plan

There are many ways to market a restaurant and it can be difficult to determine which methods are the best ones to choose. For that reason, creating a marketing plan alongside your business plan can help hone in on the best marketing ideas for restaurants to ensure that your business has visibility and can grow.

Marketing for restaurants can be as simple as placing your restaurant on billboards or creating radio ads, or it can expand to sending emails or posting on social media.

The way to build your marketing strategy is to set clear goals of what you are hoping to accomplish. Do you want to increase earnings or make people more aware of your restaurant? Once you know what your business goals are, you can then research competitors to see what they are doing to market their businesses, and then determine the methods that are best for you. 

Keep in mind that no marketing strategy is set in stone. As a general rule, it's best to start small and begin with a few different marketing methods, optimising and modifying your strategy as you observe what methods are working and which ones aren’t. Here are the steps you can take to create your marketing plan:

1. Research Your Market: Completing some initial research will allow you to determine your competition and target audience, which will in turn help you identify the best methods for reaching your audience. Start by looking on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok to find out how other restaurants are promoting their businesses.

2. Identify Your Goals: Setting a goal like the number of potential customers you would like to reach or the monthly foot traffic increase as a result of your marketing strategy can help you hone in on the methods you take.

3. Create a Budget: As with other facets of your restaurant business, you will need to create a budget to ensure you don’t overspend on marketing. Once you know how much you have to spend, you can then determine the marketing methods that will help you reach the most people for the least amount of money.

4. Identify Your Marketing Channels: Whether you want to reach your potential customers through social media, email marketing, or billboard ads, start by determining which channels will showcase your restaurant business in its best light while reaching as many people as possible.

5. Schedule Content for Marketing: Once you understand where and how to reach your audience, it's time to create a schedule for content creation and publishing. This schedule can include publishing on social media, sending out email newsletters, and creating ads. Don't forget to include tasks like engaging with followers on social media or following up with customers who have left online reviews on Google.

Utilise Social Media

Whether it is through Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, social media is a tried and tested marketing channel to use when trying to achieve restaurant visibility. The reality is, social media marketing for restaurants is affordable and has the capacity to reach a significant amount of people and inspire them to visit your business.

When getting started with social media marketing for restaurants, remember that you don't need to be on every platform to move the marketing needle. Start off with just one or two accounts - both Facebook and Instagram are incredibly visual platforms, where you can build communities of engaged fans and followers, making them excellent forums for showcasing your dishes in the best light. Make your potential guests’ mouths water by publishing foodie photos that make your followers stop scrolling and feel compelled to comment. Replying to comments on other posts via your restaurant's account offers another way to engage with potential customers and further the connection. 

Besides publishing photos of your restaurant’s most visually appealing dishes, foster new relationships and connections by asking your followers for suggestions on what they would like to see on your revamped menu or repost your guests' reviews and videos of your restaurant and your restaurant’s food.

Post High-Quality Content

If you choose to go down the social media marketing route for your restaurant, focus on creating aesthetically pleasing photos that showcase your restaurant’s dishes. Your restaurant and food should be photographed in the best light possible, and the food should be plated in an attractive way. Plating dishes in fun ways makes them more likely to be photographed and shared on social media by your guests too.

If you're handy with your phone, you can easily take photos and publish them yourself. However, you might want to hire a social media manager or photographer who can take photos to make your restaurant’s dishes look as Instagrammable as possible.

And don’t forget about video content on social media. With platforms like TikTok championing user-generated content, they’re a great place to start when showcasing your restaurant's offering. All you need is a phone and willing staff or even customers to help you go viral!

Prioritise Food Presentation (Make Dishes Instagram-Worthy)

While having quality photos is one way to show your restaurant’s food in its best light, another factor is ensuring the food is plated in an Instagram-worthy way. Think tall ice cream sundaes adorned with whipped cream and sprinkles, juicy steaks seared to perfection with a pop of green from rosemary or thyme, or brightly coloured Buddha bowls topped with a mixture of fresh and cooked vegetables. 

The way your restaurant’s dishes are plated should be like eye candy that restaurant-goers will feel compelled to photograph and post on social media.

Implement Email Marketing

Email marketing provides restaurants with a way to connect and reengage with customers and drive repeat visits. You could email your loyal customers to invite them back to your restaurant, offer discounts or specials (such as 10% off at the next visit or buy one get one free drinks), or let them know what is new in your business. 

Restaurant email marketing can also extend to sending customers a newsletter on a weekly or monthly basis. A newsletter is a wonderful way to market a restaurant as it can include information like staff profiles, new menu items, upcoming seasonal events (such as a ticketed menu for New Years or St. Patrick’s Day), exclusive offers, and customer testimonials.

Think strategically about how you can take advantage of occasions like birthdays too, as they can often lead to larger groups and bigger bills when guests celebrate with their families and friends. You can set up an automated email as part of a loyalty programme that is sent to potential guests a few weeks before their birthday, and offers them a discounted meal or free dessert for coming in to celebrate their birthday.

Create a Website

Every restaurant should have a website. It can provide crucial information to potential diners about your menu, opening hours, parking availability, contact details, or advice on how to make reservations.

A website is also a wonderful way to showcase your brand and what it stands for, with elements like the mission statement, tone of your content, logo and brand colours all playing an important part of the overall picture. You could also use your website to sell gift cards to customers, offering them an easy way to support your business.

Ultimately, your restaurant website will be a customer's first impression of your restaurant, so it's essential that it represents your restaurant in the right way and provides visitors with as much information as possible to entice them to try out your establishment.

Start a Restaurant Blog

If you want to focus on online marketing for restaurants, starting a blog is a great way to do so. Publishing blog content can further engage your customers with your restaurant by giving them a space to learn more about what you do, who you are, and what you stand for. A blog is also a great way to make your restaurant more visible online.

Blog topic and article ideas for your restaurant blog could include:

• Content about your successes or failures within the restaurant industry

• Tales from life on the line

• Stories about star staffers

• Recipe ideas

• The history of your restaurant or the cuisine you serve

• News or information about upcoming events at your restaurant

While starting a blog may seem like a complicated task, it doesn’t have to be. You can find blog templates on websites like Wordpress and carrying out competitor research will point you in the right direction for the kind of blog content you should be publishing. Simply set up a schedule to ensure you publish something new on the blog at least bi-weekly or monthly and share the load by encouraging your back-of-house and front-of-house team to become content creators and publish on the restaurant's blog, too.

Implement SMS Marketing

SMS marketing for restaurants involves sending text messages to new or existing customers to engage and entice them to visit your restaurant. You can use this method to text discounts or exclusive deals to existing customers, or to let them know about upcoming events. It's also a good way to prompt customers to leave a review on Google, as more reviews will increase your restaurant’s visibility online.

There are a number of tools that allow you to implement SMS marketing for your restaurant, including ClickSend and Simple Texting, but before you choose one, it's important to be clued-up on the rules and regulations around SMS marketing.

Improve Your Restaurant’s Online Visibility With SEO

SEO marketing for restaurants is key to ensuring that your restaurant is easily discoverable online. Start optimising your restaurant’s online visibility by creating a Google business profile, which will include your restaurant’s address, contact information, and photos, and gives restaurant-goers a place to leave their reviews. You should also look at publishing your restaurant’s details on websites like Yelp.

If your restaurant has a website, you could carry out some local SEO keyword research and spend time including these key terms across the pages and content you publish where relevant. As well as making sure your restaurant's home page is optimised for SEO, publishing regular blog posts on your website can be a great way to climb up the search engine rankings to get your restaurant noticed. To get started or learn more about SEO, check out Hubspot's helpful courses for all knowledge levels.

Partner With Influencers

Influencers are paid to promote products, brands and businesses on social media. Their positive content often has huge potential reach, but influencer marketing for restaurants can be expensive. If there are foodie influencers or bloggers in your area, contact them to see if they would be willing to visit your restaurant and post about it on social media. Alternatively, you could reach out to repeat customers and incentivise them to promote your restaurant online.

Influencers usually take payment per social media post, so, depending on your budget, you could choose different content types, volumes, and frequencies for posting.

Engage With Customers Via Restaurant Reviews

Whether customers leave positive or negative reviews about their dining experience through review platforms like Google, you should respond to them to let them know you have heard their feedback and appreciate it. Letting someone who gave an excellent review know that their commentary has been heard may seal the deal when driving repeat business.

Meanwhile, a response to a negative review is an opportunity for you to smooth things over with the customer who left it, while giving those who read it the impression that you will go above and beyond to serve your customers. When responding to negative reviews, you should always be professional and polite, while acknowledging their disappointment and offering a resolution. 

Invest in Paid Ads

Although investing in paid ads isn’t essential for marketing a restaurant, if your restaurant is in its early stages, paid ads can be a helpful way of increasing its online exposure. Paid ads on Google or Facebook can help improve your business’s visibility, ensuring that more people visit. 

• Here’s a helpful guide to Facebook paid advertising

• Here’s a helpful guide to Google paid advertising

When creating ads, make sure you only target people in your particular area. While getting many clicks is a good thing, the cost can add up and spending large amounts of money won’t benefit your restaurant if the people who click on your ads live too far away to visit your restaurant.

Are You Ready to Tackle Different Marketing Strategies for Restaurants?

While this list of marketing techniques for restaurants isn’t exhaustive, it does provide a great starting point if you're looking to launch a successful restaurant business or expand your operations.

From social media and email marketing to influencer partnerships, how will you use these restaurant promotion methods to improve your restaurant’s online footprint and translate its improved visibility into increased profit?