Best Restaurant Promotion Ideas That Are Easy to Execute

Canada is a country of diverse cuisines and even unique establishments. So why shy away from marketing your establishment in unique ways? In today’s world, the more out-of-the-box your ideas are, the better chances you have of going viral online. While virality may not always bring in customers, it definitely improves the eyeballs your restaurant gets. This means you get to create your own blueprint for promotional activities too. Different formats and promotional ideas work for different restaurants. So we’ve curated some of the very best for you to choose from. If you’re feeling fun, you could even combine some of these for better results.

How to run restaurant promotions in Canada | Full guide

1. Leverage a big local event

2. Collaborating with social media celebs or charities

3. Holiday galas

4. Loyalty rewards

5. Bundled and fixed offerings

6. Foot-in-the-door strategy

7. Optimize downtimes

8. Organize or run community events

9. Buy in bulk and upsell

10. Launch, openings, or festive discounts

11. Takeout, delivery, or catering for special events

12. Virtual access

13. Collaboration with third-party delivery systems

14. Show up with pop-ups

15. Old-school restaurant promotion tactics

What are Restaurant Promotions?

Restaurant promotions are distinctive ways you can get potential customers to come visit your restaurant and retain them in the long run. These include creating offers to reward loyal customers and entice the new ones. From events to social media giveaways, these restaurant promotional offers can set your business up for success in a small but substantial way. When it comes to tangibility, these promotional offers can be made available to the consumers through coupons, QR codes, or discounts delivered via email or your receipt.

Everything You Need to Prep for Restaurant Promotions

Before you decide to go all out on these ideas, you need to understand what keeps your audience excited and invested in your business. Is it your food, your ambience, your location, or something else? Once you have your basics in place, you can actually plot low-investment to high-investment ideas so you can keep your cash flow and ROI balanced. Here are some of the simpler ways you can do that for your establishment.

1. Know your customer base

You cannot create a successful restaurant promotion plan without analyzing your potential and existing customers. They’re the drivers of your business. You need to evaluate their behavior when it comes to attracting them to your establishment. This includes taking a look at their spending habits and expectations, too. This behavior is also influenced by where your restaurant is located.

Are you 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 who might be interested in a customer loyalty program? You’ll have to take the customers’ spending habits into account as well. For example, if your target group is a younger Gen-Z audience with lesser spending capacity, the promotional activities cannot be high-spending ones.  

You can be strategic and get the audience to come and visit your restaurant.

2. Evaluate your business challenges

Even when your restaurant is doing well, there’s always going to be room for improvement. So before you go ahead with another round of restaurant promotions, it’s recommended to list all the challenges or hiccups you’re currently facing. For example, is there a section of your menu that isn’t getting any love, or a time of day when your staff are idle? You could try setting up discounts on food items like appetizers that aren’t moving or launching a happy hour during off-peak times. 

In case you want to solve admin-first issues by uncovering data and analytics, you should try investing in a point-of-sale system for your restaurant. This helps in excavating important details like how much food you are able to sell, what dishes are topping the charts, where your employees are spending the maximum amount of time, or how often you should stock up on inventory.

3. Choosing between revenue and press promotions

Plenty of high-end restaurants in Canada focus on garnering a spot in the press instead of revenue-focused promotions. Generating good press inadvertently also brings in curious customers who help in increasing revenue. The brand awareness has a lasting impact and creates top-of-the-mind recall. 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. In fact, collaborating with video-first press coverage creators could help you show your process, food, and story all at once.

You could stagger periodic boosts throughout the year for video press. Additionally, you could also apply to be on the top food lists depending on your province/territory.

4. Define your margins

When determining the pricing for your food menu, you should set profit margins on every item. Even when you’re giving discounts to entice your audience, you should be able to make a profit out of it. The best way to market these discounts is by managing your pricing for your bestsellers.

If you want to make this more profitable, you could add this dessert as a freebie when your customers buy a specific burger/bestseller item from the menu. Understanding your margins will help you make informed discounting and purchasing decisions and identify ways to make your inventory go further.

Food & Beverage Restaurant Promotion Ideas in Canada

Accounting for your business challenges and problems is one of the easiest ways you can plan your restaurant promotion ideas in Canada. The first and foremost part of this is listening to your customers, making a note of what needs to be improved or changed, and finding that one thread that makes the experience better. Eventually, you can implement fun restaurant ideas for promotion.

1. Leverage a big local event

Whether you’re launching your restaurant or trying to build further hype around it, you can tap into local events for some hype. This helps in driving business and generating awareness for your restaurant to a larger audience. To entice these customers, you can change up the menu for the day, offer them discounted prices during the event day, or collaborate with the event hosts too. 

For example, if there’s a big sports day event in your area, you could give the winning team supporters and members some discount. In case there’s a concert, you could give them items at a discounted rate before they head to the event.

2. Collaborating with social media celebs or charities

Depending on your requirement — engagement or viewership, you can create a list of influencers who could promote your restaurant. Some mini influencers trying to build an audience generally do restaurant promotions as a barter collab. If you’re trying to work with major celebs, you can actually personalize the menu. You could rename a menu item for the day so they could celebrate with you.

You could also do a sit-down conversation with them explaining the story behind your brand. This helps in building depth and showcasing your brand beyond the food.

3. Holiday galas

Even during holidays there are some folks who are either working or can’t celebrate with their families. So when you create a holiday menu, you could actually take festivities into consideration. Your restaurant could also host mini events for people to come together so they feel welcomed.

You could also run contests where the best participants win a free side or get compensated for a meal. This will drive interest amongst people who love experiential-first establishments. 

4. Loyalty rewards

Rewarding customer loyalty is the oldest trick in the marketing book that continues to help in retaining customers. The fact that these customers are choosing your restaurant over something else is an indicator of how much they like your food, service, or simply the setup. But when these customers decide to stay with you, it becomes your responsibility to keep them coming through the door.

Remember to determine a threshold before you go around giving discounts because you’re running a business after all. It should be high enough 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: Give them free birthday coffees if they're regular, create a punch card where they get one coffee free if they buy nine, or they get a discount if they buy a bucket of beer pints.

5. Bundled and fixed offerings

When you have a restaurant POS system that tracks inventory with efficiency, you should be able to create your menu depending on what’s faring. Maybe a dish needs some push, so you can tweak the pricing. If a specific menu item is a bestseller, you can provide the customers with a bundled offering at a slightly higher rate to turn that dish into a meal. 

6. Foot-in-the-door strategy

If you’re experiencing a plateau in the business or you’ve just launched, this could be a great strategy for restaurant promotions. You typically discount sides or appetizers from your menu so the customers feel like ordering accompaniments. These promotions are generally called “get them in the door” or “foot in the door” because you’re using it to increase the footfall in your restaurant.

You can promote them on your social media channels or even put out a board outside your restaurant so people can step in at any time. Example: Discount salty pretzels or fries that’ll inspire someone to buy beers or a soft drink.

7. Optimize downtimes

This can be a great time for you to open up offerings and discounts to a different set of audiences. For example, if you’re generally serving large groups of friends or family, you can run promotions for freelancers or people who work from home. This downtime can provide a quiet atmosphere for people who want to work from your restaurant while they enjoy a coffee or two. 

You can also run promotions for your online ordering or food delivery too on slower days. This can help you cover the gap of low orders at your establishment. For example, you could start your happy hour an hour prior to a designated time between Tuesdays and Thursdays. You could offer 10% discounts on any item on the menu during the lull hours. This could also be a great time to try new dishes and take feedback from newer customers before you officially add them to the regular menu.

8. Organize or run community events

Your restaurant can be a huge part of building community and bringing people together. You can be the regular hub for local organizations, book clubs, or even coffee raves so people show up to your restaurant consistently. 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.

Say if you’re running a happy hour on a Thursday, you could use that money to fund a local sports team. You could run a press release for the event and post on social media to get more eyeballs on the topic.

9. Buy in bulk and upsell

This restaurant promotion idea focuses on increasing the bill value. The key here is to know how much a customer spends/would spend on an average and offer them a discount if they buy one more dish. You could knock off $5 on an appetizer if they spend $35-$50 more. Gift cards or free dishes are also a great way to upsell.

10. Launch, openings, or festive discounts

Huge events automatically garner attention — whether they’re on social media or in person. The idea is to introduce your people to something new: a new opening, launch, or even festival discounts. These offers could be for regulars only so you don’t incur losses and still have the adequate number of visitors at your restaurant.

This works especially well when you’re opening a second or third location in a different area. Your old customers get to hype you up while the new ones experience your genius.

11. Takeout, delivery, or catering for special events

This is a unique opportunity for customers who love your food and might want to book you for events or parties. You could create a set holiday-special takeout menu for festivals or collaborate with wedding agencies to cater food. This will help you focus on the customers you know would splurge. 

Good food always has its place, and with the right contacts and restaurant promotion, you should be able to make it to everyone’s top of the charts. 

12. Virtual access

Your customers should feel like a part of your ecosystem even when they’re not present at the restaurant. This means giving them more than just food content. You could do storytelling videos, offer to explore secret menu items, and even showcase BTS stuff so they know exactly how the food is made. Some restaurants like Three Falcons in London have an Instagram-first miniseries to promote their gastropub and boutique hotel.

13. Collaboration with third-party delivery systems

If you’re still trying to scale your orders, working with third-party delivery systems could be a great idea, too. Maybe your restaurant is located in a slightly distant part of your town, or reaching there isn’t super accessible. A third-party delivery partner can work with you to offer customers discounted dishes in a mega-wide radius while promoting your restaurant and certain menu items. With Toast's third-party integrations, all the orders will come straight to your POS (no more juggling tablets). This way, you can reach out to new customers who are further away from your restaurant.

14. Show up with pop-ups

If you’re unable to bring in customers at your restaurant, you should go where the customers are. A pop-up or food truck parked in a popular area allows people to experience your menu in nontraditional surroundings. This is also a good test of what a larger audience might prefer to have on your menu.

You could take your new or most popular items to an outdoor brewery, a nearby farmer’s market, or another open-air setup to engage customers and promote menu items. Additionally, you could also use these pop-up days for when you know you’ll have fewer customers in the restaurant.

15. Old-school restaurant promotion tactics

Even though social media is having its moment right now, old-school tactics for restaurant promotions haven’t gone obsolete yet. Word-of-mouth is still one of the most reliable ways to get new customers. One simple way to get people’s attention is sending them direct mail with a preview of your menu. You could also discount the prices if they order online using the code provided in the mail.

When times are slow, you can run an email marketing campaign for customers who visit often with a new discount or a new food item too.

Feeling Inspired? Start With a Plan

If you’ve already got a couple of restaurant promotion ideas, the next best step would be detailing it out. This gives your investors a sense of what your vision for getting and retaining customers would look like. If you’re wondering where to begin, a marketing plan template is perfect for you. It takes away all the pressure from mish-mashing different strategies that may or may not work for you.

This way you’ll always have a promotion idea for Mother's Day, summer peaks, or the holiday season. Now that you’ve got a rolodex of restaurant promotion ideas, it’s time to put them to use with this marketing plan.

Related Resources

• 44 Unique Restaurant Ideas to Inspire Your Theme or Concept

• How to Design a Restaurant Floor Plan, Layout, and Blueprint

• How to Make a Restaurant Menu Design With Examples