Here is an ultimate list of the best restaurant marketing tools 2024.
This list will cover nearly every software that can help you market your restaurant. It can be as simple as social media marketing, or as complex as local SEO.
If you own a restaurant, regardless of its current market exposure, these platforms will increase your presence in the market.
Nearly all of these restaurant marketing software are either 100% free, or offer a free forever plan. Optional paid packages exist but they aren’t mandatory. This means, you aren’t spending any money that you don’t want to.
Table of Contents
The Ultimate Restaurant Marketing Tools Checklist
If you employ even one tool from each section in this article, nearly all of your restaurant marketing is sorted.
Here’s everything we’ve covered in this list:
- Online and digital reservation tools: Allows seamless booking from Instagram/Google/Facebook
- Email marketing tools: Get feedback, invite to events, and share promos.
- Graphic designing tools: Design menus, flyers, banners, and event posters with 0 previous experience.
- Social media management: To create or generate posts/schedule posts/manage comments and replies.
- Local SEO: Dominate those Search Engines’ searches.
- Bonus.
In a nutshell, this covers nearly every aspect of marketing that exists out there. Sure, I may have missed a few but using even half of these tools should work wonders for you.
Online Reservations
Here are a few tools that will allow your restaurant to accept and manage reservations online. This will eliminate the need for customers to manually call to book their tables. Convenient booking is something that definitely can increase your sales.
Pro tip: Use social media or email marketing to send users to these online reservation pages. This will allow you to capitalise on your marketing efforts by letting users book tables instantly.
EatApp
Primary features:
- Zero commissions
- Helps reduce no-show (book via credit cards/ send reminders etc.)
- Allows booking directly via Instagram/Facebook etc.
- Manage and reply to third-party reviews.
- Collect guest data
- Track customer history/expenses/special requests
- Forever free plan.
EatApp is a zero-commission app that lets your users book reservations directly from Instagram/Google/Facebook/or even your website. It helps reduce no-show by letting you demand credit cards for reservations, send e-mail/text reminders, and even accept direct payments!
It also offers an online waitlist that tells you customers their wait time, as well as sends a notification when the table is ready.
You can also reply to and manage reviews for your restaurant on multiple platforms from within EatApp.
Its data management lets you collect guest data and use them for marketing purposes at a later time.
It also tracks customer history, special requests by them, their previous expenses and everything else.
The tool has a forever free plan, and paid plans start at $34.00/month.
OpenTable
Primary features:
- Accept reservations directly from your website.
- Optional card/deposit requirement can be enabled.
- Manage reviews
- Manage and update wait times for guests
- Workforce and shift management
- In-built email marketing and ad features
- Not free, plans start at EUR 179.00/month
OpenTable is another one of the best restaurant marketing tools and takes care of reservations among other things.
It too allows your customers to make reservations online. You can also enable the card/deposit feature to reduce no-shows.
It too, alike EatApp (discussed above) can provide status updates and estimated wait times to users about their tables.
You can also use OpenTable to manage your workforce and their shifts. It also has a marketing feature and all restaurants using OpenTable are automatically marketed on social media as well as via display ads. You can also directly run ads on the app for more exposure. It even has an in-built e-mail marketing featutre.
The review management feature exists as well. You can manage reviews and respond to reviews on Google, Facebook, and of course OpenTable directly without leaving the OT app.
My only problem is it’s on the expensive side starting at about EUR 179.00/month and there’s no free plan.
TableAgent
Primary features:
- Book tables, even from your website.
- 100% free, forever.
- SMS notifications available
- Advance payments can be enabled.
I’m including TableAgent for those of you who are low on the budget, or need to cut costs. It’s a 100% free table management/reservation tool.
It’s a browser-based tool that can be used without any downloads. You may also enable advance payments to secure tables. Although, this is a paid feature.
You can use it to send reminders for various activities via SMS. Its advanced features let you select exactly how many free seats are available at specific times, or even block individual tables.
It also can be used to accept bookings directly from your website. It may not be the most feature-rich restaurant marketing software but when it comes to “tables”, it works like a charm.
Its paid plans allow for the SMS notifications or private uses and these are billed separately.
E-mail marketing tools
69% of marketers still use e-mails for content marketing! This proves e-mail marketing isn’t dead and you should be using it.
It’s special because it’s extremely personalised, unlike social media marketing. You can use a user’s name, date or birth, special dates to create unique marketing campaigns that will convert.
Do note that e-mail marketing works best when combined with other marketing tactics, such as social media marketing or SEO.
Here are some of the best tools that will help your restaurant with email side of things.
Hubspot e-mail marketing tool
Primary features:
- 100% free forever
- AI-crafted subject line and e-mail copies
- Pre-designed templates
- Personalization
- Automated thank you and other responses based on specific triggers
Hubspot launched this free e-mail marketing tool that does more than even some paid tools in the segment.
For starters, its in-built AI feature crafts subject lines and even entire e-mails using your prompts.
Then there are pre-designed templates that you can use. This ensures you can craft e-mails for your restaurant with absolutely 0 previous experience!
Its automation is what I love the most though. Once the e-mail is sent, you can create automated workflows that react to how your e-mail performs, or other metrics.
It can also be used to personalise your e-mails on automation making them feel more personal.
Then there’s A/B tests that you can utilise to get to the most profitable copies.
In a recent article, we also covered tools similar to Huspot.
Sender
Primary features:
- Pre-designed templates
- Automation and pre-designed automation workflows
- SMS campaigns
- A/B tests, heatmaps, click tracking
- Free forever
Sender is another restaurant marketing platform that helps you with email marketing. For starters, it too offers pre-designed templates to choose from. This helps you save time and efforts, while guaranteeing that you’re using proven and effective templates. You can also use its drag & drop editor to build your email templates.
It also has automation features such as auto-resend, thank you e-mails and others. You can set your parameters based on which these automations get triggered. It even has pre-designed customer journey workflows that let you create your automations within seconds.
It also is capable of sending SMS and creating SMS campaigns. Advanced features such as A/B tests, heatmaps, click tracking etc. allow you to optimise your campaign for maximum returns.
Did I mention it’s free forever?
Brevo (formerly SendInBlue)
Primary features:
- Forever free
- Email + SMS + Whatsapp campaign
- Advanced automation
- Pre-designed workflows and templates
- In-built AI features
SendInBlue is actually a half a decade old marketing solution for restaurants and everything else. They recently rebranded. It’s a full-fledged marketing solution that takes care of email/SMS and even Whatsapp marketing.
For starters, it too offers pre-designed email templates that you can customise in an instant. Not a marketer? No problem. Its AI-powered editor will craft the most conversion-optimised subject lines and email bodies for you.
Its reporting is pretty on-point and it tells me how many people opened my mails, clicked on the links etc.
It also has automation features that can help you get back abandoned carts, send birthday wishes, or do anything else depending on the workflow that you create.
It also has features for SMS and Whatsapp marketing. You can also automate Whatsapp automation by linking it to your workflow.
Brevo pricing starts at $0.00. Yes, it’s free forever.
Graphic Designing Tools
“You eat first with our eyes” -Roman gourmand Apicius. To get more customers for your restaurant, you’ll need graphic appeal. In fact, for almost any campaign, be it for social media, your website or even Whatsapp, you’ll need graphic content to get people interested.
You can use these graphic designing tools to either design your menu, host events, market a new dish or even memes!
Pro tip: You can design flyers with “share the flyer for a 10% discount code” campaign. Massive exposure, new customers for X% discount from your end.
Canva
Canva is almost the undisputed champion when it comes to drag & drop graphic designing. It has thousands of pre-designed templates that fit almost any need and format. Then its elements (stickers/text styles/icons) etc. make things even better.
In fact, if I simply type “restaurant” it gives me some pretty interesting options.
Just to show you its potential, I clicked on the flyer option. It gave me these extremely professional-looking pre-designed templates.
To edit these, all I have to do is choose what I wish to change, and insert my own text/image there!
You can also schedule your social media posts using Canva. It even has integrated AI so now you can literally just tell Canva what you want! It automatically detects content in your graphic and shows you similar icons/stickers etc. that you can add.
Canva is free forever and the free plan offers nearly everything you may need. Of course paid plans offer more assets and features. In my personal opinion, there’s no easier or simpler tool better than Canva that you can use for designing flyers, menus or other such marketing material.
Picsart
Picsart while not as feature-rich as Canva, does get the job done for the most part. It too has tons of pre-designed templates you can choose for nearly any event or purpose. It too is drag & drop ensuring you don’t need to be a graphic designer to create the best designs.
Because I did it for Canva, here’s what “restaurant” gives me on Picsart (I’m just keeping it unbiased eh).
It also has AI powered features that let you generate AI art, remove backgrounds, extend images and much more.
It too, alike Canva has tons of elements, icons, stickers etc. that you can use in your graphic to spice it up.
In my opinion, I don’t find major differences between Canva or Picsart. I’d say you can use either to create your graphic campaigns.
Colorcinch (formerly Cartoonize)
This is an AI-powered photo editor. You can fix your restaurant marketing flyers and social media posts in seconds.
Its one-click feature can turn any photo into a cartoon, a sketch, digital art or even painting. You can also fine-tune your creations with slider adjustments for details, hue, colour range etc.
On top of that it can instantly remove background from any image making it easier to edit photos.
It also has a library of over 4 million icons, images, vector graphics and more that you can use while designing your images.
Your restaurant may need images in different formats. Colorcinch has an in-built format convertor that can convert your images to many different formats (including PDF).
If you’re a photoshop user, you’d appreciate Colorcinch’s layering feature that lets you control elements individually.
Text masking is another feature that I used to write my restaurant’s name using food images!
Best of all, it’s free and doesn’t even require a registration. Simply upload your photo and start editing. Paid plans are affordable too and start at $4.99/month.
Social Media Management Tools
As a restaurant, a lot of your customers may be coming in from social media. If they aren’t, you’re doing something wrong. In fact, over 71% of the users in a recent survey said they prefer social media for their restaurant updates!
So, these tools will help you manage your social media accounts better:
Hootsuite
Primary features:
- Schedule and post content across multiple social media accounts.
- Detect trends, analyse what users are saying about you.
- AI-based hashtag and caption generator
- One dashboard for all social media
Hootsuite is one of the best marketing tools for restaurants when it comes to social media. For starters, you can schedule social media posts for multiple social media accounts at once.
It also analyses your posts and gives you the best time to post. This is when your audience is the most active and your content has the highest impact.
Its AI writer can also generate instant captions and hashtags based on your content.Not sure what the post? It has a built-in ideas generator. You can also use its “link in bio” feature to drive traffic to your online reservation apps or websites.
It also recently acquired Techwalker. In simpler words, it can summarise conversations, user-sentiment, find what people are saying about you, detect trends and do a lot more magic.
You can also reply to comments and DMs for multiple social media accounts through your Hootsuite account.
The only problem is, there’s no free plan. A 30-day trial does exist though.
Buffer
Primary features:
- AI content library and ideas generator
- Schedule posts
- Manage all social media apps from within Buffer.
- Detect questions/comments and overall sentiments.
- Landing page builder
- Free forever
Buffer is another market leader when it comes to social media management. For starters, it helps you build a content library for your social media posts. If you’re out of ideas, use its AI ideas generator.
You can then use Buffer to share (or schedule) your post across various social media tools. It also has the “link in bio” feature but this is called a “landing page” here. Basically, all your links at one, professional place. Because it’s a landing page, it offers slightly more features than simply link-listing.You can insert links and buttons and track analytics for the clicks.
It also lets you manage comments from within Buffer. Its AI is also capable of detecting “questions” and “sentiments” and you’re notified so you can respond to them better.
Buffer is free forever (yes, even AI features). Paid plans are completely optional.
SEO & Local SEO
SEO is almost synonymous with marketing in today’s day and age. In fact, according to Google, “restaurants near me” is one of the top keywords people search for on Google!
While SEO has a much broader meaning, local SEO focuses on getting you noticed locally. Considering how a restaurant business is hyper local in any scenario, you’ll need tools to help you dominate those google searches.
In fact, in my opinion, ranking for “restaurants near me” probably has more impact for your business than almost anything else.
Semrush
Primary features:
- Local SEO toolkit (local directories/ map rank tracker/ review management)
- AI-powered features for generating review responses.
- Nearly all the SEO features that exist on the planet.
- 100% free to get started.
Semrush is the best SEO tool I’ve ever used. The tool can be used to spy on your competitors, see how they’re getting their customers, and even steal them!
As local SEO is the priority for a restaurant business, it has a dedicated local SEO toolset as well. You can list your restaurant in the top directories, track your map rank, manage and reply to reviews on third-party platforms (AI-generated automated responses are possible as well) and much more.
As for generic SEO, you can track your own keyword positions and monitor changes in real-time. You can use it to detect backlinks you’re missing and build them.
It also tells you how much traffic you’re getting and compare it with your competitors if you want to.
There’s even a link building tool that lets you find e-mails of website owners, craft an email copy, send it, track it and finally acquire your backlink.
Here’s a detailed Semrush review if you’d like to know more. Bottomline, if you own a website, I’d say Semrush is your best friend.
Ahrefs
Primary features:
- 100% free to get started.
- Nearly all the SEO features you’ll need.
- Focuses primarily on backlinks.
Ahrefs is almost the same thing as Semrush with slight differences in features and database. In fact, we did another ultra-detailed comparison between Semrush and Ahrefs.
It too helps you monitor your traffic, competitors’ traffic, keywords, backlinks and everything else. You can use Ahrefs to spy on your competitors and copy their strategies as well.
It’s perfect for local SEO optimization as well. It has all the features you may need to rank locally, it’s just that these features are more manual than Semrush and hence Semrush wins my confidence.
However, as a tool, it’s more than enough to cater to all your SEO needs, both local and generic.
Bonus: 7 Shifts
7Shifts is an all-in-one tool that helps you “manage your restaurant team”. Yes, it’s not directly a restaurant management app but nothing is better marketing for your restaurant than fast service and the team catering to your customers.
So, it lets you create and manage schedules for your team members. The time-clocking feature lets you manage overtime and breaks.
Automated and synced tip feature that lets you create a tip pool and tally the data with individual payrolls.
There’s even a Payroll feature that helps with onboarding, does your taxes, benefits and everything else.
You can also track your employees’ performance, shift satisfaction and other data.
It does have a free forever plan that can help you get started!
Final verdict on the best restaurant marketing tools
Time for my two cents then? In my opinion, none of these restaurant marketing tools can help you dominate the market if they aren’t used in sync. Meaning, your marketing campaign needs to encompass all of it. This includes social media + email + SMS + SEO to obtain the best exposure out there.
Of course, individual tools do increase your exposure too but converting a viewer into a paying customer needs the unison of all these tools.
Go on then, give some of these tools a try and figure out which are the best restaurant marketing tools for you then.
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