Restaurant Promotion Ideas for UK Restaurants | Simple Guide

You can have one of the finest restaurants in the UK, but if you’re not promoting it correctly and adequately, your bookings might end up suffering. If you’re a restaurateur in a country with such diverse establishments and cuisines, you shouldn’t shy away from getting creative with your restaurant promotion ideas. 

When you implement out-of-the-box ideas, you improve your chances of going viral. And in today’s day and age, that is currency for getting more eyeballs on your restaurant. This means you get to create your own blueprint for promotional activities, too. 

No two restaurants are the same when it comes to promotions. Even when your offerings are similar, having a competitive edge through different formats and promotional ideas works 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 the UK | Complete 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. Optimise downtimes

8. Organise 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?

Posting and praying or just telling the people you know isn’t the only way to market your restaurant. Restaurant promotions are systems and ideas through which you can have a constant influx of customers at your establishment. These include creating offers to reward loyal customers and entice the new ones. From running community events to social media giveaways, these restaurant promotional offers can set your business up for success from the get go. 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.

How to Prepare for Restaurant Promotions

Before you even start investing in restaurant promotions, you need to understand the promotional landscape of the hospitality sectors. You don’t have to go all out since launching. It’s all about trial and error. You should be first focusing on gaining knowledge about 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 the four important ways you can do that.

1. Know your customer base

Every successful restaurant promotion plan starts with the people. This means analysing your current and potential customers’ behaviour and spending habits. They’re the drivers of your business. So every little thing that is important to them becomes crucial for you.

Some questions about your restaurant that you could ask yourself include: 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 programme? 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 have to exercise precaution and limit spending wherever you can.

2. Evaluate your business challenges

Your business is a constantly changing entity. So even when you have lots of customers, there’s going to be room for improvement. Before you implement another round of 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 appetisers that aren’t moving or launching a happy hour during off-peak times. 

If you want to focus on admin issues first, investing in a point-of-sale system would be ideal. This would also support in uncovering data and analytics. For example, the POS system excavates important details for you. This includes 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

There’s nothing like some good press from the UK food and media houses to garner customer attention. This press doesn’t even have to be revenue-focused, and it’ll still bring in more customers into your restaurant. The brand awareness has a lasting impact and creates top-of-the-mind recall. There’s a reason why a freebie or a promotional offer is for a limited time. You could end up making more losses despite selling the freebies.

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.

These periodic video boosts can be plugged before big events, festivities, or a new menu launch so you have the maximum amount of engagement during that time.

4. Define your margins

You can offset the costs that you incur to run a restaurant by setting profit margins on every item. When determining the pricing for the food items, you should always see where people would be willing to spend. This will provide some insight into what should be further discounted. 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 setting margins 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 the UK

Depending on your business challenges, you can pick and choose the restaurant promotion ideas that work for you. The key to a good idea is picking something that your customers resonate with and isn’t necessarily expensive. You can implement fun restaurant ideas once you’ve figured out what can be improved or changed. Here’s our simple, recommended list.

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. You can change up the menu for the event day, offer discounted prices during the event, or collaborate with the event hosts too so you can entice some customers. 

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

If your restaurant’s page doesn’t have a large audience yet, you can tap into celebs who have plenty of followers. Bring along a food blogger to review for free, have a social media celebrity get free dinner in exchange for a post on their social media, or host a charity event. Depending on your requirement, engagement, or viewership, you can create a list of influencers who could promote your restaurant. If you’re trying to work with major celebs, you can actually personalise 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. These collabs with social media celebs or charities would make for a great press release. Hence, giving you the audience viewership you need on social media, and, eventually, your restaurant.

3. Holiday galas

Running holiday galas and events is the next big thing, as it takes away the pressure of planning for people. Even during holidays there are some folks who are either working or can’t celebrate with their families. So with a set holiday menu, you could actually host galas or limited-seating dinners. You could also run contests where the best participants win a free side or get compensated for a meal. This will drive interest among people who love experiential-first establishments. There’s always an option to give them a free appetiser or dessert for Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.

4. Loyalty rewards

Customer loyalty is one of the top reasons why restaurants become successful. So rewarding them becomes the oldest trick in the marketing book that continues to help in retaining customers. You want these customers to keep choosing you over everyone else because of your food, service, or simply the setup. A reward system is how you keep them coming through the door.

Set a threshold before you start providing discounts. You’re a business after all; the idea is to make a profit. 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 regulars, 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

To curate restaurant offerings depending on the inventory, your restaurant needs an efficient POS system. Essentially, this system should be able to track under/overstocked items, dishes that are faring well, or even bestsellers. Maybe a dish needs some push, so you can tweak its 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. 

You could also have a reduced-price set menu featuring a mix of top performers and dishes that need a boost.

6. Foot-in-the-door strategy

As a brand, you need restaurant promotions for customers in various levels of your marketing funnel. Some people might be completely unaware of your brand, while a few need just a push before they come and visit you. You could use the plateau in your business to experiment with your restaurant promotions using the foot-in-the-door strategy. You typically discount sides or appetisers 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 chips or crisps that’ll inspire someone to buy beers or a soft drink.

7. Optimise downtimes

When your business is experiencing downtimes, you can actually use it to your advantage by testing your offers with a different set of audience. 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. 

A great addition for slower days could be running promotions for your online ordering or food delivery. 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. Organise or run community events

Community events are big in the UK. Whether it’s book clubs, fundraisers for local organisations, or running for a cause, they always cause a stir. People either need a way to wind down or have a restaurant host the event through their collaborators. If your restaurant is set up in an area where people admire community-driven events, this could be great for your business. 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. A good way to get eyeballs is running a press release in a local newspaper and talking about it on your brand’s social media accounts prior to the event.

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. You could also push this as a ‘complete your meal’ offering. Try knocking five pounds off an appetiser with the purchase of a £50 or more gift card, or give away a free beer for every two orders of scampi.

10. Launch, openings, or festive discounts

People love a good discount, especially at the start of something new. Whether you’re dropping a new dish or opening a new restaurant location, running event-specific discounts and offers could get more people to explore your restaurant. 

Through these festive offers, you open yourself up to newer customers who might eventually turn into regulars. While you’re offering them discounts, remember that good service and great food always go a long way, too. Additionally, ensure to keep these discounts for a limited-time or specific people so you don’t incur losses while getting people in the restaurant. 

Some cost-effective ways to promote these discounts are through social media, word-of-mouth, or telling your regulars about it when they’re at the restaurant so they splurge more than usual.

11. Takeout, delivery, or catering for special events

If you’ve built enough rapport with your loyal customers, you open up a unique opportunity. This means the customers who love your food might just book you for bigger events and parties. You could create a set holiday-special takeout menu for festivals or collaborate with wedding agencies to cater food. 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. 

Come festive season, people still want good food but without actually going outside. They want to spend some time with their family while sharing something they love. For example, you could have your restaurant offer a full Christmas roast for takeout and delivery or keep those family-style roast dinners available year-round and email guests around their birthdays with this kind of offering at a small discount.

12. Virtual access

Your customers should feel like a part of your ecosystem even when they’re not present at the restaurant. While content related to food works really well in terms of virality and engagement, you could also bring in an element of storytelling. This means making them feel closer to your restaurant’s story, its establishment, and eventual growth. Some restaurants like Three Falcons in London have an Instagram-first miniseries to promote their gastropub and boutique hotel.

These engaging social media promotions keep your audience hooked while they’re away from your restaurant but still talking about it.

13. Collaboration with third-party delivery systems

If your orders are still in the snooze zone, you might want to experiment with third-party delivery partners. 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

Having a pop-up means you get to interact with potential customers in an area where they spend most of their time. This could include office hubs, trade centres, or even popular markets. These are the customers who give you feedback in real time so you can go and make changes to your menu. Running a pop-up 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

With the advent of social media and how exhausting it is to be online, people, especially millennials, have started craving analogue time. These are also your potential customers who currently have spending power. So, it might not be a bad idea to revert to old-school tactics for your restaurant promotions. This includes word-of-mouth, sending direct mail with restaurant menu previews, and putting boards outside your restaurant. You could also discount the prices if they order online using the code provided in the mail.

You could also run an email marketing campaign to reach out to your warm audience with exclusive discounts.

Start Planning as Soon as the Inspiration Strikes

Once you’ve compiled a list of restaurant promotion ideas, don’t wait up on planning. Remember to have all your ideas detailed out before you present them to the investors. This supports the vision you’re trying to create for your restaurant. And if you’re feeling stuck, this marketing plan template is perfect for you. Instead of DIY-ing your way through it and risking important steps, just use the template to cover all ground.

This way, you’ll end up preventing any missed opportunities for Mother’s Day, World Cup, summer peaks, or other festivities. Now that you have a running list of restaurant promotion ideas, let’s put it to good use.

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• 43 Unique Restaurant Ideas to Inspire Your Theme or Concept

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