Digital Marketing for Restaurants: 12 Tips for Any Budget

Restaurant digital marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach a bigger audience, driving search engine performance, and securing new customers. It’s more cost-effective than nearly every other type of marketing channel. It’s a strategy that restaurants of all sizes and budgets successfully use to grow. 

To get the strongest return on your investment (ROI) in digital marketing for restaurants, it’s a good idea to use what other restaurants have found success with. Keep reading for 12 tips across various digital marketing channels to help you make the most of your marketing dollars, even if you have a very limited budget. 

A. Establishing Your Online Presence

To make the most of digital marketing for your restaurant, it begins with a top-tier website. It isn’t enough to simply buy a domain and set it up so that it opens a third-party website like Facebook. You can’t create effective SEO content and website pages for Facebook like you can on your own website.

1. Create a User-Friendly Restaurant Website 

Make your restaurant website easy to navigate, intuitive, and user-friendly. You don’t want potential customers to get frustrated with your site and leave before finishing their online order. Since most people will likely visit your website from their phones or tablets, make sure it’s mobile friendly and accessible from mobile devices. 

2. Make It Possible for Visitors to Book a Reservation Online

Today’s standard is giving your website visitors the option to book a reservation for your restaurant online. You want them to be able to take action immediately, versus hoping that they visit your restaurant without prior action.  

3. Optimize Your Website Using SEO Best Practices

Optimize your website using SEO best practices so your restaurant’s website shows up in search results. This includes using: 

• Relevant keywords 
• Meta descriptions 
• Title tags and H1s 
• Internal links to other pages 

There are tools such as Surfer SEO and NeuronWriter you can use to identify which keywords to use and to score your content’s SEO performance against your competitors. Use these tools to improve your content’s performance by expanding on-page topical coverage and structuring subheaders and paragraphs for the best chance to rank. 

4. Focus on Local SEO 

Unless you operate a restaurant with locations across the nation, it’s important to utilize local SEO tactics to reach customers in the geographic region around your restaurant. For example, it doesn’t make sense as a local Italian restaurant in Tampa, FL to try to compete with national brands, such as Olive Garden, when it comes to Google Ads performance and SEO. However, you could create effective content around the keywords “Italian restaurant in Tampa” to make the most of reaching nearby customers. 

B. Leveraging Social Media

Many restaurants already have social media accounts but don’t achieve the results they want in terms of customer engagement and sales. Following are two tips to better leverage social media to benefit your business. 

5. Be Active Where Your Target Customers are Active 

It’s a waste of time to invest tons of resources into every social media platform out there. Your best customers aren’t on every platform. You should prioritize engaging on social media where your target customers are.  

You can do this by interests, location, gender, and/or age. According to Sprout Social, the most popular social media platform by age is: 

• 18- to 29-year-olds: Snapchat 
• 30- to 39-year-olds: LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter) 
• 40- to 49-year-olds: LinkedIn and Facebook 
• 50- to 59-year-olds: Facebook 

If you operate a bar that sells craft beer, for instance, it makes more sense to prioritize Snapchat. If your target market for your restaurant with a play area is working parents, focusing on LinkedIn and X would make the most sense. 

6. Create Shareable Content 

Make the content you publish on social media extremely sharable. Prioritize stunning photos of your best menu items, special offers, discounts, giveaways, contests, and event announcements.  People are more likely to share these types of content with their friends.

C. Email Marketing 

Building your restaurant’s email subscriber list is an easy and effective way to reach your customers and send hyperpersonalized promotions and special offers. Unlike social media, where an algorithm determines whether or not most of your followers see your content, emails go directly into your customers’ inboxes. 

7. Build a Subscriber List 

It’s illegal to purchase a subscriber list and make it your own. Instead, you have to collect customer emails to make your own list—but this doesn’t need to be a complicated or difficult process. Collect emails using sign-up sheets at events, during customer interactions at your restaurant, or with an opt-in form on social media. By offering a free appetizer or a small discount for signing up, it’s easier to encourage customers to join your email list and your loyalty program, if you have one. 

8. Develop Engaging Email Marketing Campaigns 

Make the most of the email marketing campaigns you send to customers so they stay subscribed to your list. Send information about timely events and specials, offer them discounts, and highlight new menu items. Avoid sending out too many emails too often so customers are less likely to unsubscribe.  

D. Utilizing Paid Advertising

To maximize the benefits of digital marketing, invest in paid advertising, too. You don’t need to spend a lot of money to see results from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Instagram Ads.  

9. Set Up and Optimize Facebook and Instagram Ads 

As you set up your restaurant’s Facebook and Instagram Ads, optimize it so that you only pay for your target audience to see it. These are customers who live in your direct geographic area, who have money to spend, and who match other demographic characteristics of your target market.  

10. Think Local with Google Ads for Restaurants 

For your Google Ads campaigns, target local keywords such as “brunch near [neighborhood]” and enable location extensions. You want your ads to make it easy for local customers to find you. 

E. Tracking and Analytics 

To know your digital marketing works, you need to track and analyze its performance. Here are two techniques to keep in mind: 

11. Measure Digital Marketing Successes 

The tools you already use also allow you to measure digital marketing campaign success. You can gather information about website traffic, user behavior, and conversations with: 

• Google Analytics 
• Google My Business Insights 
• Facebook Insights 
• Google Ads Reports 
• Email marketing platforms, like Klaviyo, Constant Contact, and Mailchimp 

12. Use Data to Adjust Marketing Strategies 

By monitoring the successes and failures of your digital marketing campaigns, you can use data to adjust your marketing strategies to see better results. If something’s working well, it might be worth doubling down on that strategy. If your Google Ads are getting a lot of traffic, it might be worth increasing your max daily spend to improve it. If a strategy isn’t working as well, you can try different strategies to refine it. 

The Bottom Line 

Digital marketing is an excellent way to connect with new customers and keep current customers engaged. While you don’t have to roll out these strategies at once, the more types of digital marketing you can implement, the better the results.  

Digital marketing goes hand in hand with loyalty programs, customer acquisition, and engagement. Check out our 2024 Loyalty Guide to see how leading restaurants and convenience stores increase customer lifetime value through loyalty. The great news is that you can do it, too. 

Ready to tap into your restaurant marketing’s full potential? We provide industry-leading online ordering and loyalty solutions so your restaurant can achieve more profitable guest engagement outcomes. Schedule a demo now to see what Paytronix can do for you.