The best restaurant marketing tools to drive results  

Helping you to weigh up the pros and cons of restaurant marketing tools

Knowing where to start investing in marketing tools can seem like a minefield. Here at Access Hospitality, we have hundreds of conversations with businesses like yours, looking at how to prioritise marketing spending and get the most bang for their buck.  

In this article, we’re answering those questions we get asked all the time and hopefully will help you weigh up the pros and cons of the different marketing tools available to restaurant businesses.  

How tools can supercharge your restaurant marketing strategy  

For multi-site operators and brands – marketing will already be a huge part of your day-to-day business strategy. You are likely to be on the lookout for tools that will optimise your current restaurant marketing activities to save time and money.  

But marketing should also be a priority for independent operators to build a secure local customer base that will keep their business afloat. And you need to learn about the tools that will help you execute marketing campaigns without necessarily having a dedicated marketing team. 

No matter the size of your operation, there will be a marketing tool that you can utilise to help you on the way to business success. You can use restaurant marketing tools to:  

• Help new customers discover your venue  
• Build an online presence and improve your reputation  
• Increase repeat visits from existing customers  
• Provide a better customer experience  
• Harness and utilise customer data  

Our customer-reported data reveals that 70% of a restaurant’s database consists of customers who have only visited once. In a hugely competitive market, it’s important to maximise every sales opportunity, which means once you get a customer through the door, you need to work on getting them to return. 

With the right management, your existing customers can also be used as a marketing tool to bring in new ones. Encouraging them to leave reviews after their visits has the benefit of improving your business’s online visibility and will provide more of an incentive for newcomers to book. According to the Access Hospitality Tech Shift Report, 56% of people who visit a hospitality venue at least once a week said they’d be deterred from visiting a restaurant if they couldn’t find reviews of it online.  

The same report revealed that basic digital marketing functions, such as having up-to-date websites and social media channels, are not just useful, they are essential tools for survival in today’s market. Three in five (60%) of regular restaurant-goers said they look online for menus, photos and reviews before visiting a venue, and as many as 71% said they’d be deterred from visiting if they couldn’t see a menu online.  

Read on to find out more about the different marketing tools and how they can boost your business performance. 

The five best restaurant marketing tools to achieve your marketing goals 

So, you know you need to find the most effective marketing tools for your business. There are a lot of different tools available, and each offers different benefits – and has its own drawbacks.  

Let’s take a look at some of the best marketing tools available for restaurants:

Online reservation software

Online reservation software that enables your customers to view availability at your venue and book a table quickly and easily themselves is a powerful sales tool to help you boost pre-visit sales and bookings, but also helps with marketing for new and existing customers.  

According to Access’ Tech Shift Report, 54% of people would be deterred from visiting a restaurant if they couldn’t book it in advance online. Online booking enables customers to book directly through social media, Google search and through venue discovery platforms and third-party sites.  

The online customer journey from discovering your venue to booking a table should have the fewest steps possible to achieve maximum conversions.  

In addition, the online booking process is an important touchpoint in the customer journey that allows you to capture customer data and marketing consent for future remarketing

Find out more about the advantages and disadvantages of online reservation software

Email marketing 

Email marketing is one of the most impactful ways to market your restaurant to anyone who has agreed to be contacted by your business and can produce 174% more conversions than social media according to Campaign Monitor. 

There are two main software systems to send emails to your customer database; you can use an email marketing tool such as MailChimp – which enables you to create and send emails to a manually uploaded customer list. And there are CRM software systems such as Access Acteol, which are connected to your customer database and can be integrated with your sales software to use sales data in your marketing. A CRM allows you to design campaigns that are connected to guest behaviour and habits – which makes them much more relevant to your audience. Because a CRM is connected to your data directly, building audience segments is much easier and requires less manual management and uploading of data.  

Personalised email campaigns are proven to be more effective for customers and will help you generate repeat customers from your existing customer base.  

There are a number of email marketing platforms on the market, such as Campaign Monitor or MailChimp, that allow you to create an email that can go out to your restaurant database, telling customers about anything related to your business, such as your exciting new menu, or a discount you’re running for a particular period.  

You can also analyse data over time to learn which email campaigns are most effective. You can also set up automated campaigns – such as birthday vouchers or an automated email at a certain time after a customer’s last visit – and these emails will send at the specified time, without you having to do anything.   

Find out more about effective email marketing strategies for restaurants.

SMS marketing  

Figures gathered by uSwitch in 2021 showed that 88% of adults in the UK own a smartphone, so SMS marketing is a highly effective way to reach most customers. While you can’t send enticing images or include as much detail as you can with email marketing, SMS marketing can be a great way to get a short message out about a deal, or, if you’ve just had cancellations, let them know that there are last-minute tables up for grabs. It is also relatively quick to send texts out – writing and setting up a reactive SMS campaign doesn’t take a lot of time.  

Customers will have had to have opted into receiving communications via SMS for you to contact them, but your CRM system will help you build audience segments of those opted in. 

Social media

Social media is a great way to find and connect with a local audience. The highly visual nature of social media is a great showcase for your most popular dishes and drinks. It can be a very cheap way to market your business organically and share everything from menu updates and offers to events and opening times.

In addition, you can also utilise paid social media to target potential new customers in your local areas. Paid social media advertising is very flexible in terms of budget, so you can spend as little or as much as you want.

There are multiple tools that can help with all aspects of social media management, including scheduling tools (allowing content to be posted at certain times) like Hootsuite, Buffer and SocialPilot and social media monitoring platforms like Agora Pulse which tell you how well posts are performing.

The social module for Acteol brings content from multiple social channels such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and lets the user reply directly from one interface so they can manage the many conversations from across social and make management even simpler.

Online review management

It may seem strange to include reviews as a marketing tool as these are left by customers AFTER they have visited but you should remember that 60% of consumers look at reviews, menus or photos BEFORE they visit a venue.  

And, according to the Tech Shift Report, 56% of frequent restaurant-goers would be deterred from visiting a venue if they haven’t read reviews about it online, so managing your online reputation should be considered an integral part of your digital marketing strategy.  

There are plenty of third-party review websites collecting reviews about restaurants, and a CRM system like Access Acteol collects customer feedback and enquiries from multiple sources and routes them to the relevant team members so they can be responded to quickly and efficiently.  

A CRM system also helps you build review prompts into your post-visit communication journey, so you capture as many reviews as possible. Don’t forget to review and reply to all feedback and action negative comments accordingly to improve service for all guests.

What’s the next step for your marketing strategy?

In this article, we’ve explored some of the most effective marketing tools for restaurants and some of the main benefits and drawbacks to consider. 

Time investing is as important as financial when it comes to effective marketing so we advise our clients to look at the software solutions that will help them save the most time when creating marketing campaigns.  

For our smaller clients, it is often worth starting small and building over time – nail the basics – email and organic social media as well as supporting activity with an effective booking process.  

For more established businesses, a comprehensive CRM is usually the best way to harness your extensive customer data and start making it work for you – creating effective targeted campaigns and automated messages at different points of the customer journey.  

Our team of restaurant marketing experts can help you put together a marketing strategy supported by software to help you get the most out of your marketing investment.  

Get in touch with the team by filling in the form for a personalised chat about your business requirements.