In the vibrant and ever-evolving restaurant industry, success isn't just about the tantalizing dishes you create; it's also about how well you reach the right people and keep them coming back for more. Amidst a saturated market, the differentiation of your restaurant hinges not just on the exceptional dishes served but also on the adeptness of your digital outreach. In 2024, having the right arsenal of marketing tools is imperative for ensuring your restaurant gets the attention it deserves amidst fierce competition.
This post serves as your roadmap to exploring the top restaurant marketing tools, strategies, and techniques that will make a real difference in 2024 and beyond.
Restaurants in 2024 need to master the art of digital connection. Today, your digital presence equals relevance. Marketing tools are not merely about broadcasting your message but about creating a dialogue with your guests, understanding their preferences, and delivering experiences that resonate.
Marketing tools become your invaluable toolkit for everything from creating eye-catching visuals to launching personalized campaigns – all designed to draw diners in.
The benefits are multi-faceted:
The directness and personalization potential of email marketing continue to make it a cornerstone for restaurant marketing strategies. It’s a channel that balances cost-effectiveness with the ability to deeply connect with your audience.
Search engines are gateways to attracting new customers, and they demand a strategy. Optimizing your presence ensures your establishment is at the fingertips of potential diners.
Social media is the modern word-of-mouth, a critical platform for building your restaurant’s reputation and engaging directly with your audience.
SMS provides high open rates and direct engagement. The immediacy of SMS marketing makes it a powerful tool for time-sensitive deals and personalized interactions:
Your online reputation precedes you. Manage reviews strategically with these tools:
Visuals reign supreme - The adage “we eat with our eyes first” has never been truer, with visual content playing a pivotal role in enticing diners.
Marketing automation empowers restaurants to work smarter, not harder. It streamlines repetitive tasks, personalizes customer experiences at scale, and ultimately creates deeper, lasting connections. Here's why it matters:
Personalized Campaigns: Segment your audience based on behaviors and preferences to deliver tailor-made promotions, birthday greetings, and loyalty rewards, increasing engagement.
Time Savings: Automate tasks like welcome emails, reservation confirmations, and loyalty updates, freeing up your team to focus on creating great guest experiences.
Lifecycle Marketing: Develop automated campaigns, nurture guests at each stage of their journey, from leads to regulars.
Marketing automation isn’t just about doing more with less; it’s about creating a framework that supports meaningful connections with your patrons, ensuring that every interaction enriches their relationship with your brand.
The right marketing tools can turn strategy into success. Consider these factors in your selection process:
Budgetary Constraints: Define your financial boundaries and prioritize tools that offer the most value.
Desired Features: Match tools with your marketing objectives, whether it’s email engagement, social presence, or customer insights.
Scalability: Choose solutions that grow with your business, accommodating expanding needs.
System Compatibility: Look for tools that seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack.
User-Friendliness: Ensure the tool is accessible to your team, maximizing its utility and impact.
Monitor these key metrics to track the effectiveness of your marketing tools:
Campaign Results: Compare performance between campaigns. Track click rates, open rates, and conversions.
Customer Acquisition Cost: Determine the cost to acquire a new customer, compared to revenue generated.
Retention Rate: Tools should enhance loyalty; track increases in guest repeat visits.
Planning & Training: A thoughtful rollout prevents overwhelm and encourages team buy-in.
Testing: Before launching broadly, start with smaller segments and ensure functionality.
Invest in the right marketing tools to reap the rewards that come with increased awareness, loyal customers, and ultimately, sustained business growth. Here are some additional tips:
Integrate for success: Leverage the power of different tools in tandem for cohesive brand messaging across platforms.
Emphasize personalization: Tailor offers and content – diners in 2024 expect individual treatment.
Experiment and analyze: Continuously optimize and test results to maximize effectiveness.
What is the most important tool?
Each restaurant's needs vary. Invest in solutions that directly address your pain points and achieve your business goals.
With so many available options, how do I choose which marketing software to go with?
Thorough research, trials, and honest self-assessment of your restaurant's specific needs are key.
How do I measure success?
Establish performance metrics (website traffic, social engagement, bookings) to track progress meaningfully.
Discover top restaurant marketing tools for 2024: Mailchimp, Ahrefs, Later, TextMagic, ReviewTrackers, Canva, Hubspot, and more at Fishbowl.
We're hitting the road all year long in 2024. It'll be a year full of tourists, panelists and sponsorships, and we can't wait.
Restaurant365 Transformation Tour
Boston, MA
February 8
GuestXM Best Practices Conference
Dallas, TX
February 26-28
Restaurant Leadership Conference
Phoenix, AZ
April 14-17
Food on Demand Conference
Las Vegas, NV
May 4-6
National Restaurant Association Show
Chicago, IL
May 18-21
Restaurant365 Transformation Tour
Denver, CO
June 20
QSR Evolution Conference
Atlanta, GA
September 4-5
FSTEC
Anatole, TX
September 13-15
Restaurant365 Transformation Tour
Fort Lauderdale, FL
November 7
Restaurant Finance & Development Conference
Las Vegas, NV
November 11-13
See you soon.
We're hitting the road all year long in 2024. It'll be a year full of tourists, panelists and sponsorships, and we can't wait.
Fishbowl is delighted to announce new enhancements and features on our Fishbowl Guest Relationship Management platform. As Fishbowl GRM grows, we’re empowering restaurant pros with the tools for nailing guest engagement, acquisition and marketing automation.
We have expanded the number of resources available in our Connections Marketplace, leveraging dozens of partnerships with the companies that restaurants rely on most. We pull data from these resources – like POS, Reservations, Third Party Delivery, Online Ordering and more – to power our GRM platform. We’re thrilled to now offer integrations with Olo, Toast, Upserve, a Lightspeed Company, Brink POS, Resy, OpenTable, Tock and Spendgo.
Fishbowl GRM users can now turn their guest WiFi system into an acquisition, engagement, and loyalty engine. With Guest WiFi, restaurant marketers can identify new and returning guests; access their data; build a marketing database; and drive revenue with interactive landing pages, rewards and real-time promotions that are compelling and personalized.
Rather than having to write long search queries, Fishbowl GRM utilizes AI to let users find specific groups with ‘spoken’ English. Marketers can simply ask the database a question, or type in a sentence describing the information they want; and then create a targetable segment for use in marketing automation.
Fishbowl GRM customers can create a fully-branded online ordering experience hosted on their own sites. Manage, update and publish menu changes with a simple click, across web, mobile apps and other digital channels. Online ordering includes guest support; and supports loyalty programs across all the restaurant’s transactional platforms.
Online ordering represents a pivotal channel for guest acquisition, seamlessly integrating on-premise and off-premise transactional data. This integration furnishes a comprehensive 360° view of guest interactions, enhancing Guest Relationship Management strategies.
Fishbowl is delighted to announce new enhancements and features on our Fishbowl Guest Relationship Management platform.
Valentine’s Day is three weeks from today. Here are some quick tips to share the love and help your messaging stand out.
Holiday-themed messages outperform everyday messages, and Valentine’s Day is the ideal occasion to promote your restaurant. In 2024, more than 30% of National Retail Federation survey respondents planned ‘an evening out’ — that’s business you should capitalize on.
Some considerations to ensure you get the most love (opens) for your Valentine’s Day promotional email messages this year:
Personalize the experience for recipients to get a bump in open rate anywhere from 25-35% or more!
Emails with subject lines that included Valentine’s Day messaging get another 4% or more higher open rate.
The best time to send your emails is the week before Valentine’s Day week. Holiday messaging open rates for the first week of February (2/1-2/7) were 39% higher than the open rates for the week immediately leading up to Valentine’s Day (2/8 – 2/14).
Get all the love you deserve this Valentine’s Day — and if you need a little help with your Restaurant Marketing, the sweethearts at Fishbowl can help
Jynessa Mason, VP of Data & Insights at Fishbowl, gives tips for to help your valentines email stand out this year.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov) Consumer Inflation Report released today shows that Full-Service Restaurant (FSR) prices ticked down markedly to 8.2% year-over-year (YOY) vs 9.0% in November. This is a significant change, as FSR inflation has remained consistently within the range of 8.7% to 9.0% YOY for the past 8 months. Limited-Service Restaurant (LSR) prices, up 6.6%, dipped slightly from November’s 6.7%, but continue on a soft downward trend versus the ~8% peak from Nov-Feb year ago.
On the whole, this result is reasonably good news for restaurant consumers. These improving trends are consistent with our internal forecasts as we believe that deceleration is likely to continue across the year, particularly as we lap prior year acceleration and peaks over the coming months. While restaurant price inflation will remain elevated in comparison to historical norms in 2023, LSR and FSR inflation rates near 4-5% by year end are possible, barring unexpected developments.
Consumer wage growth (+4.6% YOY) along with easing gas prices will continue to offset a portion of the pressure on household budgets, although housing inflation and high levels of credit card debt are likely to keep demand for food away from home somewhat muted. The Food at Home (FAH) CPI index, a measure of grocery prices, price inflation at 11.8% in December which continues a downward trend from the 13.5% in August, also easing household pressure from the summer peak.
Be advised that there is broad regional variation in these national numbers that will impact smaller brands differently depending on their geographic footprint. And while we are nowhere near back to normal, the directional change evident in these reports should be factored into your menu and pricing plans for 2023 and beyond.
Read about the latest Restaurant Price Inflation Update, the key takeaways, and why this result is reasonably good news for restaurant consumers.
Data Storytelling is a way of organizing your data in a way that helps you segment audiences and reach guests when they are most likely to make a purchase decision about food.
But what’s the best way to get those data points in the first place?
Working with more than 48,000 restaurant groups and 215 million unique guests, we know the way to encourage someone to share information is empathy — consider what your target may be thinking; ask the right questions; and listen carefully.
To ask the right questions, try to identify the wants and desires of the different audiences you serve:
To be remembered whether I was a one-time visit or I’m a frequent eater.
A feel-good memory when I enter my favorite restaurant or a new establishment, and they make me feel like a friend, or even better, a VIP.
For a restaurant I chose to choose me back.
To pick my own seat — just like an airline enables me to select a seat, I want that same option when I eat out. Do I prefer booths? Maybe I like sitting on a high-top with views of the city? Maybe I always sit at the bar?
Having options reminds me why I like a specific restaurant over another.
When a guest asks what I recommend, I want to create value and increase my tips by suggesting a dish based on their stated preferences, instead of just offering what I like or what the kitchen says is popular.
At the same time, I’d like to be able to make informed decisions based on a guest’s allergy or dietary restrictions — and I’d like to know those even before the table is seated.
And if I’ve seen those guests before, it would be great if I had a method of remembering a past experience to ensure a great encounter this time, and dissipate any leftover friction from a previous visit.
Understand everything I can about my guests’ preferences, and collect essential guest data to enhance the restaurant experience.
Make it easy for my team to enhance the guest experience.
Know why someone loves us, what makes them come back and where can I improve so we can continue filling table.
Have sight lines into which guests (and how many) have dietary restrictions. How does this affect reservations, menus and other insights?
Understand how to create better, more relevant promotions to different kinds of guests seeking distinct dining experiences.
Every story has a beginning, middle and end. With the right data restaurants can anticipate how an encounter will go even before the story starts, so you can guarantee a happy ending, and many many more over time.
Data Storytelling is a way of organizing your data in a way that helps you segment audiences and reach guests when they are most likely to make a purchase decision about food.
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