With so many restaurants delivering via UberEats, how can your business stand out from the crowd? There are lots of strategies for gaining an advantage, and one of the most effective strategies is to make a restaurant marketing plan.
Learn how to create a marketing plan to attract new customers, reward loyalty, and increase restaurant sales – and how Uber Eats can help you execute it.
What is a restaurant marketing plan?
A marketing plan is a strategic roadmap that outlines the steps you’re taking to advertise your business.
Think of your restaurant marketing plan as a to-do list, with each item you check off achieving one of your restaurant’s marketing goals.
How to create a restaurant marketing plan
1. Define your restaurant
Get specific. Don’t just say you serve food, write down your speciality dish or the theme of your menu.
Do you want to be the number 1 restaurant for a specific cuisine? Are you making hearty food for families or quick bites for students? Does your restaurant use farm-to-table ingredients? Why are you passionate about using farm-to-table ingredients?
Interrogate your business and write it all down so that anyone who reads it would understand your vision. Try filling in this template:
Our mission is to [your restaurant’s mission] to [your restaurant’s target audience] by [how your restaurant will achieve this mission] to [why this is important to you].
It might look something like this:
Our mission is to [serve farm-to-table meals] to [families and young groups] by [partnering with local farmers] to [support local agriculture and reduce wastage].
2. Do a SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is a comprehensive overview of your restaurant’s:
- Strengths: what your restaurant does well or what makes it unique;
- Weaknesses: what your restaurant could be doing better or what’s holding it back;
- Opportunities: external factors that could benefit your restaurant, like the desire in your neighbourhood for more vegan offerings;
- Threats: external factors that could hurt your restaurant, like a competitor opening across the road or a price hike on ingredients.
Once you have these, you can start to plan how you’ll capitalise on your strengths and opportunities while addressing your weaknesses and threats.
3. Research the market
The more you know about your customers the better. Look into your target demographic and record any details you learn about their age, occupation, location, and dining preferences. There are many third-party tools you can use to gather this information and more.
And don’t limit yourself to learning about customers. Learn as much as you can about your competition: what are their most popular dishes, what kind of promotions and ads do they run, what does their culinary photography look like? Any little detail can help you gain an edge.
4. Set your restaurant marketing goals
Now you can put all that research into practice by setting concrete goals for your restaurant.
Write down your goals, define what success will look like, who will be responsible for success, and any steps you know you need to take to be successful. Don’t worry about how you’re going to achieve them just yet – that will come in the next step.
Remember, all of your goals should be SMART:
- Specific: Don’t just say you want to make more money. Specify that you want to increase online orders by 10% or increase the number of food and drink combos you sell by 15% in the next 12 months;
- Measurable: Track the performance of your goals and measure their success. Then you can set benchmarks and optimise any future goals;
- Achievable: It’s better to achieve a smaller goal than to fail a larger, more impressive goal. Be realistic and build upon each success;
- Relevant: Your goals should always mirror back to the business mission that we defined in step 1;
- Timely: Give yourself enough time to achieve your goals, but also give yourself a specific deadline to work towards to help structure your efforts.
It’s a good idea to set 1-3 goals for the next 12 months and another 1-3 for the next 3 years.
5. Develop your restaurant marketing strategies
Now that you have your goals, you can create some restaurant marketing strategies to actually achieve them.
So if your goal is to increase the number of food & drink combos you sell by 15% over the next 12 months, one of your restaurant marketing strategies might look like this:
- Set up a buy 1, get 1 free promotion on combos in Uber Eats Manager so customers are enticed to try something new and are more likely to get a combo again the next time they order from you;
- Post about your combos – or the promotion you’re running – on your social media;
- Make a new menu item available through Uber Eats that automatically packages up food and drink for a discounted price.
6. Select your marketing channels
Social media has a big role to play in restaurant marketing, which is why it’s so important for yours to have an online presence – but also why it’s so important to have a good online presence.
Don’t feel pressured to join every platform. It’s often much more beneficial to do one platform really well. If you’re not sure which is the main platform for your audience, look at your competitors’ social media. If they’re doing well on Instagram with the same audience you’re targeting, then chances are building a strong Instagram presence should be one of your top restaurant marketing strategies.
If you’re going to use multiple platforms, personalise your content across them all. Low-fi, short-form videos are popular on TikTok, while carousels of high-res food photography are better placed on Instagram.
If you have a CRM database of all your previous customers, you might want to create an email marketing strategy to send personalised emails announcing the promotions you’re running via Uber Eats Manager.
Or if you have zero marketing experience and need something very light-touch, you can explore the easy to use marketing tools available within Uber Eats Manager. There are two options available to you here – Uber Eats ads and offers.
Ads promote your restaurant to potential customers by enabling your restaurant to appear higher up in their feed within the Uber Eats app. To get started, create an ads campaign in the marketing section of Uber Eats Manager, tell us how much money you want to spend, and we’ll take care of the rest. Your restaurant will automatically appear higher up in-app to relevant customers, making you top-of-mind when they’re hungry and browsing for their next meal.
Offers is the other marketing tool at your disposal, giving you the ability to run a promotion within the Uber Eats app. Depending on your desired outcome, there are a host of options for you to choose from. For example, if you’re hoping to increase the number of customer orders, why not try “buy 1, get 1 free”. This encourages customers to order by offering a free item with their purchase. Another example is “spend more, save more”, encouraging customers to spend a certain amount by unlocking a discount on their current order. The wide range of options available help cater your offer based on your goal.
Why you need a restaurant marketing plan
Is it really worth creating a restaurant marketing plan? Absolutely.
A marketing plan gives order to your mission. It’s a single point of reference you can use to focus in on your goals, track and measure your performance, identify your target market, and more.
And with those things in order, you can now optimise the bigger picture. Knowing your audience means you can get more specific with how you market to them; seeing how much of your marketing budget remains each month helps you avoid overspending or missing out on reactive marketing opportunities; measuring the performance of your campaigns gives you worthwhile, actionable insights for the future.
Having a restaurant marketing plan arms you with the tools to maximise your profit, return on investment, and opportunities for growth. And with Uber Eats Manager unlocking a host of powerful restaurant marketing strategies, it’s easier than ever to create the ultimate marketing plan to supercharge your restaurant sales.
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