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Guide to Writing a Restaurant Marketing Plan (Templates, Ideas & Strategies)
Stephanie Schalow
5 min read
Jun 25, 2025
Stephanie Schalow
5 min read
Jun 25, 2025
Today’s diners are hungry for more than just great food: they want elevated experiences, personalized touches and moments truly worth the splurge.
They're seeking unique occasions that leave a lasting impression, eager to customize and upgrade their meals. This means attracting the right customers, and more importantly, keeping them coming back, is trickier than ever.
A data-informed restaurant marketing plan is your secret ingredient. Done right, the marketing plan gets people through the door and defines your unforgettable brand and experiences you offer — fostering the kind of loyalty that turns first-time visitors into raving regulars. After all, 74% of consumers say they’ll return to a restaurant after a truly unique experience.
Ready to craft a marketing plan that captures hearts (and wallets) and ensures your restaurant thrives? Our guide and free template for creating a restaurant marketing plan is designed to give you a head start on your marketing efforts across email, text, social and more.
A restaurant marketing plan is a document that outlines and informs your marketing strategy. It typically covers topics like who your ideal customers are, how you’re going to reach those customers and how you’ll compete with your competitors. Creating a strategic plan is a helpful exercise in many ways:
If you plan to grow or seek investors, you’ll need to present a marketing plan to stakeholders in addition to your business plan. Together, these documents prove that you’ve thought through the ins and outs of operating and promoting a restaurant.
Going through the exercise of creating a restaurant marketing plan helps you put all the creative promotional ideas you have in your head into writing, so you can share your vision with collaborators and hold yourself accountable.
No need to start from scratch! Download our free template to kickstart your marketing plan!
Here’s a detailed look at what information your restaurant’s marketing plan should contain.
Write a brief introduction to the business that covers the basics, like your restaurant’s name, location, service style and concept.
Then, summarize highlights from the rest of the marketing plan. We suggest writing this part last, so that you can reference the rest of the document.
Explain your restaurant’s marketing goals and the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure success.
Need inspiration? Here are some sample goals to get you started:
Goal 1: Reach new customers
KPI: Have 100 customers attend the restaurant’s grand opening celebration.
Goal 2: Increase customer retention
KPI: Double the number of customer accounts in the restaurant’s CRM
Goal 3: Boost brand awareness
KPI: Increase the restaurant’s social media following by 15% every quarter.
A restaurant’s mission and values are a large part of your brand identity — it informs your business decisions, branding, voice and processes. Simply put, a mission statement explains why your restaurant exists, and it needs its own space in your restaurant marketing plan.
Write down your restaurant’s unique selling propositions (USPs): what makes it different from the competition.
Keep your USPs in mind when crafting your marketing strategy; they should inform everything from branding to your social media posts. It might also help to refer back to your mission statement when defining USPs.
Who is your ideal customer?
Get specific. Knowing who you want to target with your marketing efforts will help you create marketing campaigns that resonate with that audience.
Consider creating restaurant personas for everyone who walks through your door. For example, you might want to target suburban families seeking a quick dinner meal at a good price. Alternatively, you may want to cater to high-paid, urban professionals looking for an exclusive restaurant where they can entertain clients.
The more you know about who’s dining with you, the better you can deliver personalized experiences that keep guests coming back. SevenRooms’ restaurant CRM can help you build detailed guest profiles that track everything from visit history to diner preferences.
Dive Deeper: Guest Data: The Restaurant Marketer’s Secret Weapon
Research your market. Get to know the competition to source ideas from them and understand how to differentiate your business.
Answer questions like:
A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) can help identify what you’re doing well now as well as strategies for how to improve in the future.
Strengths: Internal attributes that can help your business:
Examples:
Weaknesses: Internal attributes that can stand in the way of your goals.
Examples:
Opportunities: External attributes that can help your business.
Example:
Threats: External attributes that can stand in the way of your goals.
Example:
Include your restaurant’s branding guidelines in your marketing plan.
Incorporate key branding assets, such as:
Take inspiration from burgers. beer. bourbon., which makes its branding guidelines publicly available online.
Explain how your restaurant’s prices compare to competitors’ and how you’ll position your business among the competition.
Let’s say, for example, you run a healthy fast food restaurant chain. Fast-food restaurants aren’t known for having healthy options. You can leverage your higher prices to show that you use better ingredients and position yourself as the leader in healthier fast food.
List any and all digital and physical marketing channels that your restaurant uses or plans on using, and explain how you’ll use each channel to achieve your marketing goals.
For marketing channels where you own your presence, such as your website and Google listing, prioritize direct booking and ordering over third-party platforms. (SevenRooms has a solution for this.) There’s no reason to have a middleman on channels that you have control over!
Learn More: How to Shift from Legacy Reservation Apps to Direct Booking
Your marketing calendar should include holidays, events and other important moments. Every season offers a unique opportunity for restaurants to engage customers and drive sales — if you plan ahead and track every date. Create a simple marketing calendar to help ensure you celebrate every important, revenue-generating milestone.
Need help coming up with new ideas for timely events? Check out our UK and Australian marketing calendars to get the creative juices flowing.
Use this final section to synthesize all you’ve discovered about your business to create a list of marketing campaigns and strategies you’ll use to launch or grow your restaurant business. These ideas are the heart of your restaurant marketing plan, so don’t skimp on the details here. Brainstorm actionable strategies, including long- and short-term plans, across specific channels.
As you strategize your marketing plans, know that confining yourself to a single channel alone won’t work. To reach today’s guests, you must be where they are, which means expanding into multiple channels and creating a consistent brand experience. This is called an omnichannel marketing strategy. Read our omnichannel marketing guide to learn how to implement it.
Whatever channels you decide to leverage (and you should choose several), remember to create a consistent brand experience across them.
Here are some ideas to get you started on a successful omnichannel marketing approach:
According to our platform data, customers who receive email marketing are 3.5 times more likely to book another dining experience than those who do not.
Convert first-time customers into regulars by collecting guest data and then using email software to send targeted emails to guests. Events that might interest them, loyalty program invites, review requests — it’s all fair game.
A successful email should include personalized subject lines and high-quality graphics.
Balance Hospitality Group used SevenRooms’ email marketing software to generate hyper-personalized email campaigns by segmenting guests based on interests. Their efforts translated to $1.3M and 18,000 covers across three venues—all through email. Read more about their marketing success here.
48% of consumers prefer getting texts from restaurants, especially for time-sensitive messages and reservation updates. Text marketing also delivers 24 times the ROI, according to SevenRooms data.
From personalized restaurant perks for birthdays and anniversaries to last-minute menu updates, a well-timed and personalized text is almost guaranteed to reach customers.
Consider adding marketing automation software to your restaurant tech stack to help power your email and text marketing strategies. SevenRooms offers hospitality templates you can use to quickly segment, customize and send targeted messages at scale in minutes.
Some restaurant owners might focus all their time on one channel, while others have the bandwidth to promote across all platforms. Show users how a fan-favorite dish is made, invest in your photography skills or go live during an event. Regardless of where you choose to live online, commit to a consistent posting schedule to increase awareness.
Nearly half (49%) of diners discover new restaurants on social media. TikTok and Instagram are great social media channels for engaging potential customers and maximizing online presence. To capitalize on exposure and promote your restaurant, hire a social media consultant to work with influencers or partner with brand advocates.
Create links with source tracking attributes for your reservations, online ordering and event-ticketing landing pages. Place those links in your bio, about sections and in posts using a simple call to action like “book a table” or “order now.”
Restaurant video marketing is worth the investment — on social media and in your marketing campaigns. Facebook Reels and Instagram stories have high open rates and greater organic reach, so it’s worth dedicating some time to posting on these channels.
Keep them short and sweet: videos under 90 seconds have the highest viewer retention rates.
Adding video to your website or landing page can increase conversion rates by up to 80%!
Even a small loyalty program can significantly boost sales. Brainstorm ways to create a loyalty program tailored to your business that caters to your most loyal customers and offers incentives to encourage repeat business.
Then, send texts and emails to encourage return visits. Small gestures, such as “thank you” notes to first-time diners and online reviewers or exclusive access to perks and limited-time offers, can help generate guest loyalty.
Whether you host events for all customers or reserve special occasions for your VIPs, celebrations at your venue help generate excitement and word-of-mouth.
Create landing pages for each event and experience. A well-designed landing page with all the information about your event and restaurant is a highly marketable asset that you can promote across your website, email newsletters and social media channels.
Events and experiences can also be a great way to drive pre-paid revenue and reduce no-shows and cancellations. Encourage guests to reserve their ticket and pre-pay by adding a direct booking link to your event landing page or reservation widget to your marketing materials.
When building your website, implement a few search engine optimization strategies to increase visibility and positioning in search engines. The higher your SEO score, the more likely your restaurant will appear at the top of Google searches — and the greater chance you have to acquire a booking or order.
Use Google Keyword Planner to brainstorm website content and identify keywords to incorporate throughout. Consider hiring a digital marketing agency or SEO company to help you optimize your restaurant’s website and drive more traffic.
A successful social media marketing strategy includes paid ads. While you don’t need to boost every post, it’s wise to promote your business across specific demographics (this is why guest data is important), to advertise new menu items or take-out options. Hashtags can also help ensure more people see your post.
With paid digital ads, you can:
Sending coupons, takeaway offers and event invites to a select group of people in the mail is still an effective marketing strategy. But before sending mailers, be sure your website and other POS systems are prepared to track the success of your campaigns.
As you build out your marketing strategies, remember to track the success of your campaigns to determine what’s worth allocating more time to and what isn’t. Digital marketing tracking links will help to determine the return on investment (ROI) of each partnership.
Restaurateurs have a lot on their plates — it’s easy to get caught up in day-to-day operations and neglect promoting your business. A data-backed restaurant marketing plan can help keep your team focused on communicating with guests more intentionally.
However, developing marketing strategies that drive revenue and support your brand experience requires knowing your customers inside and out.
SevenRooms’ CRM, marketing, and operations platform was built for hospitality operators who want to build better relationships with customers using guest data. When you collect this data using the right tech tools automatically, you can use it to tailor your marketing, elevate the customer experience and measure the impact on your bottom line.
Learn more about how a restaurant CRM could benefit your restaurant.
