Restaurant Marketing Plan Checklist

Pull cover counts and average check by daypart (brunch, lunch, happy hour, dinner, late-night) from the POS — Toast, Square, or Aloha. Sketch the guest persona for each daypart: lunch is often nearby office workers on a 45-minute clock; dinner skews date-night or family. Marketing channels follow from these personas.

Walk into the three nearest competitors at peak service. Note their menu price bands, average check, cover turnover, signature dishes, and any visible promo. Photograph their menu and check Resy/OpenTable availability — booking density is a usable proxy for demand.

Strengths and weaknesses are internal (cuisine, chef reputation, patio, parking). Opportunities and threats are external (a new concept opening two doors down is a threat; an office tower opening across the street is an opportunity). Keep it to one page.

One sentence: what a guest can expect every visit. "Wood-fired Neapolitan pizza and natural wine in a 45-minute neighborhood dinner." The promise should constrain operations — if the kitchen can't hit 45 minutes, the promise is wrong, not the kitchen.

Answer the question: "Why here, not the place across the street?" The USP must be something a guest can perceive in one visit — a 900°F oven, a James Beard semifinalist chef, a 200-bottle natural wine list, a $14 lunch combo that beats every comp.

Required pages: home, menu (with allergens flagged), hours, location with map, reservations link to Resy or OpenTable, online-ordering link to Toast or ChowNow, contact. Menu PDFs are a common search-engine miss — render menu as HTML text so Google can index it.

Most discovery traffic comes through Google Maps and "restaurants near me" searches, not the website. Verify the listing, add 10+ photos (interior, exterior, top sellers, team), set accurate hours including holidays, enable reservations, and turn on Q&A monitoring.

Convert to business accounts so analytics and link-in-bio work. NAP (name, address, phone) consistency across all platforms is a local-SEO ranking signal — copy-paste from the GBP listing to avoid drift.

Allocate the quarterly marketing budget across channels. For independent restaurants, paid social (Meta + TikTok) and Google Local Ads typically outperform print or radio per dollar, but a neighborhood concept may still benefit from a community paper buy. Set a single channel as the primary test.

Shoot vertical video for Reels and TikTok, square stills for the feed, and landscape for Google. Lead with the signature dish — generic interior shots underperform food shots by a wide margin. Aim for 6-8 assets per campaign so you can rotate before fatigue.

Local micro-influencers (5K-50K followers) typically outperform regional macro-accounts on conversion for restaurants. Comp the meal, set deliverables in writing (one Reel + 3 Stories), and require FTC disclosure (#ad or #partner). Track redemption with a unique promo code per creator.

Toast Loyalty, Square Loyalty, and SpotOn each support points-per-dollar with redemption thresholds. Pick a simple structure (e.g., $1 = 1 point, 100 points = $10 off) — complicated tier systems lose servers at the point of enrollment.

Most independents under-collect email — the host stand is the highest-intent moment. Train hosts on a one-line ask tied to the loyalty signup. Online ordering should pre-check the opt-in (where legal). Sync captures into Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or the POS-native marketing tool.

One newsletter per month is the floor; weekly is the practical ceiling before unsubscribes spike. SMS should be reserved for time-sensitive offers (today only, last-minute reservation availability) — overuse trains guests to unsubscribe. Honor TCPA: explicit opt-in, every message includes STOP instructions.

Pull the bylines from the city paper's food section, Eater's local site, the metro magazine, and the two or three local food podcasts and Substacks. 20 names is plenty — quality of relationship beats list size.

News hook first: new chef, menu change, opening, anniversary, award. Lead paragraph answers who/what/where/when. Include the chef's bio, hi-res photos, reservation link, and the GM's mobile number. Send by 10am Tuesday — Monday is too noisy, Friday is too late.

Media tastings work for menu launches, new chef debuts, or anniversaries — they don't work for ordinary operations. Cost is 10-20 comped covers plus prep time. Decide based on whether there's a real news hook a writer would care about.

Neighborhood 5K, school auction, public radio fundraiser, or food bank gala — pick one with overlap to the guest persona, not whatever has the lowest sponsorship tier. Negotiate logo placement plus a gift card pull (lower marginal cost, higher trial conversion than cash).

Find a non-competing business with the same customer (a wine shop, bookstore, theater, hotel concierge). Trade gift cards, run a joint promo, or build a "dinner + show" package. Concierge relationships at nearby hotels are particularly underused — a $50 staff meal at the hotel buys a year of referrals.

Pull the POS sales summary for the quarter. Compare cover counts, average check, and sales-mix shifts against the prior quarter and the same quarter last year. Marketing impact shows up in cover growth and new-guest counts, not just gross sales.

For each campaign, calculate cost per new guest, cost per redemption, and incremental cover lift. A campaign at $40 cost per new guest is fine if the lifetime check is $200+; the same number is a problem at a $25 lunch counter.