Whether or not you’re dwelling the dream of opening your individual restaurant or transforming your current idea, a restaurant marketing strategy template takes a ton of stress out of writing a marketing strategy.
With prompts for each part you’ll want, we’ve created our free restaurant marketing strategy template to be your operational basis (you’re welcome!). One thing you possibly can obtain, customise, and are available again to everytime you make enterprise selections to your restaurant.
However first, let’s undergo all of the methods a written marketing strategy helps form your restaurant, and why it boosts what you are promoting’s probability of success.
What’s a restaurant marketing strategy?
A restaurant marketing strategy is a written doc that lays out an outline of a restaurant, its targets, and its plans for attaining its objectives.
It’s wanted throughout all types and sizes of eating places, and generally is a handful of pages lengthy or rather more detailed. A well-written restaurant marketing strategy not solely helps you arrange your concepts, it’s additionally a key a part of getting investor funding.
Beginning a restaurant? Right here’s why you want a marketing strategy.
Creatively, opening a brand new restaurant might be extremely thrilling. Nevertheless it’s additionally tremendous difficult. From licenses, to gear, to constructing a group, every section wants a number of consideration to element.
Earlier than you bounce in, it’s necessary to form your plan of assault, organizing what you are promoting concepts into a transparent, concise narrative that an outsider may simply perceive. A marketing strategy is a vital a part of this—and right here’s why.
Your marketing strategy helps you:
Set brief and long-term objectives.
A restaurant marketing strategy not solely exhibits how what you are promoting will function in its early phases, it additionally exhibits what steps it’ll must comply with as time goes by. Setting each your brief and long-term objectives on the outset makes you extra more likely to obtain them.
Perceive your useful resource wants.
Going by the train of writing a restaurant marketing strategy is as necessary as having the completed doc in entrance of you. As you arrange your ideas, your useful resource wants—from the quantity of capital you might want to elevate all the way in which all the way down to the gear you might want to discover—will take form.
Cut back potential dangers.
Sadly, some 60% of eating places fail inside the first 12 months of opening. One of many principal causes? A failure to plan. Your marketing strategy will enable you plan for many challenges at your restaurant earlier than they arrive up, preserving you on the fitting aspect of that quantity.
Develop a advertising technique.
As you do your market evaluation and determine who your prospects are more likely to be, the methods you’ll promote what you are promoting will get clearer. The extra particular you might be together with your market analysis, the better and more practical your advertising efforts shall be.
Construct your group.
Your marketing strategy helps you see who you’ll want in your group and which roles you’ll must fill first. For buyers, it’s a doc showcasing everybody’s collective expertise, personalizing your restaurant of their eyes and packing knowledgeable punch.
Share your imaginative and prescient.
Whether or not you’re utilizing your marketing strategy to safe startup funding or want extra capital after you’ve already opened, your restaurant marketing strategy exhibits an investor or lender precisely why they need to get behind you.
The 9 parts of a robust restaurant marketing strategy.
Your restaurant marketing strategy shall be distinctive to your imaginative and prescient. However all good enterprise plans hit commonplace factors, and whoever reads yours will count on them. As you develop and finalize your concepts, listed here are 9 key parts you need to embrace.
1. Govt abstract
A powerful restaurant marketing strategy begins with a robust govt abstract. It is a sharp, concise overview of your restaurant and your alternative to seize individuals’s consideration.
Right here’s the place you talk, in a nutshell, what sort of restaurant you need to run. Which demographic will you be focusing on? Why is what you are promoting one thing the group needs or wants? Particularly if you happen to’re asking for financing, embrace a snapshot of your monetary info and progress plan as nicely.
Your govt abstract ought to briefly lay out:
- Your mission assertion. Why are you beginning this restaurant now, on this location?
- Your thought. What’s the idea of this restaurant?
- Your plan of execution. What are your key steps to creating this idea work?
- Your potential prices. What are your anticipated bills?
- Your anticipated ROI. How a lot do you count on your restaurant to make?
Many buyers will make a split-second resolution off of the manager abstract alone—it is perhaps all they’re going to learn, so make each phrase rely.
2. Firm description
Now it’s time to let your creativity out and provides your restaurant idea life. Give a extra detailed description of your idea that lets your ardour for what you’re creating come by.
Flesh out all the opposite particulars of your proposed restaurant, together with your restaurant’s:
- Fashion of delicacies and any distinctive promoting factors or differentiators that may make prospects select you
- Service fashion
- Restaurant identify (or a minimum of concepts)
- Measurement, seating fashion, and capability
- Location concepts or the situation you’ve scouted or secured
- Ambiance concepts together with décor, lighting, and music
- Working hours
- Different service choices like whether or not you’ll provide supply or takeout, supply ensures, catering, and any retail merchandise you propose to promote
- Authorized construction (e.g. sole proprietorship, LLC)
- Present administration and their roles, together with yours
- Specialists or advisors you’ve introduced on board
3. Market evaluation
Current the analysis you’ve performed in your goal market. Make a few purchaser personas to symbolize your future prospects, explaining:
- The place your goal prospects reside
- Their revenue ranges
- Their dining-out and/or ordering-in ache factors (e.g. lack of late opening hours, lack of household friendliness)
- How typically they dine out or order in
Undergo which different eating places have already got a buyer base in your space, then clarify why individuals will select your restaurant over others.
4. Pattern menu
Even on the marketing strategy stage, menu engineering is essential. The particular menu gadgets you’re more likely to serve—the largest factor that may set you aside—ought to shine by with descriptions which might be brief, clear, and evocative. You probably have an govt chef already, this can be a nice space for them so as to add enter.
Use language that may get individuals enthusiastic about making an attempt your choices. Rent a designer or use a web-based program to create your individual mockup utilizing the identical colours, fonts, and design parts as the remainder of your branding.
5. Enterprise construction
Dive deeper into what you are promoting construction (sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC, and so on.) and organizational administration. Present what your completely different worker positions shall be (co-founders, managers, servers) to offer a way of your group’s make-up. An organizational chart might be useful right here.
Buyers gained’t count on you to have your total group on board at this stage, however you need to have a minimum of a few individuals firmed up. For the roles which might be already crammed, together with your individual, summarize your collective expertise and achievements. Bullet factors work nicely, or some individuals select to enter extra element with full resumes for the manager group or important group members.
6. Restaurant design and placement
Lengthy earlier than you signal a lease, guarantee that your new providing will outshine current ones close by. On this part of your marketing strategy, clarify why your chosen location, or those you’re narrowing down, are going to be an efficient area to your goal market.
Think about issues like:
- Neighborhood demographics
- Foot site visitors
- Labor prices
- Accessibility
Hand in hand with location, your restaurant’s inside design—each in its flooring plan and its ambiance—can also be essential to what you are promoting’s viability. Provide you with a fascinating restaurant design that communicates your theme and matches your delicacies, making a memorable buyer expertise. Determine what number of tables you’ll be serving, and plan out any outside seating.
Contact on issues like:
- Lighting
- Decor
- Crew uniforms
- Flatware and glassware
7. Advertising technique
How do you propose to market your restaurant? Your plan for grabbing prospects’ consideration is important to getting diners by the door, particularly originally earlier than word-of-mouth promoting has taken off.
What sort of gives will you present? Will you’ve got promotional occasions, junk mail, or a social media technique? Undergo your deliberate advertising campaigns and clarify how every of them will assist safe your goal market.
8. Takeout and supply choices
In case you’ve determined to have takeout and supply at your restaurant—fairly necessary for many goal markets—resolve whether or not you’ll use your individual drivers or knowledgeable fleet like Uber Eats or DoorDash.
Present the way you’ll present the sleek digital expertise your prospects will count on. Determine if and the way your web site will come into play, making an allowance for that in 2023, 40% of customers most popular to order straight from the restaurant web site.
9. Monetary projections
Your restaurant’s projected funds should be stable, particularly if you happen to’re utilizing your marketing strategy to get startup funds. With out this, buyers haven’t any means of realizing if what you are promoting is an efficient funding or when it can change into worthwhile.
Rent an skilled accountant with experience in operating eating places and write down your market analysis, your deliberate prices, and your projected revenue. Present how investor funds shall be used and whether or not you’ll be placing up collateral to get a mortgage. Give a gross sales forecast, normally for the primary 5 years, and ensure to offer a break-even evaluation.
Get began with our free restaurant marketing strategy template.
Because the group behind Homebase, we all know how a lot there’s to think about whenever you’re beginning a brand new restaurant. We’re proud to be an all-in-one companion for hundreds of eating places massive and small—serving to make all the pieces from staffing, to scheduling, to group communication simpler for enterprise homeowners.
And we all know that your restaurant marketing strategy is a high-stakes doc. That’s why we created our free restaurant marketing strategy template to ensure nothing will get neglected.
Take a look at our free, downloadable template to get your concepts into form, get began in your restaurant journey—and get buyers excited to leap on board with you.
Obtain your restaurant marketing strategy template without spending a dime: Restaurant marketing strategy + free template (2024)
