Facebook Marketing for Restaurants: What Still Works in 2025


To run a restaurant effectively, you need a powerful advertising tool that can help you promote your culinary business in the most effective manner. For that, Facebook ads can be the best tools that can help you boost your restaurant’s online presence in the most interesting manner.

As consumers nowadays are spending more hours online than before, especially on Facebook, you need to level up your advertising game. To get your potential customers to visit your restaurant, your brand needs to show up more on the platforms where they are spending a lot of time.

In this article, you will learn about the things that will work for the Facebook marketing strategy of your restaurant in 2025. These tips, shared by a restaurant marketing agency, will help you establish your restaurant as a leading brand on this social media platform.

Facebook Marketing: Why Is It Beneficial for Restaurants?

It has become really important to learn marketing on Facebook at an exceptional level. Although developing a picture-perfect feed on Instagram and actively promoting your daily specials on X will help you understand the appetites of your users, you should not limit your campaign to there.

67% of users on Facebook visit a local business page once a week or more. This looks like a captive audience, doesn’t it?

What’s more interesting is that 70% of purchases made at a local restaurant can be traced back to social media, which implies that your restaurant should have a social media page, especially on Facebook, to show up where your customers are searching and stay ahead of your competitors.

Creating a Facebook page as a part of your marketing strategy allows you to run ads on the platform. Plus, it enables potential customers to find your restaurant through organic reach. This is the type of reach you don’t simply pay for.

Let’s say your restaurant is tagged in a user post. Over 20 million users post pictures of restaurant meals on Facebook, which simply implies a lot of free promotion for your restaurant.

Organic reach might be a great thing, the posts on your feed can only be seen by users already following you or the once who know enough about you to actively seek your services out. 

This seems to be a great start. However, what about all the hungry folks who might have never heard about your restaurant? This is where Facebook Ads can be of service. If you spend a minimal amount of money on Facebook ads, you will be able to ensure that your restaurant’s social media content shows up on other users’ feeds and grows your reach beyond local regular customers.

Difference Between Boosted Posts and Facebook Ads

Now, you might be wondering how Facebook Ads work. Well, there are two main ways to run paid promotions on Facebook, i.e., boosted posts and Facebook ads:

  • Boosted Posts:

Boosting a post implies paying to promote an existing post on your restaurant’s Facebook page. It might be something like a post about your Friday night dinner special. 

Such boosted posts usually show up on the screens of people following your page and their Facebook friends, or individuals in your local area within a specific age group.

The purpose of boosting a post is to enhance its reach. By doing so, you will be able to achieve better visibility and improve brand awareness regarding your restaurant.

  • Restaurant Facebook Ads:

Boosting your posts may seem to be a great move. However, running Facebook ads for restaurants is a much more effective marketing strategy than you may think. 

First of all, unlike boosted posts, Facebook ads are not associated with posts that are found on your Facebook page. This implies you can try various other options and alter your campaign in different ways throughout the duration of your ad campaign. This is the flexibility you may not get with boosted posts.

Facebook ads also give you the power to use highly sophisticated targeting, such as the ability to create several personalized and overlapping audience bases from your existing customer databases. This involves a newsletter list, which cannot be created with boosted posts.

Most importantly, Facebook ads are also known to have a significant immediate impact that helps you achieve more specific campaign goals, such as capturing leads or boosting sales.

These are the main differences that you need to understand.

Editor’s Pick: Want to take your ad strategy further? Explore our complete guide to creating high-converting Facebook ads for small restaurants in 2025. Learn step-by-step targeting, budgeting, and creative tips to get better results from your campaigns.

Tips That Will Work For Your Facebook Marketing in 2025

Here are some essential tips that will help you optimize the marketing strategies for your restaurant on Facebook, in the following:

  • Customize Location Targeting:

Showing up in the right place is essential to get started with Facebook marketing for your restaurant. You just need to set up your ads for your local zip code and neighbouring zip codes. This will help you ensure that only targeting customers who can actually visit your restaurant without the need to buy a plane ticket.

If you have multiple locations, you can target more than one geographical area as long as the content of your ad is applicable to all your restaurant branches.

  • Set Goals for Your Ads:

The most effective Facebook ad is the one that has an objective aligned with the business goals of your restaurant. Hence, you need to think about what you want your ad to achieve for your restaurant.

Do you just want to boost the number of likes on your page to make people aware of your brand? Do you want to encourage your followers to fill out a form to book a reservation? Or do you want to promote your loyalty program by driving traffic to the membership page of your website? 

By understanding these goals, you will be able to define one for your Facebook ad, allowing you to drive more sales in your restaurant.

  • Begin Your Online Journey With Current Customers and Followers:

When you aim for quick growth, you will be able to kickstart your Facebook marketing strategy as quickly as possible. By using the “custom audiences” feature, you will be able to easily upload a spreadsheet of email addresses and deliver ads to the Facebook accounts linked with your list.

  • Create Lookalike Audiences to Expand Your Reach:

It doesn’t need to be overly time-consuming to run a marketing campaign for your restaurant on Facebook. You just need to let the platform do the groundwork for you and develop a “lookalike audience” full of users identical to your usual guests.

 The clear advantage of this approach is that you will be advertising to people who you can consider your potential audience. To get started, you just need to upload a source audience of 100 individuals on Facebook. 

Pro Tip: Want to re-engage past visitors? Learn how to bring back diners using proven Facebook retargeting strategies. Turn occasional guests into loyal regulars with smarter ad targeting.

  • Target Specific Interests:

Have an understanding of your targeting and try restaurant promotion ideas, such as advertising on Facebook, who are looking for more online ordering options. You should consider promoting safety and convenience in your ad copy, as these are the two key expectations from your audience.

No matter what niche interest you plan to target, carefully developing your targeting and messaging is the most important thing to do. According to Facebook’s relevance score, getting these elements into your Facebook ads can be helpful in reducing your cost per click. 

It implies the amount of money you pay for each person who clicks your ads. It is so because the more attractive your ad is on Facebook, the more clicks you are likely to get. 

  • Test Multiple Ad Formats:

Facebook ads shouldn’t be considered as a “set it and forget it” task. You should work hard to have at least two running ads at any give time. You should also monitor their performance on a regular basis to recognize the one that suits well with your audience well.

The best thing to do here is to try different ad formats like single image ads, video ads, or carousel ads.

You Might Also Like: Discover fresh content ideas that captivate diners on Facebook and Instagram. From mouthwatering food photography to engaging customer stories, find out what keeps your followers scrolling and clicking.

  • Showcase Multiple Types of Audiences:

You can also split test different types of content and calls to action to see the ones that perform the best. When you’re carrying out split testing, you need to create more than one ad set, then test these ad sets against each other to see which one gets you better outcomes.

The best way to do this is by swapping out imagery. You just need to run one ad with a mesmerizing picture of one of your menu items, and another ad with a picture of your happy customers dining at your restaurant. Or else, you should consider testing your calls to action to find out which one is more effective in driving the audience to your restaurant.

To Summarize

Running ads on Facebook can definitely help you drive more foot traffic to your restaurant. It helps you gain a lot of insights into what could be improved for your social media campaign and make amendments to it for better outcomes.

With the abovementioned tips, you will be able to set the right foot for yoru campaign, allowing you to tap into the deep potential that Facebook carries.

Further Reading: Explore how to track ad success and refine your restaurant’s Facebook campaigns. Understand the key metrics and tools to measure what’s working—and what needs improvement.

 

 

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