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How to Make More Dough with Mobile Marketing

Spontaneity drives restaurant visits –
Deciding when and where to eat is usually a spontaneous decision. Sure, people might have plans to attend a fancy restaurant on Friday or Saturday night with friends, but when it comes to pizza and other casual dining options, it’s all about being in the right place at the right time. As it turns out, mobile marketing makes restaurants dough.
As reported in recent findings, it was observed that restaurants that took advantage of mobile marketing strategies experienced a $7,000 increase in sales and up 60% of people that order again once every week using digital channels . Moreover, it is noted that 89% dining research is done by mobile before even visiting the restaurant so its necessary to have user friendly and eye catching website.

Why Mobile is the Special Sauce
So, what’s the right place? It’s where your customers are – mobile.
In fact, Chili’s said that 58% of its restaurant visitors are coming from mobile. For pizza restaurants, it would make sense that even more than 58% are coming from mobile.
Today, your customers are spending more time on their mobile phone than they are with radio and print combined! And, just to clarify that time spent with mobile in the chart below doesn’t even include the time they are spending actually talking on their cell phones. Remember that? It seems like the mobile phone is used for far more today than its original purpose, between texting, score checking and social media updating.

Benefits of Mobile Marketing for Restaurants
Mobile marketing restaurants brings new level of interaction and personalization to customers and helps build their loyalty. With the help of restaurant mobile ordering and loyalty applications. Like SMS marketing, may leave other forms of promotions useless because of its very high open rates, as many as 35% of messages are getting clicked on. What is more, specific about mobile advertising is that ,it enables restaurants to position themselves to reach possible clients within given perimeter increasing the number of customers as well as sales.
How to Best Reach the Mobile Pizza Eater
It used to be that when people talked about mobile marketing, they were mostly speaking about text message marketing. While text message marketing is still a vital part of the mobile marketing equation, there are numerous other things to consider when planning your mobile strategy.
Mobile Websites
Is your site mobile friendly? That should be the first thing that you test, because if it’s not, then we have to start there. Google has made it very simple to test. Click here to test if your site meets Google’s standards for being considered mobile friendly.
It used to be that we recommended to our pizza restaurant customers that they have a separate and distinct mobile site in addition to their desktop site. This was usually designated with a URL such as http://m.pizzarestaurant.com. Then, Google changed the game by recommending that sites use just one piece of code and not have a separate and distinct site for mobile.
With responsive design, your site resonates properly whether it’s on desktop, tablet, smartphone or feature phone. And, perhaps most important, Google says you should use it:
“Google recommends webmasters follow the industry best practice of using responsive web design, namely serving the same HTML for all devices and using only CSS media queries to decide the rendering on each device.”
Mobile ordering is a key ingredient to the success of your website. There are numerous mobile ordering tools that can be integrated into your pizza restaurant website. Your website should have an easy click to call button and a convenient mobile ordering process.
SMS Marketing

Remember the chart from the top of this article? Making a decision on where to eat for lunch remains mostly a spontaneous decision. That’s why putting a text message in the hands of your customers just before lunch or dinner time is so important. Sure, text message marketing is so 2008. But the fact is, it still works and likely offers you the single best ROI that you will find anywhere with mobile or traditional media. Text message marketing is the workhorse of mobile.
But, it requires some work to get those phone numbers and government regulations, as both the US and Canada have stiffened in recent years regarding text message marketing. Your customer needs to opt-in, usually via an interactive text message. Then, once you have a verifiable opt-in, you can send broadcast text messages in the future.
See what other pizza restaurant owners are saying about the power of text message marketing and mobile marketing here and get text message marketing tips here. Also, read about why mobile marketing continues to become more and more important here.
Mobile Advertising
There has never been a better medium for pizza restaurant advertising than Facebook. That’s because of mobile’s and Facebook’s ability to geo-target its mobile advertising. Most pizza restaurants draw only from a three to five mile radius from the stores themselves. With mobile advertising, you can target only those mobile phones in your specified geo-targeted area. No waste!
Better yet, you can target specific products to certain demographics. If its young males that eat your cheesesteaks, you can serve those advertisements to males 12-24. Want to target Moms to help them deliver a healthy and fast meal home to their families, an agency and its mobile ad network can identify mobile phones that belong to mothers 25-44.
Mobile marketing makes restaurants dough
In recent years, the pizza industry has been the forerunner for much of the restaurant mobile marketing business. It was pizza that helped spur many innovative mobile solutions, such as mobile ordering and driving consumers to place orders via mobile.
The success of the pizza industry in mobile is due in part to the quick, on-the-go nature of pizza sales. More sales are waiting to be made, and your mobile message can be in the pockets of your consumers when they are most likely to buy.
Best Mobile Marketing in Restaurant Examples
- Chipotle Mexican Grill: Chipotle strategy included investment in mobile marketing for restaurants, which involved launching a Chipotle app. Thanks to the application customers were able to place orders, customize meals and benefit from Chipotle Rewards loyal program. Other innovations such as the introduction of the “Chipotlane” drive-thru dedicated solely to mobile orders also enhanced ease of use and sales with digital orders accounting for over 50 percent of Chipotle transactions. Additionally, the emphasis on mobile orders during the COVID-19 pandemic prepared the ground for a more robust digital customer base for the company.
- Domino’s Pizza: Domino’s successfully extended the functionality of its app to facilitate ordering without leaving the couch and embedded features such as a real time pizza tracker and a system for earning loyalty rewards. It also introduced voice orders with phone message confirmations keeping customers posted of order progress without them physically answering the phone. Such moves contributed to enhancing delivery pizza sales with total sales of Domino’s going over 60% of Digital Sales thus it maintained its status as a fast food digital innovator.
- Taco Bell: As always, seeking for improvements, Taco bell’s application offered the menu which could be tailored by the customers including items available only on the app. Subscriptions like the “Taco Lover’s Pass” offered through the app were used by Taco Bell to enhance users’ interaction and create revenue engines that catered digital customers. The developments in mobile technology by the company improved customer retention as well as reached out to the younger consumers.
FAQs
How can restaurants market themselves efficiently?
For a restaurant, the optimal marketing strategy would integrate both the old methods and the modern techniques. Social media marketing, email marketing, loyalty programs fall under the digital options, whereas, participating in community activities or working with other businesses offer the personal touch. Focusing on providing services to one’s clients and managing one’s reputation on the internet also is very important.
What strategies can I employ for mobile marketing?
Mobile marketing for restaurants can be implemented via several options, for example, a simple easy to use mobile application, SMS marketing as well as mobile advertisements. It is advisable to provide special offers and utilize push notifications as reminders. Social networking along with geotargeted advertisement assists to attract potential clients located around as well as increase their presence in search engines.
How much do restaurants invest in advertising their products?
Normally, restaurants allocate 3 to 6% of their gross sales to marketing efforts. Based on this, we can estimate that at least 1% would go to advertising expenses. Larger chains may include additional costs so as to remain visible to their customers while smaller restaurants may have less but concentrate on specific regions.
What is the most useful marketing tool of most restaurants?
Most useful marketing tool for restaurants is social media, specifically Facebook and Instagram. Many restaurants also use Pinterest and Twitter to reach their audiences. Social media enables communication between customers of the restaurant and its management as well as sharing pictures and videos of the restaurant with the customers. There are other elements that cannot be ignored like review websites, as new customers are drawn in by good reviews.
How do I make my restaurant popular?
In an effort to attract new customers, attention should be given to some of the strategies which entail providing customers with unique experience, community based entertainment and targeted advertisement on the internet. Other strategies aimed at attracting and keeping customers include promotional campaigns that are time bound, effective use of customer loyalty platform and developing impressive and informative websites.