Restaurant marketing involves using various strategies and tactics to promote your restaurant and attract customers. It encompasses digital marketing, social media campaigns, and traditional advertising methods such as OOH advertising. The goal is to increase visibility, draw in new patrons, and build a loyal customer base through effective communication of your restaurant's personality and unique value proposition. Your restaurant marketing strategies need to be designed to reflect your business in the best possible light.

Local advertising is crucial for restaurants as it helps target potential customers within your vicinity - AKA, those who are most likely to visit your restaurant for a bite to eat. Independent restaurants rely heavily on foot traffic and local clientele; even those with multiple locations need their patrons to know there’s a place to eat nearby. Therefore, ensuring your marketing efforts resonate with the local community is key to your restaurant's success. Local advertising, particularly OOH advertising, helps to foster a sense of community with the surrounding area and build a loyal customer base to regularly frequent your restaurant.

You can also capitalise on local and national events to enhance the impact of your OOH adverts. In our collaboration with PizzaLuxe, we made specific creative content advertising a special offer around the Euros, designed to appear an hour before a match is set to start. This drives traffic to PizzaLuxe not just to take advantage of the deal, but also to stay in and watch the game being screened in-store.

Effective OOH Marketing Strategies for Restaurants

Here are our top tips for crafting effective restaurant marketing strategies.

Choosing the Right Locations

Of course, ‘right’ is a subjective term. What is right for your competitor’s restaurant may not be right for yours, so it’s important to choose carefully. Consider high-traffic areas such as busy intersections, shopping centres, and transit routes - if your restaurant has no designated parking nearby, consider mentioning the nearest available place where your patrons can park their cars.

Think about places where your target audience spends time, like near offices, schools, or entertainment venues, and whether their coming and going from these places intersects with mealtimes. The more relevant the location to your target demographic, and the daily ebbs and flows of their appetite, the more effective your advertising will be.

OOH advertising comes in various formats, each with its advantages. Billboards are large and high-impact, while ads on buses and trains travel large distances every day, taking your message to people and not just waiting for people to pass it by. Posters and banners can be placed in strategic locations like shopping malls or street corners. Digital OOH ads, such as screens and displays, can offer dynamic content that changes throughout the day. Using a mix of these formats can maximise your reach and effectiveness, so take your time when considering which is right for your restaurant.

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Effective OOH advertising could be a lifeline in keeping your restaurant cooking - more than 500 restaurants had to close in the last quarter of 2023, a marked increase from the year before, and an unfortunate result of ‘high inflation and cash-strapped customers.’

By choosing the right locations, crafting compelling content, and using a variety of formats, you can create effective OOH campaigns that resonate with your local audience and make them hungry for more of what you can bring to their (dinner) table.

Ready to boost your restaurant's local presence with OOH advertising? We can help you get started.

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