7 Needle-Moving Restaurant Marketing Objectives to Set

It’s easy to see restaurants full every day of the week, or those that have a massive social media presence, and think it was all a stroke of luck. The reality is that it’s the result of hard work, tenacity, irresistible food, and carefully chosen restaurant marketing objectives put in place by restaurant managers and owners. 

Without these objectives, there’s no direction to follow, no feedback to garner, and no way to see how your restaurant is doing. These objectives are the ultimate way to focus your marketing efforts and make sure every decision is purposeful and aligns with your restaurant’s goals. With them, you know what exactly is moving the needle. 

Want to set restaurant marketing ideas that drive real results? Let’s dive into a few must-have objectives and how to set, adjust, and monitor them. 

Defining Your Marketing Objectives 

Restaurant marketing objectives are the targets guiding your marketing efforts. They keep your actions in line and direct all your resources toward accomplishing them. But if you’re already using social media platforms, SEO, partnering with influencers, and developing solid branding, why are they necessary? 

The short answer is that marketing is like a puzzle. It may look good as a whole, but behind the scenes, putting the pieces together requires a method to the madness. The long answer centers around purpose, as these objectives remind you what you’re working towards. Even when your restaurant marketing strategies evolve from time to time, you’ll still have a stable foundation to work from. 

Many often think of restaurant marketing objectives as interchangeable with tactics and strategies, but they have distinct meanings. Take a look at three below: 

1. Tactics are the specific steps needed to put those strategies in place, like running an email campaign. 
2. Strategies are the approaches required to reach those objectives, such as building customer loyalty through targeted email communications. 
3. Objectives are measurable and time-bound, outlining what you want to achieve. In this case, it could be increasing customer visits by 20% over the next quarter. 

We’ll talk about tactics and strategies under each objective we cover. Let’s continue. 

Objective 1: Increasing Brand Awareness 

Brand awareness is how familiar your target audience is with your restaurant. Measuring it involves visiting where your customers interact online. 

Social media metrics like engagement, growth, and impressions provide a general idea of your online presence. Google Analytics gives you a deeper look at the traffic coming to your website, like where they’re coming from and how they’re interacting with your site. Brand mentions around the web can show you exactly how people talk about and perceive your restaurant. 

Here are three ways to increase brand visibility: 

1. Cultivate a strong and appealing social media presence through regular engagement, content creation, implementing trends, and specialty tools designed for each platform. 
2. Participate in community events like food festivals or organize cooking classes to gain visibility. 
3. Team up with local businesses to host activities together or offer joint promotions. 

Objective 2: Improving Customer Satisfaction 

How happy are your customers with your product and service? Do they frequently have plenty of positive feedback about their experience? Customer satisfaction is the biggest determinant of repeat visits and loyalty.  

When customers enjoy their dining experience, they’ll return and recommend your restaurant to others. That will result in consistent business from more customers and better lifetime customer value.  

Here are four ways to improve customer satisfaction: 

1. Make it a point to collect customer feedback through online forms and in-person interactions.  
2. Regularly assess your restaurant’s menus, ambiance, and customer service in relation to feedback. 
3. Streamline your systems and training using new technology for peak efficiency and consistency. 
4. Offer personalized touches to make customers feel valued. 

Objective 3: Boosting Customer Retention 

Acquiring a new customer costs five to seven times more than retaining one, so you don’t want to lose out on these valuable relationships. While the overarching goal is to have as many people as possible eating at your restaurant, it’s not in your favor for them to be one-time customers either. That’s a red flag something isn’t working, whether it’s the food, atmosphere, or service. In the restaurant industry, repeat business is important for consistent revenue, profitability, and, according to the numbers, higher spending. 

Here are three ways to keep customers coming back: 

1. Have a loyalty program. These programs increase customer retention by rewarding customers for dining at your restaurant. Each visit earns them more points leading to discounts or exclusive offers. 
2. Consistency, with occasional surprises like events, seasonal menu items, and special drinks to keep customers excited and engaged. 
3. Personalized marketing, like birthday offers and recommendations based on their dining behaviors. 

Objective 4: Growing Social Media Engagement 

Every business should be on social media. It’s the best way to reach a relevant audience, as the built-in algorithms help these users discover your brand and get a taste of what your business offers. Each platform has special features to help you interact effectively with potential customers, showcase your food and restaurant visually, and create a community. While you’ll want to advertise your business using social media marketing tactics, you want to put a greater emphasis on creating genuine connections to encourage organic visits.  

Here are four ways to increase social media engagement: 

1. Take advantage of popular trends or viral challenges to tap into pop culture and get noticed. 
2. Engage with your followers authentically in your brand voice. 
3. Post and interact consistently, but don’t overdo it. 
4. Post a variety of high-quality material, like behind-the-scenes content, Stories, videos, reviews, polls, and interactive contests are ideal. 

Objective 5: Increasing Sales Through Promotions 

Promotions are a fantastic incentive to encourage potential customers to dine at your restaurant, even if they weren’t initially thinking of doing so. Discounts, deals, and limited-time offers are useful for creating urgency, but they should also be implemented with a purpose.  

For example, you might want to promote a new menu item or draw attention to your new restaurant catering services. You might offer a happy hour special featuring your new pasta dish or offer 10% off catering services within a specific date range, respectively. Many restaurants have found success doing buy-one-get-one (BOGO) deals or three-course bundles. These promotions boost restaurant sales by increasing traffic and enticing customers looking for a good deal. 

How to measure the success of your promotional campaigns in three steps: 

1. Make sure you’ve been tracking your sales and marketing metrics before your promotional campaigns are launched so you have a baseline for comparisons. 
2. Monitor your average check size during the promotion to see if there’s an increase in spending. 
3. Track your customer acquisition numbers and determine whether you’ve retained those customers after the promotion is over. 

Objective 6: Improving Online Review Ratings 

Customers are heavily influenced by reviews, with 74% checking at least two review sites before making decisions. While you might get lucky and gain a lead from a viral Instagram reel you posted, chances are high that many of your customers will go through a more detailed research process before setting foot in your restaurant. Not only that, but 89% of consumers expect business owners to respond to all sorts of reviews—negative or positive. 

The more positive reviews, the better, of course. However, negative reviews don’t always have to be a deterrent. It’s about mastering how you deal with them in the short term and in the long term. The short-term might be mitigating the immediate problem, while the long-term could involve rectifying the root cause if there is one. 

How to encourage positive reviews and handle negative feedback in three steps: 

1. Make it easy for customers to leave feedback, whether through a business card with a QR code to your review profiles or a text message with all the direct links 
2. Always respond professionally and quickly without getting defensive. Show accountability or provide an incentive to return and revisit the restaurant. 
3. Offer two-way communication between a negative reviewer and your restaurant to show you care about their experience. 

Objective 7: Expanding Your Customer Base 

Nurturing your existing customer base is important, but eventually, you need to expand your reach. After all, there could be plenty of interested new customers who you haven’t reached yet.  

To do so, diversify your marketing efforts. Community involvement, a stronger focus on digital advertising, and shifting toward traditional marketing tools like direct mail are all effective strategies. It’s all about spotting gaps in your plan to see how you can reach new audiences. 

How to use targeting and segmentation in two steps: 

1. Leverage local SEO efforts, as well as local radio ads, partnerships with neighborhood businesses, and social media ads. 
2. Split up your audience based on factors like age, income, dining history, values, and preferences. That way, you can tailor your messaging, deals, and other offerings to suit them. 

Setting SMART Marketing Objectives 

Setting clear objectives requires structure, and that’s where the SMART criteria come in handy. When setting objectives, make sure they are: 

• Specific: Outline what you want to achieve in a detailed manner.  

Example: Increase sales of our new pasta dish. 

• Measurable: Clearly trackable through metrics. 

Example: The pasta dish should increase in sales by 15%. 

• Achievable: Realistic given your restaurant’s situation and resources. 

Example: 15% is an achievable goal, as we’ve increased our marketing budget and ingredient budget. 

• Relevant: Goal should align with your restaurant’s business objectives. 

Example: Biggest goal is to increase food sales. 

• Time-Bound: The goal should be reached within a specific timeframe. 

Example: Achieve a 15% sales increase within the next quarter. 

5 Keys to Monitoring and Adjusting Objectives 

Marketing objectives should never be set and forgotten. They should be constantly monitored over time in case adjustments are required. This allows you to keep your objectives in line with your restaurant’s broader goals and industry trends at all times. 

Five useful tools to help with this include: 

1. Built-in social media insights on Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok to dive into your reach, audience demographic breakdown, engagement, and more. 
2. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software like Paytronix for a broad range of loyalty, marketing, and engagement solutions for granular tracking. 
3. Customer feedback to gauge real-time opinions and sentiments on the customer experience and identify room for improvement. 
4. A/B testing to compare marketing tactics and deploy whichever works better. 
5. Regular team check-ins to ensure alignment and personal employee feedback so you can adjust strategies as needed. 

Frequently Asked Questions About Restaurant Marketing Objectives 

Still need clarity on certain aspects of restaurant marketing objectives? Let’s go over a few FAQs about them below. 

What are the objectives of a restaurant? 

Restaurant objectives should focus on growth, attracting and retaining customers, and becoming more profitable. Those are just the basics! 

What are the objectives of food marketing? 

Food marketing objectives include boosting sales and brand awareness, attracting new customers, and turning them into loyal clientele. Marketing food means promoting it as a unique product and executing targeted campaigns. 

What is the best marketing strategy for a restaurant? 

A restaurant business should create a broad marketing strategy involving digital and traditional marketing channels, brand visibility, managing and encouraging online reviews, special promotions, and community-focused tactics. As you can imagine, a restaurant marketing strategy can be pretty in-depth. 

What are the four main business objectives? 

The four main business objectives are:  

1. Profitability (financial success) 
2. Growth (sales and reach)  
3. Satisfying customers (meeting customer expectations) 
4. Staying operationally efficient (improve business performance and productivity) 

Moving Forward with Campaigns 

Now that you’re familiar with how to set restaurant marketing objectives and goals to achieve them, you’ll want to tailor them to your restaurant. Whether you’re more focused on monthly net restaurant sales, daily net restaurant sales, food quality, or something entirely different, you’ll want to consistently revisit them. This will ensure they consistently align with your broader restaurant marketing goals. 

To improve the success of your campaigns, marketing automation tools, like ours at Paytronix, can help you master each part of your restaurant marketing strategy. Schedule a demo to see how our tools at Paytronix help you get more out of your efforts. 

For more insights, check out our helpful e-book on Choosing a Loyalty Program for Your Convenience Store for ideas that can be applied to your customer retention strategy.