How to Advertise a Restaurant on Facebook

Thinking about using Facebook ads to get more customers through your restaurant door? You’re in the right place. While running a restaurant consumes most of your time, a smart Facebook advertising strategy can become a consistent engine for filling seats and driving online orders. This guide will walk you through exactly how to set up, launch, and manage effective Facebook ad campaigns for your restaurant, from defining your audience to creating visuals that make people stop scrolling and start booking.

First, Build a Strong Foundation

Before you spend a single dollar on ads, you need a solid foundation on the platform. Think of this as getting your kitchen prepped before dinner service. Skipping these steps is like trying to cook without your mise en place - sure, you can do it, but it’s going to be chaotic and far less effective.

Optimize Your Restaurant’s Facebook Page

Your Facebook Page is your digital storefront. When a potential customer discovers your restaurant through an ad, they’ll likely click through to your Page to learn more. If it’s sparse, outdated, or unprofessional, you might lose them before they ever see a menu.

• High-Quality Photos: Upload a professional-looking profile picture (usually your logo) and a captivating cover photo (like a shot of your restaurant's interior, your most popular dish, or your staff).
• Complete Your "About" Section: Fill out every single field. Include your address, phone number, operating hours, website, menu link, and a compelling description of what makes your restaurant special.
• Choose the Right Call-to-Action (CTA) Button: Facebook lets you add a prominent button to the top of your Page. For a restaurant, good choices are “Book Now” (if you use a reservation system), “Start Order” (for online ordering), or “Call Now.”
• Enable Reviews: Social proof is everything. Let happy customers share their experiences. It builds trust with new people who find you.

Set Up Your Meta Business Suite and Ad Account

This is your control center for all things advertising. If you haven't already, go to business.facebook.com and create an account. This tool separates your personal Facebook profile from your business activities and gives you access to a much more powerful suite of advertising tools, including Ads Manager.

Install the Meta Pixel on Your Website

What’s a Pixel? It's a small snippet of code that you add to your website. Don’t let the word “code” scare you, platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, or WordPress often have simple integrations that just require you to copy and paste an ID number. This tiny piece of code is a game-changer. It tracks actions people take on your site - like viewing a menu, starting an order, or booking a table. This data lets you:

• Measure Ad Performance: See which ads are actually leading to online orders or reservations.
• Retarget Website Visitors: Show ads specifically to people who visited your website but didn’t book a table. For example, you can target someone who looked at your catering menu with an ad for a corporate catering package.
• Build Custom Audiences: Create “lookalike” audiences, where Facebook finds new people who are similar to your website visitors or existing customers.

Define Your Ad Strategy: Objectives and Audiences

A successful ad campaign starts with a clear goal. Throwing money at a “boosted post” without a strategy is like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks - it’s messy and rarely works. Let's break down how to target the right people with the right message.

Choose the Right Campaign Objective

In Facebook Ads Manager, the first thing you’ll do is choose a campaign objective. This tells Facebook what you want to achieve. For restaurants, these are the most common objectives:

• Awareness/Reach: The goal here is to show your ad to the maximum number of people in your local area for the lowest cost. It's great for new restaurant openings or building general brand recognition. Think of it as a digital billboard.
• Traffic: If your goal is to get people to click a link - perhaps to your menu page, blog, or online ordering platform - this is the objective for you.
• Engagement: Want more comments, shares, and reactions on your post? Use this. It’s effective for promoting special events or contest-style posts where you want to build social buzz.
• Sales/Conversions: With the Meta Pixel installed, you can use this objective to find people most likely to take a specific action, like booking a table or placing an online order. This is typically the most direct way to get a measurable return on your ad spend.

Master Local Audience Targeting

Facebook’s superpower is its targeting. You can go beyond a simple boosted post and get your ads in front of the exact people you want to serve. Here’s how restaurants can do it:

Geotargeting: Your Bread and Butter

This is the most critical targeting option for any local business. Don't advertise to an entire city if your customer base lives within a few miles.

• Set a Radius: Target people within a specific radius of your restaurant (e.g., a 3-mile, 5-mile, or 10-mile circle).
• Target by Postcode: You can be even more specific by entering postcodes for neighborhoods you know are a good fit.
• Refine by Location Status: You can choose to target people “living in or recently in,” “living in,” “recently in,” or “traveling in” this location. For a local favorite spot, targeting people “living in” the radius is smart. If you're in a tourist area, “traveling in” could be a goldmine.

Detailed Targeting: Finding Your Foodies

Once you’ve set your location, layer on interests and behaviors to find your ideal diners.

• Interests: Target people who have shown an interest in specific cuisines (e.g., “Italian cuisine,” “Mexican food,” “sushi”), dining styles (“fine dining,” “fast casual restaurants”), or general food-related topics ("foodie").
• Demographics: Filter by age, gender, language, and other demographics. If you’re a family-friendly establishment, you could target parents. If you’re a cocktail bar, target people over the legal drinking age.
• Behaviors: Get creative here! You can target people who have an upcoming anniversary, people who recently moved, or frequent travelers. Imagine an ad that says, "New to the neighborhood? Welcome! Come try your new local pizza spot!”

Designing Ads That Create Cravings

For restaurants, your ad creative is everything. You're not just selling food, you're selling an experience, a flavor, and an escape. Poor-quality photos or boring videos won't cut it. Your goal is to stop them from scrolling and make them hungry.

Lead with High-Quality Food Photography &, Video

Your camera eats first, and so do your customers' eyes. Here are some ideas for visuals that work:

• High-Quality Dish Shots: Professionally lit photos or videos focusing on your best-selling dishes. Think cheese pulls, sizzling steaks, glistening sauces, and vibrant salads.
• Action Shots: Don't just show the final dish. Show it being made! Videos of a chef tossing a pizza, a bartender pouring the perfect cocktail, or a behind-the-scenes look at the kitchen buzz can be incredibly engaging.
• Ambiance &, People: Show what it feels like to be at your restaurant. Capture happy customers (with their permission!), your friendly staff, or your cozy interior. People buy into an atmosphere just as much as they buy food.
• User-Generated Content (UGC): Do you have fantastic photos shared by your customers on Instagram? Repost them (with credit and permission!) in your ads. UGC acts as a powerful, authentic review.

Write Compelling Ad Copy

Your visual hooks them, and your words reel them in. Your ad copy should be clear, persuasive, and have a strong call to action.

• Keep it brief: People scroll fast. Get to the point.
• Ask a question: "What are your plans for Friday night?" or "Tired of cooking?"
• Highlight the benefits: Don't just say what it is, say what it does for them. "Warm up with our homemade tomato soup" is better than "Tomato soup on the menu."
• Create urgency (when appropriate): "Book our Valentine's Day special before it's sold out!"
• Use a strong CTA: Tell them exactly what to do next. "Book Your Table," "Order Now for Free Delivery," "View Our Menu."

Running Different Types of Restaurant Ad Campaigns

Once you’ve got your foundation, audience, and creative, you can start running campaigns tailored to specific business goals.

Promote Special Offers and Events

Special promotions are a classic way to drive traffic and can work wonders on Facebook. Create an offer ad for:

• Happy Hour Specials: Target people within your radius during the afternoon rush - for example, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. - with an ad about your 5 p.m. happy hour.
• Weekly Specials: Do you have "Taco Tuesday" or "Wing Wednesday"? Run ads for these events starting the day before to build anticipation.
• Holiday Menus: Promote your menus for Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, or Christmas well in advance, targeting people interested in those occasions.

Drive Reservations and Online Orders

If you're focused on measurable action, these are the campaigns for you.

• Campaign Goal: Choose "Sales" or "Traffic" as your campaign objective.
• Audience: Start by retargeting website visitors or people who have engaged with your page. Then, create a lookalike audience based on this group to find new potential customers.
• Creative: Showcase your best-selling dishes with a clear "Order Now" or "Book a Table" button that links directly to your online ordering or reservation platform.

Retargeting: Bringing People Back

Retargeting is one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising. It involves showing ads specifically to people who have already interacted with your business. For example, you can create a campaign that shows ads to people who visited your online ordering page but didn't complete a purchase. The ad could say something like, "Still thinking about it? Complete your order and get 10% off!"

Final Thoughts

Advertising a restaurant on Facebook successfully comes down to combining mouth-watering visuals with precise local targeting. By starting with a strong foundation, understanding your customers, and testing different ads to see what resonates, you can turn your Facebook Page into a reliable source of new and returning diners.

Once your ads begin attracting new followers and customers, managing the resulting comments, messages, and your overall content calendar can become a job in itself. At Postbase, we built our platform to solve exactly that problem. Our one-stop dashboard, with its simple visual planner and unified inbox, helps you keep tabs on all of your social media platforms without the headache. You can schedule content weeks in advance and manage all your DMs and comments in one clean view, freeing you up to do what you do best: run a fantastic restaurant.