Restaurant · Guide · Updated July 2026

How to Create a Restaurant Marketing Plan in 7 Steps

The whole reason operators waste money on marketing is simple: they skip the plan and jump straight to tactics. Without a written plan, every competitor promotion you see pulls you off course, and you end up running campaigns that conflict with your own goals. Seven steps fix that.

Step 1: Identify Exactly What You Want

Before you think about Instagram posts or sandwich boards, answer one question: what does success actually look like for your restaurant right now?

“More customers” is not an objective. It is a wish. The strategies you need to increase brand awareness are completely different from the strategies you need to increase profitability, and both are different from building a community around your space. Choose the wrong objective and every tactic that follows it is aimed at the wrong target.

At 720 Sweets, we got specific. Our objective for one campaign was to increase social media engagement and increase sales revenue. Not both equally, not vaguely. We named them, wrote them down, and made them the filter for every decision that came after.

We also ran campaigns where we collaborated with well-known companies purely for awareness, knowing upfront that those campaigns would not make money. That was intentional. Being intentional is the point. Pick your one objective and everything else follows.

Step 2: Brainstorm the Right Strategies for That Objective

Only after you have a clear objective do you earn the right to think about the exciting stuff, the actual marketing strategies.

If your objective is increasing sales, relevant strategies include monthly promotions, seasonal promotions, better street signage, a sandwich board on the sidewalk, and outreach to offices, organizations, associations, and wedding planners. Each of those can put paying customers through the door.

If your objective is building community, the strategies look different: hosting events with creative groups or meetup organizations, making your restaurant the gathering space where people associate your brand with connection.

The mistake is mixing these up. Running community events to hit a sales revenue target is the wrong tool for the job. Match the strategy category to the objective you set in Step 1.

Step 3: Choose Your Platforms

Pick one platform and dominate it. Do not spread yourself across every channel because you saw another restaurant doing well somewhere new.

When you try to maintain YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and a newsletter all at once without the team to support it, nothing stays in sync. The messaging fragments. The quality drops. None of it works well.

At 720 Sweets, our customers are millennials. Millennials consume content on Instagram. So we focused everything on building an exceptional Instagram feed. One platform, done well, beats five platforms done poorly every single time.

Find out where your specific customers actually spend their time and go deep there first.

Step 4: Set SMART Goals

A goal without a number and a deadline is not a goal. It is a hope.

SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Saying “I want fifty thousand in sales” fails immediately. It has no timeline, no benchmark, and no way to know if your marketing activity caused the result.

A proper SMART goal sounds like this: increase drink monthly sales by 15% by August 2020. That goal names the specific revenue category (drinks, not total sales), the exact percentage increase, and the exact deadline. Now you have something to measure against.

From 720 Sweets’ voting contest in 2017, our social SMART goals were: reach 600 likes and 80 comments, gain 75 new followers, all by October 31st. The voting period ran October 12th to the 31st. Nineteen days, three specific numbers. Clear pass or fail.

For community growth, we set goals like: increase the email list by 1,000 by August 2020, host a $50 giveaway with email-only entry, increase community events to three per quarter by July 2020.

Once you have a SMART goal, brainstorm the tactics that feed it. To hit a 15% drink sales increase, you train staff to actively offer upsells and you add table signage for drink specials. The goal tells you which tactics to run. Without the goal, you are guessing.

Step 5: Work Backwards

Most operators think forward: “I have a goal, now what’s my first step?” That approach is hard because you cannot see the full path from where you are standing.

Flip it. Start at the end goal and reverse engineer every milestone back to today.

Map it visually. Put the end goal on one side and your current position on the other. Between them, identify every critical milestone, every asset that needs to be created (social posts, promotional materials, newsletter copy), every post or email that needs to be scheduled, and every key date.

For a 720 Sweets flavor campaign, those key dates included: finalize the two ice cream flavors, campaign launch, voting contest open, voting contest close, announce the new flavor, campaign ends. Each of those dates had assets and tasks tied to it. Newsletter drafts, contest posts, in-store posters, social content. All visible on the plan, all assigned.

Working backwards forces you to see the gaps before you launch, not after.

Step 6: Execute and Track

Creating the plan is not enough. Execution requires three things: measurement, deadlines, and assigned responsibilities.

Your SMART goals give you the measurement framework. Track from the day before the campaign starts to the day it ends. For our 720 Sweets voting campaign, we tracked likes and comments daily against the 600 and 80 targets.

Deadlines matter because without them, a goal that could take a month stretches to two, then three. The urgency disappears and so does the result.

Assign specific responsibilities to specific people. Our campaigns touched designers, print vendors, staff putting up banners at retail locations, and PR contacts. Every person knew their role. When execution is vague, things fall through. When responsibilities are written down and owned, they get done.

Step 7: Reiterate and Repeat

After every campaign, one question matters most: what actually worked?

For us at 720 Sweets, collaboration with other brands worked consistently. Every time we partnered with a brand, we generated noise, and that noise translated into sales. So we validated it, refined it, and repeated it. We collaborated with Vitasoy. We ran campaigns around new flavors. Each new campaign was a calculated move built on evidence from the previous one, not a guess.

This is the whole engine. You test, you measure, you find what works, you drop what does not, and you run more of what does. Over time, your marketing gets sharper, cheaper per result, and more predictable.

The operators who struggle with marketing are the ones who run a campaign, get a mixed result, and move on to something completely different. The operators who grow are the ones who squeeze every lesson out of each campaign and build on it.

The Bottom Line

A restaurant marketing plan is not a luxury for big chains. It is the only thing standing between you and a month of expensive, conflicting tactics that cancel each other out. Start with a single clear objective, match your strategies and platforms to that objective, set SMART goals with real deadlines, work backwards to map every step, execute with tracked responsibilities, and repeat what the numbers prove. The maxim worth writing on your office wall: know exactly what you want before you spend a single dollar trying to get it.

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