The Ultimate Guide to Restaurant Advertising

When you’re running a restaurant, there’s nothing better than serving a hungry customer. They get some scrumptious food, and you get paid. Win win. But if they don’t know about your restaurant, the chances of this happening get very slim. That’s where restaurant advertising comes in. It could be a crucial ingredient for your business’ success, and it’s important to do it right.

So how do you do it right? What’s the key to standing out from the crowd and making your advertisements pop? Here are some tips on how you can advertise your restaurant and turn strangers into loyal customers, all without needing to hire a restaurant marketing agency.

Before you start advertising your restaurant, it’s important to know who you should advertise it to. Think about who you want ordering your food.

Young people, rich couples, and budget-conscious consumers all resonate with different phrases, images, and mediums. Young people will generally be more likely to go to a restaurant that creates social media memes. Rich adults and couples want restaurants that advertise prestige and class. Budget-conscious consumers want price to be at the forefront of an ad. 

If your restaurant is a burger joint near a university, you could attract customers by using more slang and emphasising your combo meals. If you serve bespoke, woodfire pizzas, you could feature elegant photos of your kiln in your ads.

Making the right ads for the right audience will help attract your target customers to your restaurant. In turn, they’ll have a higher likelihood of loving your food and becoming long-term customers.

We eat with our eyes. When we see a photo of golden, crisp fries, we just know that these chips will comfort us after a long day at work. When we see a photo of pale, soggy fries, we know we’re going to be disappointed if we have to eat them and that the chef probably doesn’t care about their work. That’s why it’s so important to use the most flattering pictures of your meals in your restaurant advertising.

If you can’t afford a professional photographer, most modern phones take high-resolution photos. Before photographing your food make sure it looks delicious and the space around the feed is clean. Afterwards, you can use an editing app on your phone or computer to help make the photos pop.

When you promote your restaurant, you have to do it somewhere your potential customers will see it. If you put an ad up on a billboard and nobody drives past it, you’ve wasted your time and resources.

Luckily, there are plenty of potential customers who are browsing on Uber Eats. By the time they’re on the app, they’re hungry and ready to be recommended the best feeds.

Uber Eats Manager has an in-built restaurant advertising platform that doesn’t require any formal training to use successfully.

All you have to do is tap “Ad Campaign” within Uber Eats Manager, upload your ad, and tell us how much money you want to spend promoting it. By running an ad campaign on Uber Eats, your restaurant will appear higher on the home feed for relevant customers.

Uber Eats Ads help to increase the visibility of your restaurant and can increase your order volume by up to 14% on average.*

One of the best ways you can promote a restaurant is by offering rewards to customers. People love getting something back when they order – often it can be enough to convince a customer to choose you over a competitor. In fact, restaurants that have implemented Offers generally experienced an average of up to 68% more orders.*

Uber Eats Manager also lets you set up exciting offers and has a range of offers you can choose from, like “buy one, get one free” and “free item with purchase” deals.

Like Uber Eats Manager adverts, offers are simple to make. Just pick the offer you want to run from the list, select how long you want to run it for, and which menu items or spending thresholds you want to be eligible for the offer. For instance, you can make it so your customers have to spend more than $40 in order to receive a 25% discount.

You can even advertise your offer with an Uber Eats Manager ad. That way, when relevant customers use the app, your deal will appear higher on their home feed.

Once your ad is live in Uber Eats, your next step should be to monitor its effectiveness. You can see how many people have clicked on your ad, and how many sales it has generated, in Uber Eats Manager. If it’s been effective, you can increase your spend to help attract even more customers. If it hasn’t performed as well as you were hoping, you can tweak the settings in Uber Eats Manager.

Social media platforms can be an effective and cheap way of advertising your restaurant. However, not all social media platforms are created equal. If your restaurant primarily serves young people, it would be wise to create short videos instead of static posts with lots of text. If you primarily serve families, you can promote your restaurant in online parenting groups. Take the time to research which platforms your audience are on, and focus your advertising efforts here.

If you want to up your social media game, be quick to respond to user feedback. Communicate with your customers when they leave a comment or a review on your post. Speak like you would if you were face to face – be friendly, authentic and use everyday language. 

When your customers leave positive reviews, thank them for their patronage. Thank people for leaving constructive criticism – and use their feedback to improve your service.

An excellent way to extend your reach these days is by inviting food influencers to try your food and create content about it. Politely message or email them an invitation to try your food for free, and ask that they either film or write about their experience. Emphasise that they can say whatever they like about the restaurant’s ambience, menu, and food.

If an influencer likes your food and creates content praising it, an influx of their followers will likely check it out for themselves. Once these new customers order your food, it’s your job to turn them into regular patrons.

There are more restaurants today than ever before, and advertising is a tried and tested way to capture people’s attention. Good advertising can help turn those people into loyal customers – so it’s important to do it right.

Make your advertising strategy part of your restaurant marketing plan for maximum impact, and to ensure your advertising is always helping advance your business goals.

And remember, restaurant advertising isn’t hard or expensive to do these days. Uber Eats Manager gives you lots of ways to advertise your restaurant to help expand your customer base and increase your sales.

*Uber internal data based on performance across all restaurants in Australia and New Zealand between 1 July 2023 and 30 June 2024.