Marketing tools for a restaurant cover four jobs: being found online, keeping in touch with customers, taking orders and measuring what works. This guide names the tools worth trying for each job and what each one does.
Why digital marketing matters for a restaurant
A good location and a sign used to be most of the marketing. Customers now find restaurants through search, maps, reviews and social media before they ever see the front door. The tools below cover those channels.
Get found online
Your online presence is more than a website. It includes your reviews, your social posts and how you appear in search results.
SEMrush and Moz show which keywords to use, where to use them and how to structure your pages. Both are general SEO tools rather than restaurant-specific ones, so budget time to learn them.
Buffer and Hootsuite let you schedule social posts, watch replies and answer comments from one dashboard. That saves the daily scramble to post something.
Keep customers coming back
Email is the cheapest way to reach people who have already eaten with you. Mailchimp sends newsletters, offers and one-off messages, and reports which ones people opened and clicked.
Loyalty tools such as Belly and FiveStars reward regulars and give them a reason to return.
Take orders on your own site
Ordering and delivery need to work without a phone call. FoodMaster (formerly WooFood) is a WooCommerce food ordering solution for WordPress. Customers browse the menu, place an order and choose a delivery or pickup time without leaving your site. It installs on the site you already have and is managed from the WordPress dashboard.
Measure what works
Google Analytics and Social Report show how many people visit your site, which posts get engagement and which emails get opened. Use the numbers to drop what does not work and put the time into what does.
You do not need every tool on this list. Pick the one or two that match the job you are trying to fix, run them for a few months, then decide.