Whether or not you’re residing the dream of opening your individual restaurant or remodeling your present 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’ll be able to obtain, customise, and are available again to everytime you make enterprise choices in your restaurant.
However first, let’s undergo all of the methods a written marketing strategy helps form your restaurant, and why it boosts your small business’s likelihood of success.
What’s a restaurant marketing strategy?
A restaurant marketing strategy is a written doc that lays out an summary of a restaurant, its targets, and its plans for reaching its targets.
It’s wanted throughout every kind and sizes of eating places, and generally is a handful of pages lengthy or way more detailed. A well-written restaurant marketing strategy not solely helps you manage 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 sophisticated. From licenses, to gear, to constructing a group, every part wants a number of consideration to element.
Earlier than you soar in, it’s vital to form your plan of assault, organizing your small business concepts into a transparent, concise narrative that an outsider might simply perceive. A marketing strategy is an important a part of this—and right here’s why.
Your marketing strategy helps you:
Set quick and long-term targets.
A restaurant marketing strategy not solely exhibits how your small business will function in its early levels, it additionally exhibits what steps it’ll must comply with as time goes by. Setting each your quick and long-term targets on the outset makes you extra prone to obtain them.
Perceive your useful resource wants.
Going by way of the train of writing a restaurant marketing strategy is as vital as having the completed doc in entrance of you. As you manage your ideas, your useful resource wants—from the quantity of capital you should increase all the best way all the way down to the gear you should discover—will take form.
Cut back potential dangers.
Sadly, some 60% of eating places fail throughout the first 12 months of opening. One of many foremost causes? A failure to plan. Your marketing strategy will enable you plan for many challenges at your restaurant earlier than they arrive up, holding you on the correct aspect of that quantity.
Develop a advertising and marketing technique.
As you do your market evaluation and work out who your clients are prone to be, the methods you’ll promote your small business will get clearer. The extra particular you might be together with your market analysis, the better and more practical your advertising and marketing 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 traders, 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 further 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 components of a robust restaurant marketing strategy.
Your restaurant marketing strategy shall be distinctive to your imaginative and prescient. However all good enterprise plans hit normal factors, and whoever reads yours will count on them. As you develop and finalize your concepts, listed here are 9 key components it’s best to embody.
1. Govt abstract
A robust restaurant marketing strategy begins with a robust govt abstract. It is a sharp, concise overview of your restaurant and your alternative to seize folks’s consideration.
Right here’s the place you talk, in a nutshell, what sort of restaurant you wish to run. Which demographic will you be focusing on? Why is your small business one thing the neighborhood needs or wants? Particularly when you’re asking for financing, embody a snapshot of your monetary info and development plan as effectively.
Your govt abstract ought to briefly lay out:
- Your mission assertion. Why are you beginning this restaurant now, on this location?
- Your concept. 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 traders will make a split-second choice off of the manager abstract alone—it is perhaps all they’re going to learn, so make each phrase depend.
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 way of.
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 clients select you
- Service type
- Restaurant identify (or not less than concepts)
- Dimension, seating type, 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)
- Current 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 characterize your future clients, explaining:
- The place your goal clients reside
- Their earnings 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 folks will select your restaurant over others.
4. Pattern menu
Even on the marketing strategy stage, menu engineering is essential. The precise menu objects you’re prone to serve—the largest factor that may set you aside—ought to shine by way of with descriptions which can be quick, clear, and evocative. When you have an govt chef already, it is a nice space for them so as to add enter.
Use language that may get folks enthusiastic about attempting your choices. Rent a designer or use a web based program to create your individual mockup utilizing the identical colours, fonts, and design components as the remainder of your branding.
5. Enterprise construction
Dive deeper into your small business construction (sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC, and many others.) and organizational administration. Present what your totally different worker positions shall be (co-founders, managers, servers) to present a way of your group’s make-up. An organizational chart might be useful right here.
Traders gained’t count on you to have your complete group on board at this stage, however it’s best to have not less than a few folks firmed up. For the roles which can be already stuffed, together with your individual, summarize your collective expertise and achievements. Bullet factors work effectively, or some folks 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, ensure that your new providing will outshine present 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 house in your goal market.
Contemplate 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 your small business’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
- Staff uniforms
- Flatware and glassware
7. Advertising and marketing technique
How do you propose to market your restaurant? Your plan for grabbing clients’ consideration is important to getting diners by way of the door, particularly initially earlier than word-of-mouth promoting has taken off.
What sort of affords will you present? Will you’ve promotional occasions, unsolicited mail, or a social media technique? Undergo your deliberate advertising and marketing campaigns and clarify how every of them will assist safe your goal market.
8. Takeout and supply choices
Should you’ve determined to have takeout and supply at your restaurant—fairly vital 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 graceful digital expertise your clients will count on. Determine if and the way your web site will come into play, taking into consideration that in 2023, 40% of shoppers most well-liked to order straight from the restaurant web site.
9. Monetary projections
Your restaurant’s projected finances must be stable, particularly when you’re utilizing your marketing strategy to get startup funds. With out this, traders haven’t any method of understanding if your small business is an efficient funding or when it would grow to be worthwhile.
Rent an skilled accountant with experience in working eating places and write down your market analysis, your deliberate prices, and your projected earnings. 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, often for the primary 5 years, and ensure to present 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 while you’re beginning a brand new restaurant. We’re proud to be an all-in-one companion for 1000’s of eating places giant and small—serving to make all the things 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 verify nothing will get neglected.
Try our free, downloadable template to get your concepts into form, get began in your restaurant journey—and get traders excited to leap on board with you.
Obtain your restaurant marketing strategy template free of charge: Restaurant marketing strategy + free template (2024)
