Whether or not you’re dwelling the dream of opening your personal 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’ll be able to obtain, customise, and are available again to everytime you make enterprise choices on your restaurant.
However first, let’s undergo all of the methods a written marketing strategy helps form your restaurant, and why it boosts your online business’s probability 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 goals, and its plans for attaining its targets.
It’s wanted throughout every kind and sizes of eating places, and could be a handful of pages lengthy or way more detailed. A well-written restaurant marketing strategy not solely helps you set up 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. But it surely’s additionally tremendous sophisticated. From licenses, to gear, to constructing a group, every section wants a number of consideration to element.
Earlier than you soar in, it’s necessary to form your plan of assault, organizing your online business concepts into a transparent, concise narrative that an outsider might simply perceive. A marketing strategy is a vital 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 reveals how your online business will function in its early phases, it additionally reveals what steps it’ll have to comply with as time goes by. Setting each your quick and long-term targets on the outset makes you extra more likely to obtain them.
Perceive your useful resource wants.
Going via the train of writing a restaurant marketing strategy is as necessary as having the completed doc in entrance of you. As you set up your ideas, your useful resource wants—from the quantity of capital it’s good to increase all the way in which right down to the gear it’s good to discover—will take form.
Cut back potential dangers.
Sadly, some 60% of eating places fail inside the first yr of opening. One of many important causes? A failure to plan. Your marketing strategy will enable you to plan for many challenges at your restaurant earlier than they arrive up, conserving you on the proper facet of that quantity.
Develop a advertising and marketing technique.
As you do your market evaluation and determine who your prospects are more likely to be, the methods you’ll promote your online business will get clearer. The extra particular you might be together with your market analysis, the better and simpler 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 have to 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 further capital after you’ve already opened, your restaurant marketing strategy reveals an investor or lender precisely why they need to get behind you.
The 9 parts of a powerful restaurant marketing strategy.
Your restaurant marketing strategy shall be distinctive to your imaginative and prescient. However all good enterprise plans hit customary factors, and whoever reads yours will anticipate them. As you develop and finalize your concepts, listed here are 9 key parts you need to embrace.
1. Govt abstract
A robust restaurant marketing strategy begins with a powerful 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 concentrating on? Why is your online business one thing the neighborhood needs or wants? Particularly if you happen to’re asking for financing, embrace a snapshot of your monetary data and development 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 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 anticipate your restaurant to make?
Many buyers will make a split-second resolution off of the chief abstract alone—it could be 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 via.
Flesh out all the opposite particulars of your proposed restaurant, together with your restaurant’s:
- Type of delicacies and any distinctive promoting factors or differentiators that can make prospects select you
- Service type
- Restaurant title (or a minimum of concepts)
- Dimension, seating type, and capability
- Location concepts or the placement you’ve scouted or secured
- Ambiance concepts together with décor, lighting, and music
- Working hours
- Different service choices like whether or not you’ll supply 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 executed in your goal market. Make a few purchaser personas to symbolize your future prospects, explaining:
- The place your goal prospects stay
- Their revenue ranges
- Their dining-out and/or ordering-in ache factors (e.g. lack of late opening hours, lack of household friendliness)
- How usually 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 most important factor that can set you aside—ought to shine via with descriptions which might be quick, clear, and evocative. If in case you have an govt chef already, it is a nice space for them so as to add enter.
Use language that can get individuals enthusiastic about attempting your choices. Rent a designer or use an internet program to create your personal mockup utilizing the identical colours, fonts, and design parts as the remainder of your branding.
5. Enterprise construction
Dive deeper into your online business construction (sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC, and many others.) 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 received’t anticipate you to have your complete 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 personal, summarize your collective expertise and achievements. Bullet factors work nicely, or some individuals select to enter extra element with full resumes for the chief group or essential group members.
6. Restaurant design and site
Lengthy earlier than you signal a lease, ensure 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 house on your goal market.
Contemplate issues like:
- Neighborhood demographics
- Foot visitors
- Labor prices
- Accessibility
Hand in hand with location, your restaurant’s inside design—each in its ground plan and its ambiance—can be essential to your online business’s viability. Provide you with a charming 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 out of doors seating.
Contact on issues like:
- Lighting
- Decor
- Group uniforms
- Flatware and glassware
7. Advertising and marketing technique
How do you propose to market your restaurant? Your plan for grabbing prospects’ consideration is important to getting diners via the door, particularly at the start 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
If you happen to’ve determined to have takeout and supply at your restaurant—fairly necessary for many goal markets—determine whether or not you’ll use your personal drivers or knowledgeable fleet like Uber Eats or DoorDash.
Present the way you’ll present the sleek digital expertise your prospects will anticipate. Determine if and the way your web site will come into play, making an allowance for that in 2023, 40% of customers most well-liked to order immediately from the restaurant web site.
9. Monetary projections
Your restaurant’s projected funds have to be stable, particularly if you happen to’re utilizing your marketing strategy to get startup funds. With out this, buyers haven’t any approach of understanding if your online business is an effective funding or when it would develop 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 may be to contemplate once you’re beginning a brand new restaurant. We’re proud to be an all-in-one associate for 1000’s of eating places massive and small—serving to make every thing 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.
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)
