The Best Restaurant Marketing Software in the UK

To make your restaurant a success, you need effective systems in place to attract new customers and keep them coming back for more! In today’s digital age, a range of marketing software can help you reach these goals efficiently.

But with so many options, how do you know which software will truly benefit your business? That’s why we’ve crafted this guide to the best restaurant marketing software available in the UK. We’ll cover essential tools for increasing your online presence, boosting foot traffic and ramping up revenue to help your business thrive.

What is restaurant marketing software?

Restaurant marketing software refers to digital tools restaurants use to make more customers aware of their business and ultimately build customer loyalty. These tools can take many different forms, but typically serve purposes such as:

• Making your restaurant visible to a wider audience.
• Communicating with previous or potential customers.
• Enabling customers to place a booking with your restaurant as easily as possible.
• Automating your marketing efforts.
  
  

Why is restaurant marketing software important?

There are many different reasons your business should prioritise getting the right restaurant marketing software. These include:

• Attracting customers: If you want to make more money in your business, you need to draw in more customers. Restaurant marketing software is designed to help you do just that, finding the best ways to entice more hungry diners to visit your venue.
  
  
• Automation: When you're a restaurant owner, it can feel like you're wearing 100 different hats at all times. Restaurant marketing software helps to take some of the stress and the burden out of attracting customers to your business, offering scalable solutions that don't require hours of work on your end. (It goes without saying that restaurant customers are also likely to be time-poor and eager for a fast and reliable way to find venues and make table bookings online.)
  
  
• New opportunities: When you delve into the world of restaurant marketing software, you can expect to encounter additional opportunities for growing your business you hadn't previously considered. Investing in one piece of software can open up a whole range of new options for encouraging customers to visit your business. 

Explore ResDiary's tools to help make restaurant marketing a streamlined experience for venues and their customers alike!

Features to look for in restaurant marketing software

When trying to find the right restaurant marketing software for your business, there are a few key things to look out for:

• Ease-of-use: Restaurant owners are used to multi-tasking, making ease-of-use a critical priority. There are plenty of tools that can be used by people with limited marketing knowledge or skills for great results. You’re not alone if this is a priority for you. According to our 2024 Tech Trends Report, this is the most important factor for restaurant owners when uptaking new software in their venue.
  
  
• ROI: In your efforts to market your restaurant, it's important to avoid having costs pile up too much. While incorporating many different kinds of systems can be extremely exciting, make sure to keep an eye on how much you're spending. You can use tools like ResDiary to avoid costly commission fees that can eat into the return on investment you get from your marketing.
  
  
• Integration: Integrating various systems together makes for simpler usage. Plus, it offers the chance to synchronise data between systems for the best results. Tools like ResDiary are the ideal lynchpin for the marketing tech stack, as they offer simple integration and allow you to incorporate booking data. 
  
  
• Cloud access across multiple devices: Like any great piece of software these days, the best restaurant marketing solutions have the ability to work across multiple devices. This gives the power to log into multiple screens in your venue and see the same data. You can even check in on your marketing efforts from home.
  
  

7 best solutions for restaurant marketing software

Curious to know the leading pieces of restaurant marketing software for UK hospitality businesses? We've rounded up seven of the very best to make your marketing life easier.

1. Booking platforms

Booking platforms are used by millions of customers around the globe to find new restaurants to check out. They are therefore an exceptional opportunity to showcase your restaurant to new prospective diners on third party sites and mobile apps.

While integrating booking systems into your marketing efforts can be a great choice, you might find yourself surprised by costly commission fees that can pile up. These fees can be unpredictable and eat into your return on investment, so it's important to bear them in mind when planning your budget for marketing.

Thankfully, there are third party booking platforms that don't charge commission fees. One excellent option is Dish Cult, powered by ResDiary. Dish Cult is used by 9.7 million customers to find new dining spots to check out, making it a great option for appealing to potential customers.

When you sign up for ResDiary's reservation management software, you get a free Dish Cult listing. Dish Cult is also no different from any other booking made through ResDiary, when a user makes a booking, there's no commission fee taken from your business. This makes Dish Cult the ultimate low-cost way to market your business.

ResDiary also integrates seamlessly with other third-party booking platforms like First Table. Like Dish Cult, this integration allows customers to easily make bookings within your diary directly from the platform. This helps to keep things simple and convenient for you and your diners.

When it comes to your booking platform strategy, don’t forget arguably the world’s biggest booking platform, Google! We’ll explore how your business can make the most of Google in more detail below.

2. Booking widgets

For an effective restaurant marketing strategy, it's not enough to focus on getting eyeballs on your business. You also need to ensure that it's easy to convert interested diners into table bookings as easily as possible.

One of the most effective tools to do this is by using booking widgets. Booking widgets enable you to place enticing buttons in a variety of digital locations. These buttons are used to link users directly to make a booking through a table management system like ResDiary - all the necessary information is then captured and processed automatically by the system.

If you want to incorporate booking widgets into your restaurant marketing strategy, ResDiary is the perfect partner for you. ResDiary makes it easy to design and place attractive widgets on your website to draw in more online reservations, ensuring your business is open to take table bookings 24/7.

Importantly, ResDiary also offers a similar integration with Google. It supports the creation and placement of widgets in Google Search and Maps results. This provides another outstanding opportunity for your business to be discovered online and capture fresh reservations there and then.

"Restaurants near me" is Googled 285,000 times a month in the UK, and that’s just one example of relevant keywords you could be ranking for! So, the value of having booking widgets appearing in Google Search and Maps results can’t be overstated. It’s a critical channel for customers to find your venue.

Similarly, we also offer a number of integrations enabling you to place widgets in other online locations. Our Meta integration allows you to place booking widgets on your Facebook and Instagram business pages.

This makes it the perfect accompaniment and point of focus for your social media strategy. When a customer comes across your business page or one of your viral posts, it’s easy for them to become a paying diner.

Having the right strategy in place for using widgets means that you can be confident that all of your hard work marketing your business pays off in the form of bookings.

At ResDiary, we're always on hand to help venues set up for success by optimising their booking widgets and bringing multiple channels together in one place. Book a demo to see how simple it can be!

3. Restaurant booking system

You may not think of your restaurant booking system as a foundational piece of your marketing strategy, but it can actually sit right at the centre, pulling everything together and driving your efforts to attract diners. Here are some of the ways that a system like ResDiary can play a role in your marketing campaigns:

• Multiple channels: Using a restaurant booking system is the best way to bring multiple marketing channels together in a unified way. Your customers can easily place bookings from your website, Google Search results, social media, emails or just about anywhere else you can place a widget. You can also manage this data (such as customer contact details) in a single location.
• Built-in marketing features: ResDiary offers a range of built-in marketing features. They are designed to be totally intuitive and usable for any restaurant manager. These include booking widgets for your website, email marketing features and much more.
  
  
• Integrations: Want to take your marketing efforts up a notch? ResDiary also offers plenty of integrations to help you do just that - whether you’re looking for more seamless workflows between your marketing efforts and booking management, greater visibility to make data-led decisions on campaigns or all of the above.
  
  These include integrations with Google and Meta, Silverstreet for SMS communications and Acteol for customer relationship management (CRM). With these integrations (and many more on offer), you can use ResDiary as the hub for your marketing efforts.
  
  
• Data collection: Another benefit of using ResDiary's integrations is the ability to synergise these tools with your booking data. When you use ResDiary, you collect and own a wealth of data from your customers. This data is easily synchronised with your marketing integrations, allowing customer contact details, dining preferences and more to be put to work in your campaigns.
  
  

Check out our brochure to learn more about ResDiary's tools to help you attract diners, run a smooth service, and grow your business.

4. Customer relationship management software

Marketing is about more than just bringing in new customers. You also need to ensure you are growing deeper relationships with your existing diners, by learning everything you can about them, so you can offer unparalleled personalised experiences.

By increasing the knowledge you have of diners who have visited your venue, you will have more information you can use to target future customers.

That's why ResDiary integrates with the Acteol CRM software. Acteol boasts a number of features to level up your restaurant's marketing. The system works by pulling together a wide range of customer data points into a single customer view.

You can then use this information to tailor your marketing campaigns for maximum effectiveness. Stop relying on guesswork and use real data to develop your campaigns.

Thanks to a smooth two-way integration between Acteol and ResDiary, your business can get the most out of the system. Your booking data can be incorporated in Acteol's customer views to paint the fullest picture of your diners.

5. SMS communications

With overall smartphone penetration in the UK at 94%, SMS communications can be a highly valuable way to market your business. ResDiary makes it easy to collect your customer's phone numbers, so why not put them to use?

SMS communications are the perfect way to keep your business top-of mind for your customers. People rarely leave their homes without their smartphones (or even let them leave their side), so you have the chance to stay in touch with your customers at virtually all times.

To help you with your SMS communications, you can use the ResDiary Silverstreet integration. Silverstreet automatically sends messages to customers in your SMS database according to rules you set up.

This means you can set-and-forget SMS communications to be sent for booking confirmations, reminders and cancellations. You can also use Silverstreet for specific promotions and events in your venue.

Using this ResDiary integration to manage your SMS marketing efforts is an excellent choice for your hospitality business. It allows you to draw on booking data collected by the ResDiary system to build up your SMS database. You can link a customer's contact details to other elements of their booking, allowing you to send more effective, targeted communications.

You can also use the insights from other integrations like Acteol. You can use the customer data points collected by Acteol (and ResDiary's booking data) to create the most effective possible SMS marketing campaigns.

6. Email marketing solutions

The perfect accompaniment to your SMS marketing campaign is a great email marketing campaign. Emails are an ingrained part of our daily lives, and they can be far less competitive spaces for customer attention than the likes of social media.

You can enjoy intuitive email marketing functionality within ResDiary, making it easy and accessible to send branded communications to your customers, straight from your restaurant booking system.

These emails can be used for just about anything. You can trigger emails to thank customers for placing a booking. You can give them the opportunity to place a pre-order using a set menu via ResDiary's promotions feature - great for large parties or special events. Or you can simply showcase your latest seasonal menu options.

They can also be used to remind customers about their upcoming booking, reducing the chance they’ll forget and become a costly no-show.

After a diner has visited your venue, you can continue to target them with emails to drive greater customer loyalty and return visits. Let them know about upcoming promotions or events to entice them to return.

For further information on email marketing in your restaurant, check out our complete email marketing guide.

7. Guest Wi-Fi

Once you've started working on your email marketing campaigns, you'll want to build up the best possible database of emails. That's the value of guest Wi-Fi solutions such as Wireless Social.

The leading guest Wi-Fi provider in the UK, Wireless Social collects the email addresses of diners who want to log in to your venue's Wi-Fi. These can then be added to your email marketing database.

Without a guest Wi-Fi solution, you'll only collect one email address from a party of 10 diners. With guest Wi-Fi, you can get email addresses from the entire party.

Wireless Social also works in tandem with CRM solutions to get a better understanding of guests in your venue. It helps to provide more data points to elevate your marketing efforts.

5 tips to make the most of your restaurant marketing software

Want to smash your marketing goals and get more table bookings for your restaurant? Here are a few tips to get the very most out of your restaurant marketing tools:

1. Build your brand: Strong branding is essential to make the most of restaurant marketing software. As you use these tools as a scalable solution for attracting customers, your brand is the lynchpin that ties all of your efforts together. It's an important part of keeping your hospitality business top-of-mind for customers.
   
   
2. Make the most of customer data: When using a table management system like ResDiary, you're sure to gather incredible amounts of customer data. Put this data to good use in your marketing efforts. This can involve collecting customer contact details and gaining a better understanding of dining preferences through CRM systems.
   
   
3. Integrate your systems: Using ResDiary as the centrepiece of your marketing tech stack has many benefits to your business. You can integrate your systems with all the diner data collected through ResDiary. Plus, you'll find it easy to have your integrated systems work well with each other. It's the ideal way to create an effective, data-driven marketing campaign.
   
   
4. Automate where possible: Restaurant marketing tools offer the perfect opportunity to automate the more tedious aspects of advertising your business. One of the best uses of marketing automation is triggering communications in response to key events. This allows you to build relationships with your customers without the legwork.
   
   
5. Track and analyse performance: Many of the best restaurant marketing tools offer in-depth functions to understand how your campaigns are performing. Be sure to put these analytics systems to use to understand the systems that are working the best for your restaurant and how your campaigns can improve.
   
   

Market your restaurant with ResDiary

ResDiary has built-in functions and an array of excellent integrations to help you market your restaurant as effectively as possible. This integrated approach is the perfect way to create highly-targeted and effective advertising campaigns to help fill more seats in your restaurant.

From easy bookings through widgets to email communications, ResDiary offers an end-to-end approach to bringing more customers into your venue. Once you've established a relationship with diners, you're empowered to stay in touch with them and keep them coming back for more.

Book a ResDiary demo to fast-track your way to some of the best restaurant marketing tools available.