18 Restaurant Guerilla Marketing Ideas for your Restaurant Business

1. Create and Distribute Flyers

Creating flyers is a great way to promote your restaurant. Flyers are an excellent marketing tool for getting the word out about new products and specials, or just for drawing attention in general.

Whether you have a printed document or not, there are many ways to create flyers online that can be used as part of your restaurant guerrilla marketing campaign.

Posting flyers on public bulletin boards is a great way to get the word out about your business. The key to this is consistency so that people don’t forget about you and stop taking notice.

2. Post Signs in Your Local Area

Street signs are one of the most affordable guerilla restaurant marketing tactics to promote your restaurant. Signs can be placed in front of your building or at street corners near where you do business.

Some places allow them to be attached directly onto the light posts while others will only let fliers go up on certain days at certain times.

Some states have very strict laws about how these things are posted, but it’s not impossible to find workarounds and figure out what the limits are in your area.

Use signage to help you build awareness about new products or specials, as well as simply promoting your restaurant itself. Consider including a QR code that links to your website or Google My Business profile.

3. Create Effective Social Media Pages

For effective social media marketing, the key is making sure that your content and your brand stand out from the rest, and that you give your followers everything they are looking for.

You can get people to notice you by using eye-catching visuals such as your LTO’s and menu items, posting at opportune times of the day, and using hashtags to increase your visibility.

Social media pages should always include:

• Address
• Hours of operation
• Menus
• Phone number
• Reservation links
• Ordering links

Your posts should also have a clear call-to-action that asks people to click on an interesting link or visit your restaurant website. It’s worth remembering that people are much more likely to visit your site if you have a social media account with strong engagement.

A popular way to go about this is by looking for influencers in your area who might be interested in promoting your restaurant.

Many restaurant marketers are turning to social media influencers as an affordable marketing method. When choosing influencers, restaurants should:

• Check to make sure the influencer has a high amount of real followers.
• Ensure the influencer has high engagement rates based on their follower counts.
• Determine if the influencer’s follower base matches a restaurant’s target market.

4. Manage Your Ratings and Reviews

It is important to pay close attention to managing your restaurant ratings and reviews on a consistent basis.

The issue lies in the fact that there are many different places where your ratings and reviews can come from – Facebook, Google, Yelp, etc. Many restaurateurs simply do not have the time to solicit, monitor, reply to, and properly manage their online restaurant reputation.

Fortunately, there are tools that can help you automate these processes and bring everything down into one single platform. In the amount of time, it would take you to do it yourself or to pay someone to do it for you, these tools can have it done for you automatically, and at a less expensive cost.

For example, Bloom Intelligence can send automated messages to your customers after they leave your place of business asking them to rate their recent experience on Google, Facebook, Bloom, and if they had a negative experience to contact you directly.

When your customer makes a review on Google or Facebook then their review is pulled directly back into the Bloom platform for you to respond to them in one centralized restaurant marketing software.

You can see your ratings over time, see advanced sentiment analysis using artificial intelligence, and even use all the positive ratings you are receiving to be displayed in a pop-up widget on your website as social proof.

This strategy can increase your positive ratings over time, decrease negative reviews, and increase traffic to your restaurants through social proof.

Ultimately by automating the process of asking, and responding to reviews it will improve your restaurant reputation and improves customer lifetime values while saving you tons of time.

Did you know a single-star improvement can increase your restaurant’s revenue by 9%?

5. Create Social Media Contests and Calendars

This is one of the most common types of guerilla restaurant marketing tactics for restaurants because it’s always changing and open to trying new things out. Social media allows you to connect with current customers while getting the word out about special promotions and events at your place of business.

A great way to use social media for restaurant guerrilla marketing is to create a contest. The winner of the contest can receive a free food or drink item, or a t-shirt or cap, for example. Be creative and watch the comments (and new followers) pour in. And don’t forget to market with other posts as your following increases.

Social media calendars also help provide accountability. Every month, restaurant professionals can create a calendar that can include:

• Food specials (two-for-one specials, drink specials, etc.)
• Holidays (National Burger Day, Columbus Day, Breast Cancer Awareness Day, etc.)
• Events (live music, game nights, etc.)
• Promotions (loyalty programs, catering, etc.)
• Team features (featuring employee birthdays, anniversaries, introductions, etc.)
• Customer spotlights (featuring loyal customers)
• Sports events (football catering, Baseball on TVs, etc.)
• App features (in-app ordering, loyalty programs, etc.)
• News and public relations

6. Invest in Automated Customer Data Capture and Automated Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to promote your restaurant’s specials and events.

But what if you don’t have the time to execute ongoing email marketing campaigns? What if you do not have a way to collect customer contact information at scale?

That’s where a WiFi marketing automation platform like Bloom Intelligence comes in. With Bloom, you passively collect customer contact information as they log into your WiFi, fill out a form on your websites, or information collected from your point of sales.

Bloom quickly builds huge databases of detailed, cleaned, and verified customer profiles for you that include emails, phone numbers, zip codes, birthdays, survey responses, online ratings, and even transactions.

This ultimately unlocks customer insights for you that can be used to trigger email marketing campaigns using machine learning to increase your customer lifetime values, build online reviews, save at-risk customers, and much more.

Did you also know that you can save up to 38% of your lost customers using WiFi email marketing automation, and machine learning provided by Bloom Intelligence?

With an automated restaurant marketing platform like Bloom Intelligence, you can automate your restaurant marketing process saving you valuable time and resources while increasing your customer lifetime values.

These facts combined with our reputation management tools, customer sentiment analysis, ratings widget for your website, Google My Business & Facebook integrations, and the ability to track ROI down to the transaction makes Bloom a powerful and cost-effective restaurant marketing platform.

The best part is that your Bloom investment is less than what it costs you to save one lost customer in a year.