By Peter Farrell
30/04/2022
Restaurant Marking Tips – Your menu is the heart and soul of your restaurant, which means the success of your business hinges
on its success. If you’re not sure how to put together an eye-grabbing, mouth-watering menu, our
restaurant marketing tips might be just what you need to get you on the right track.
Remember that a well-designed menu not only makes your restaurant look good, but it also helps
your servers to upsell, tempting your guests to some of the more exciting items on the menu. It’s the
chance to “sell your goods” before you make a sale by putting the talents of your chefs on display.
Putting together a great menu is about much more than just ensuring you have some great pictures
and exciting fonts – you’ll want to consider all aspects from pricing to branding and descriptions,
along with everything in between, before your menu is ready to hit the restaurant floor.
Start with the Restaurant Marketing Basics
Before you start with the creative bit, take some time to list everything that you’ll be putting on the
menu. You can use anything from a pen and paper to Excel – it doesn’t matter as long as you can
read it. Once it’s all down on paper, you’ll need to start putting those items into categories, including
starters, mains and desserts (or just about any other categories you think will be appropriate). While
you can get a bit creative with the categories, make sure that they will still be familiar to guests.
Next, you’ll want to work on the positioning of your categories on the menu. Always place starters at
the top of a menu and desserts at the bottom. This will allow the menu to have a natural, user-
friendly flow to it.
Setting Your Menu Prices
Once you have all the basics down, you’ll want to look at pricing your menu items. While some
people might think this involves simply figuring out what you think each item is worth, this is
absolutely not the case. Pricing requires costing deep-dives, including gross profit analyses (read
more about that on our blog) and this is also something you’ll want to assess and reassess on a
regular basis.
When it comes to restaurant marketing, you need to look at everything from the perspective of
your customers. Once you’ve got everything down, you’ll want to take a bit of a step back and look
at your menu from a customers’ point of view. Is it providing a good balance between value-for-
money and quality?
Creating Mouth-Watering Menu Descriptions
Now we need to start getting a bit creative, which means it’s finally time for the menu descriptions.
If you’re not handy with words yourself, hire a professional copywriter to take on the job for you,
but don’t forget that this is a team effort so be sure to include the chef. Before you can describe a
dish, you need to know everything there is to know about it – where the ingredients came from,
how the meal is prepared and anything else that makes the dish unique. It’s important to have lots
of enticing adjectives thrown into the mix, including words like “crispy”, “crunchy”, “sweet” and
“mouth-watering”, to name but a few.
The Golden Triangle
When it comes to designing a menu, the Golden Triangle will give you a good idea about how to lay
it out. This theory posits that when looking at a page, our eyes will always look to the middle of the
page first before moving to the top right corer and then the top left. This means that you’ll want to
add all of your higher priced dishes in the middle and top right areas of the menu.
Finish with the Photos
Lastly, you’ll want to make sure that your menu photos are perfect – this is, not too many and of an
extremely high quality. You don’t want to add pictures of every dish on your menu – this is just going
to distract from all the other detail – so it might be better to stick to the most profitable menu items.
When it comes to restaurant marketing, the devil is in the detail. This guide should help you to
understand a few of the finer details of putting together an outstanding menu and our restaurant
consultants are standing by to provide any further help if you need it. Get in touch today!