The restaurant business is highly competitive. Every year, approximately 50,000 new restaurants are launched in the United States. That’s over 136 restaurants every day!
As a restaurant owner, it is not enough to just make good food. Food that people like is of course the core proposition of any restaurant. However, to run a successful business, you have to go beyond just the food, and build a brand and a narrative that appeals to your audience.
In this article, we will take you through the specific strategies that PR managers use to launch successful restaurants.
Start planning early
PR campaigns take a long time to fructify. As such, it is important to launch them as early as possible. This is especially true in the case of the food industry that has high failure rates. The National Restaurant Association estimates that roughly 30% of all restaurants fail within the first year.
Waiting for your restaurant to launch before starting your PR campaigns could mean you are leaving things a little too late for comfort.
The ideal time to start your PR campaigns is roughly six months before the launch date. Here is a list of things you can do prior to launch.
Identify your PR strategy
One of the critical elements of a pre-launch PR campaign involves identifying your target audience and your unique selling point (USP). Knowing who to target, and what to communicate is ultimately PR 101 for any business.
In addition to this, this is also the right time to finalize on your restaurant logo, craft your brand story and messaging. If you do not have the budget for this, you could make use of an online logo maker to create a professional-looking logo for your restaurant that reflects your restaurant’s personality and concept.
Also, build a Press Kit that includes the founder bio, tentative menu, concept clipped photos, and other branding elements.To help bring your vision to life, you can explore some food design templates
You will need all this heading into the other steps of the PR process.
Building interest in the cuisine or theme
If you are catering to a new cuisine or restaurant theme, then generating buzz for the food or theme can take time. Perhaps your restaurant is the first vegan Japanese restaurant in the city, or you have Venice-themed decor. These are talking points that can be used to create buzz about your upcoming restaurant. Also always create online menus and invest in eCommerce reviews and ratings.
Source: Conde Nast Traveller
But before you build a plan, invest in comprehensive market research to understand the level of awareness and preconceived perceptions that customers have about the cuisine or theme. This will help you preempt potential challenges you may face after launch.
The objective here is to build anticipation and buzz around your restaurant and the theme, so that when your restaurant eventually launches, your PR announcements generate a much wider and sharper impact.
Building a social media following
It’s 2025 and the success or failure of a restaurant is decided not on the table, but away in the vividly bright corners of Instagram and TikTok. Building a loyal and engaged social media following for your restaurant business is not a “nice to have”, but a “must have”; something that can make or break your business.
The good news is this – people love food, and it is among the most engaging content on social media. Invest in top-quality content and have a solid social media calendar leading to the weeks before the launch.
This helps you build an audience and engagement for your restaurant so that when the doors open, you already have a long line of customers wanting to check out the food and ambience.
Be in the news
According to Anand Srinivasan from Singaporean business newsletter The Daily Scan, “staying in the news is one of the key elements of any popular brand”. How could you stay in the news even before launch? A popular way to do this is by building in public.
There is no such thing as “not worthy of news”. Any small update regarding your restaurant ought to be shared in public through press releases. Perhaps you have secured your alcohol license from the authorities. Or, your team has finalized on the online food ordering software to use for your orders.
Each of this is an opportunity for buzz or for a co-marketing campaign (with the partners you have brought in). While staying in the news, especially before the launch of your restaurant, may seem challenging at first, this is part of your process to establish your restaurant as a recognizable brand. You can also create Instagram posts to keep your audience engaged and excited about the launch.
Opening Week campaign
This is a crucial aspect of a restaurant’s launch. The buzz and hype during launch can often keep your restaurant’s momentum going over a few months. On a similar note, poor buzz during launch could really bring down momentum over the next several months.
Teaser campaign
Roughly four to six weeks before the launch, restaurants need to start working on the opening week. This includes planning for a teaser campaign,a soft launch of the restaurant and planning for a grand opening.
This is the time to tap into your local reporter network. At this point, you are not announcing the launch of the restaurant; instead, you are offering a glimpse of something that is coming up.
Here is Booffi’s teaser campaign ahead of its launch earlier this year.
Source: Google News
While teasers on news websites can get you a ton of legitimacy, modern PR campaigns need to go much further by tapping into your micro-influencer network.
Microinfluencers are social media users who have a very niche following that appeals to your specific requirements. A good example of this would be an Instagram user who posts about food and restaurants in your town. Getting a positive word about your launch from them could create buzz about your restaurant to customers who matter.
Unlike PR campaigns on media outlets, influencer marketing campaigns are typically pay-to-activate. Depending on your audience pool, such micro-influencer campaigns can often set you back by a few thousand dollars.
In order to maximize ROI from this investment, it is a good idea to rope in these microinfluencers for the soft launch.
Soft launch
A soft launch in the context of restaurants refers to the opening of your doors to a selective audience of critics and reviewers. The ideal period to do a soft launch of your restaurant is between 7 to 10 days before the grand opening.
During this period, invite popular food bloggers, vloggers, and microinfluencers to your restaurant. Provide them with the food, tech and logistics to create powerful and impactful content for their followers.
While some restaurants insist on an embargo till the actual launch for such content to go live, it is a good idea to let them publish the content as soon as it is done.
This way, you can expect to maximize buzz on the opening day.
Grand opening
The success of your grand opening is measured by all the work that has gone into building excitement around your restaurant until then.
However, the opening is an opportunity to build further buzz and hype. One of the best ways to do it is by making it newsworthy. There are several creative ways to do this. The most popular strategy is to invite a known local celebrity to be your chief guest.
You could also consider investing in a spectacle (a fireworks show, a musical performance, a charity event, or something related to your theme or cuisine) – this creates newsbytes that can provide further buzz in the days following the opening.
Ultimately, the success of your opening day is measured by the crowd. To ensure this, you could offer irresistible giveaways to limited customers on the opening day. These giveaways could be funneled through your microinfluencer network you activated during the soft launch phase.
If you have opened up online food delivery, make sure these orders are being handled promptly.
Post-Launch Momentum
Maintaining the buzz and momentum post the opening is critical to the long-term success of your restaurant.
Press releases pay a big role in keeping the buzz going. Some newsworthy releases could pertain to statistics related to your launch day – how many guests were served, interview with giveaway winners, and quotes from accomplished food critics who visited your restaurant for the launch.
The days after the launch is also the right time to set your logistics right. Tie up with local restaurant discovery platforms that can drive long-term traffic to your business. You could also get started on regular social media content – study competitors from within your target geography as well as elsewhere to find good content ideas that can work for your social media marketing.
Common mistakes to avoid
While PR management may look like a marketing gamble sometimes, it is often a process that yields consistent and predictable returns – if done right. However, there are a few common mistakes to avoid to ensure a successful restaurant launch.
Last-minute planning
This is by far the biggest reason why restaurant grand openings fail. Regardless of how well you know your local journalists, or how large your influencer budget is, things can still go wrong. It is important to have adequate buffers to account for content production, and scheduling in order for these PR campaigns to bring results. Last minute campaign activations do no favors and often are the reason for poor PR outcome.
Ignoring local community engagement
Restaurant owners could aspire to grow their brand into multimillion dollar entities reaching multiple cities or countries. In line with this aspiration, restaurant owners often invest in large budget social media outreach and PR campaigns that extend way beyond the target pool of your upcoming restaurant.
This results in wasted marketing budget that often reaches an audience wider than what you must be going after. So while this could be helping with your branding in the long-run, it may deplete your finances quickly, contributing to restaurant failure.
Underestimating the visual content
Food is a completely visual medium. So while you may continue to invest in campaigns targeting local reporters and media, the buzz is still heavily influenced by social media. Failing to plan a social media strategy can be a buzzkill and result in a poor outcome of your opening week campaign.
Wrapping up
Launching a restaurant can be a tricky business. A little slip up could make a big difference in how big an opening you get, and how this momentum takes your business forward. Identifying the right PR levers and making full use of them could go a long way in ensuring a successful restaurant launch.
