15 Restaurant Promotion Ideas

Promotions are a great way to engage customers and spotlight everything your restaurant has to offer. We’ve put together a list of 15 ways to run restaurant promotions that can increase your sales, boost profits, and create a blueprint for implementing highly successful restaurant marketing campaigns of your own.

What are restaurant promotions?

In short, it's all about creating special offers that get new guests through the door and bring back one-time visitors, turn them into regulars, and boost sales. Restaurant promotions can involve everything from showcasing signature dishes to running happy hour deals, and can take the form of coupons, QR codes, or discounts delivered via email or your receipt.

Restaurant Promotion Preparation

Know Your Customer Base

It’s impossible for a promotion to be successful without first identifying, analyzing, and understanding both your existing customers and your target customers. 

Ask yourself: Are you located near office buildings? A stadium? Do your customers tend to be older or younger? Do you attract families? What motivates your customers: having a unique experience, trying new foods, or saving money? Do you attract repeat customers that might be interested in a loyalty program? Answer these questions first, and you'll have a much easier time coming up with restaurant promotion ideas that inspire repeat visits.

Look at Your Business Challenges

Restaurant promotions can help restaurants overcome challenges that are unique to their business, and underlying issues are best discovered by diving into the data and analytics from your restaurant's point-of-sale system. 

Is there a section of your menu that isn’t getting any love, or a time of day where your staff are idle? Set up discounts on those foods that aren’t moving, and try launching a happy hour during off-peak times.  

Revenue vs. Press?

A lot of successful promotions have a big-picture aim: to generate press for the business, which can also increase revenue. Marketing initiatives that drive press can sometimes be more impactful than revenue-focused promotions. The brand awareness they generate is invaluable.

Think about it: A promotion featuring discounted menu items for a limited-time is only impactful while the promotion is live. But press attention has much greater longevity, and can potentially encourage traffic weeks or months from the original publish date.

Try connecting with a local reporter and coordinating a few press opportunities over the course of the quarter, to give your business a periodic boost throughout the year. 

Know Your Margins

It’s important to know the margins of every item on your menu. Generally speaking, it's best to promote offerings with high profit margins as a lead into the rest of your menu. For example, you could just give away a free dessert to all customers for a short timeframe, but it might be more fruitful to offer a freebie whenever they purchase the new burger you’re trying to promote. 

Understanding your margins will help you make informed discounting and purchasing decisions, and identify ways to make your inventory go further.

The 15 Best Food and Beverage Restaurant Promotion Ideas

• Leverage a Big Local Event
• Charities & Influencers
• Holidays
• Loyalty Offerings
• Bundling and Fixed Price Offerings
• Get Them in the Doors
• Down Time
• Community Events
• Buy in Bulk and Upsell
• Launches & Openings
• Takeout and Delivery Special Event Catering
• Virtual Access Marketing Efforts
• Collaborations With Third-Party Deliverers
• Pop-Ups
• Old School Promotion Tactics

The 15 Best Food and Beverage Restaurant Promotion Ideas

Tailor promotions to your business by writing down your top 5-10 business challenges, and the top 5-10 things that motivate your customers. Then, connect the dots. 

Here are 15 restaurant promotion ideas you should add to your yearly restaurant marketing plan.  

1. Leverage a Big Local Event

Plan a promotion around a big event nearby, like a local sporting event, concert, or marathon. This helps drive business and generate awareness of your restaurant to a large audience. You’ll essentially be riding off the coattails of that event’s marketing. 

Examples: Offer 5% off to people who have a ticket to a local hockey game, or $5 off any purchase before a concert that’s down the street.

2. Charities & Celebrities

Bringing in a food blogger or influencer, especially if they’re local, can be inexpensive. You can potentially entice them by donating a portion of the day’s proceeds to a charity of their choosing. Joining forces with a big name will not only draw people to your restaurant but show the community that you care about a good cause. Most food influencers will promote your restaurant on their social media platforms in exchange for a free meal.

Examples: Have a drink special named after the influencer for the day and have them come in to be photographed with it. Then, dedicate half the proceeds from that cocktail to the charity of their choice.

3. Holidays

How can you celebrate the holidays with your customers? What will inspire them to share, link, and tag you in the event content they post on their social channels? Create an event that's so special they can't resist to post about it — and bring their friends back next year.

Examples: Halloween costume contests featuring giveaways or gifts, a different offering for each of the twelve days of Christmas, an ask to share their own love story on social media for a chance at a free dinner on Valentine’s Day, or a Mother’s Day trivia event.

4. Loyalty Offerings

The key is picking a high enough threshold for a free meal or a discount to make it worthwhile for you. It helps to get your guests to opt in easily with the use of restaurant loyalty technology.

Examples: Buy nine coffees and get one free, purchase every beer on the list and get 10% off beers for the year. 

5. Bundling and Fixed Price Offerings

Some restaurant POS systems can help you see how your menu items are faring in inventory reporting, which helps you set up promotions. If a certain dish isn’t exactly flying out the door, attach it to one of the more popular ones, at a discounted price. 

Examples: A reduced-price set menu, featuring a mix of top performers and dishes that need a boost.

6. Get Them in the Doors

Another surefire strategy is to heavily discount a section of your menu that’s filled with items that aren’t typically eaten by themselves – like sides, snacks, and soups. These promotions are often called the “get them in the doors,” because they're used to get someone in to make their first purchase, and then pushes them to buy more. Make sure to post deals like this online- social media marketing is free and typically effective!

Examples: Discount salty =pretzels that’ll inspire someone to buy beers.

7. Down Time

Run promotions during slow times, to draw customers in when your restaurant is near empty and staff is underutilized. You can also run promotions for your online ordering or food delivery too, like free delivery or deals on slower days.

Examples: Run drink specials or trivia or music events on slow nights like Tuesday or Wednesday, offer discounts that start at 4pm and end by 5:30, or try out a late night menu. 

8. Community Events

Allowing local organizations to use your space taps into their network and – bonus – they’ll do all the promoting for you.  If you don’t want to host an event, consider doing a profit share for the group in need. Donate part (or all) of the profits you make during a specific time period.

Example: Donate 50% of profits from your Thursday happy hour to funding the local sports team. Pro tip: add specific hashtags for the day so you can utilize guests’ social media posts as well!

9. Buy in Bulk and Upsell

Similar to loyalty promotions, the key here is knowing the average amount customers spend on a certain item, and then offering a small discount if they spend slightly more. 

Examples: Knock five dollars off an appetizer with the purchase of a $50 or more gift card, or give away a free beer for every two orders of wings.

10. Launches & Openings

Time promotions with the launch of new menu items or the openings of new locations. It’s a great way to earn a bit of money back for obvious investments. 

Example: To highlight the opening of a second (or third) location, invite regulars to attend the soft opening and preview new menu items.

11. Takeout and Delivery Special Event Catering

Customers that appreciate your food may want to hire you to cater more than just a two-person dinner. Try creating a set holiday takeout and delivery menu — guests are willing to splurge this time of year, and the convenience of not having to cook for the holidays (but still enjoy a cozy meal at home) is priceless. 

Example: Have your restaurant offer a Thanksgiving feast for takeout and delivery, or keep those family-style takeout feasts available year-round and email guests around their birthdays with this offering at a small discount.

12. Virtual Access

Whether it’s through video, augmented reality, or some other platform, insights on the menu or bar prep can increase the emotional investment customers have in your team, your business, and your food. 

Example: You can offer video tutorials on how to cook favorite dishes or even offer a virtual tour of the kitchen pre-opening. These can be add-ons or special offerings to customers who visit the restaurant regularly or spend a certain amount.

13. Collaborations With Third-Party Deliverers

Is your restaurant still trying to get in-person attendance back to where it was pre-pandemic? Is your new location in a not-so-easy-to-find part of town? A third-party delivery partner can work with you to offer customers in a mega-wide radius discounted dishes, helping to promote the restaurant as well as certain menu items — and with Toast's Third Party Integrations, those orders will come straight to your POS (no more juggling tablets). This way you can reach new customers that are located a little further away.

Example: Designate one menu item as delivery-only and promote it heavily on your social media.

14. Pop-Ups

A pop-up or food truck parked in a popular area allows people to experience your menu in non-traditional surroundings.

Example: Take your new or most popular items to an outdoor brewery, nearby farmer’s market, or another open-air setup to engage customers and promote menu items.

15. Old School Promotion Tactics

We’re definitely in a digital age, but that doesn’t make old school outreach obsolete. Word of mouth does exist!

Example: Send direct mail that previews new menu items. They can contain discount codes to be used when brought back to the physical location. Email marketing is a more modern way of accomplishing this as well!

Inspired? Get planning!

The best marketing initiatives are planned and prepared in advance — that's where a marketing plan comes in.

Download your personal restaurant marketing plan template to plan your marketing ideas on a calendar. This way, you won't be caught without a promotion idea for Mother's Day, the Super Bowl, or the holiday season.

Related Restaurant Marketing Resources

• Restaurant Social Media Marketing
• Restaurant Marketing Plan Examples
• Bar Marketing Ideas
• Bakery Marketing Ideas
• Coffee Shop Marketing Ideas
• Nightclub Marketing Ideas
• Brewery Marketing Ideas