How to Make a Restaurant Flyer: Ideas That Will Help You Sell More Food

Reasons to create a restaurant advertising flyer

You can design flyers every day to advertise your menu, but here are a few of the other reasons successful restaurant owners make them:

• Holiday offers: organizing a special dinner for Valentine’s, Thanksgiving, or Christmas? Let your clients know by designing an appropriately themed flyer for your restaurant;
• Corporate parties: if your location is open to host company parties, be sure to let potential patrons know this. Distribute the flyers in office buildings and even at subway stations near office districts.
• New menu: every time you introduce new items to your menu or go through a seasonal change, don’t just assume people will notice it. Create a flyer to let them know. Also, use the digital version as part of a newsletter.
• Deals: Attract clients to your restaurant by offering them hard to pass deals like 20-50% off your most popular items or a daily menu for a fixed price.
• Happy Hour: make sure you attract clients as soon as they leave work by creating a special offer after 6 PM.
• Themed Nights: a flyer can be an effective way to advertise an exclusive night, like a live music act taking place in your restaurant or a wine tasting event. You can also think about food-centric nights like Sushi Night, Oyster Dinner, or Taco Tuesdays.
• Live cooking: if your kitchen set-up allows it, you can have live cooking nights, where patrons get to see your chef in action and maybe get some tips and tricks to try at home.

If you are just getting into the business, design a restaurant opening flyer to tell people you are ready to receive guests.

If you are thinking about upgrading your current restaurant flyer design or are just introducing this tool in your marketing mix, we have some tips to help you stand out from the crowd and fill those empty seats.

How to make a restaurant flyer in just a few minutes

To create a restaurant flyer that brings you new clients, you require the right tool. Lucky for you, we have exactly what you need. Our online ordering system is equipped with the powerful Kickstarter module that helps market your business efficiently.

Sign up for a free account, fill in your restaurant information, and let’s learn how to create a promotional flyer in almost no time:

Go to admin -> Kick-starter -> Advertise with flyers -> Overview.

You can choose between two types of flyers:

• Online ordering flyer: access a restaurant flyer template that includes a promotion to encourage people to order your food online. For example, free delivery or 5% percent off main dishes. You can include the flyers in the delivery bags or distribute them in your delivery zones to attract more clients;

• Order ahead flyer: our online ordering system allows you to accept reservation with ordering ahead to increase table turnover and customer satisfaction. Enable this useful feature by going to admin -> Setup -> Services & Opening hours -> Table reservation and check the box next to the text “Allow guests to pre-order their food when booking a table”. Now you can promote this new aspect by creating a food restaurant flyer, printing it, and adding it to your tables.

Click yes on the restaurant flyer design of your choosing and then click “Next” to go to the customization screen. Here, you can add a mouth-watering picture of your food, adjust the colors to match your restaurant branding and edit the headline text.

Click on “Edit back image” to add a hunger inducing picture to the back of your flyer. There is just one more step before you can send your food flyer design to print: creating the coupon codes that will appear on the flyer and encourage people to order.

To do so, go to admin -> Marketing -> Promotions -> Overview -> Add promo deal and choose any of the available deals you want your clients to redeem with the flyer.

Click on “Next” on the following two screens and fill in the important information such as minimum order amount or headline. By clicking “Next” again you will reach a screen where you must check the box near “Use custom coupon code”.

Don’t forget to also select “Hide from the menu (redeem with coupon code)” from the Display Time section. Add the coupon text clients will use to get the discount, such as “5%NEWCLIENT” or “30%BF”. Click save and you’re all done.

If you want to learn more about how to create restaurant coupon codes, check out this video:

Read more: 10 Restaurant Website Promotion Ideas for Delivery & Takeout

Now let’s get back to our flyer. All there is left to do is add the coupon text and click on “Next”. In this last screen you can choose your preferred method of printing:

• Download: get the restaurant flyer transferred to your computer and print it on your own;
• Send to print: email the restaurant flyer design directly to your print shop so they can help you.

That’s it! Have fun creating attractive restaurant flyers that will bring you more clients and increase your revenue.

10 Restaurant Flyer Ideas That Work

1. Use vibrant colors

Food is all about colors and textures that make people feel intrigued and hungry. Your flyer needs to be as tempting as a hot pizza slice and as hard to forget as the taste of cheesecake.

You can show the finished product or focus on the freshness of the ingredients. Make sure to separate the different visual areas with some white or negative space, so that it doesn’t become crowded and each dish gets a chance to shine.

2. Keep copy short, fun and inspiring

Apart from the contact details, you only need a call to action and some inspirational words on your flyer. Everything else should be on your website.

If you decide to share a part of the menu, select a few dishes. By no means use a restaurant flyer as a menu replacement.

Focus on high-value items and the stars of your cuisine.

Use attention-grabbing words like free, new, save, love, and other positive expressions, together with the names of the dishes.

3. Use space dividers

Think of your flyer as an excerpt from a newspaper or a movie poster. Use columns and rows to separate ideas and offers. Use different colors and backgrounds to highlight information in an eye-popping way.

4. Craft a great design for your target audience

Think about your audience. Who are these people? How old are they? What do they like the most? How can you strike a sensitive chord with them? Try and create a visualization of your current client base. Segment them by age, interests, and the food they order most often. Then, try to identify the most profitable segments and the underserved ones. These, and those similar to them, are the people you are trying to persuade.

Create restaurant flyers that have smart references to what your clients might find interesting, funny, or could feel nostalgic about. Use fonts and visual cues to link your message to their preferences.

Here is an example of a Game of Thrones-themed dinner, which uses both visual references, fonts, and wording. This will most likely catch the eye of the Silicon Valley clientele.

If you're catering to a young, hip audience, you might want to consider advertising your brunch options. Make sure to emphasize the specialty coffee and deliver on that promise by investing in a high-end latte machine.

5. Give out the right signals

The design of your flyer can give subtle cues about your restaurant. If you have an upscale place, you will need to show that by using a neutral color scheme that embraces minimalism. On the other hand, if you have a crowded burger joint, you can go crazy and use multiple images and colors on your flyer.

Here are a few examples from a website offering flyer design templates for restaurants.

6. Appeal to senses

Your goal is to make the customers as hungry as you can so that they spend more. The easiest way to do so is to trigger their senses in the most primitive form. Use mouth-watering images or even videos. This sample of a fiery banner makes people think about a juicy steak or burger immediately; you can almost feel the charred smell before clicking it.

The best images you can use for this are “in the process.” Use a picture of wine being poured into a glass and put a freshly sliced pizza next to it. Use dynamic visuals and show food texture instead of perfectly arranged plates. Aim to make the recipient of the flyer imagine that they are already savoring the dishes you show them.

Read more: Why Food Photography Is Important

7. Focus and showcase

Think about your flyer as a shop-window of your menu. You don’t put everything in there. Make a seasonal selection of your top offerings. When it comes to cost, make sure you use nested prices, which come after the description and use the same size font. Don’t allow people to select based on the price tag, but on what you have to offer - eradicate currency signs.

8. Use visual hierarchy to highlight what you want customers to read first

There are a few simple principles of visual hierarchy that can help you create an eye-catching flyer. The goal of this concept is to answer three questions: What is this? How do I use it? Why should I care?

Make sure you put the name of the event you are advertising with a clear, easy to read, and large enough font. You want to let people know what you are talking about right away. Next, use the same, or coordinated fonts in a smaller size to give more details like the type of event, the menu or the theme.

Use contrasting fonts or logos to emphasize information like the name of the invited band or a sponsor. This structure will help the people reading the flyer diagonally to decide if this is interesting for them.

Don’t forget to put your contact details for reservations or further questions in a corner or centrally, at the bottom of the flyer.

9. Use special paper

If you want to use a simple flyer design and make an impact, you could use special paper. Select colorful pages and print with contrasting colors. Another option is to use heavier paper and rely on texture and a premium feel, although this could be too expensive.

10. Choose a winning template for your restaurant flyer ideas

When selecting a template, you have to pay attention to five items: background, color scheme, fonts, image proportion, and overall feeling.

The background for a restaurant flyer should be either monochrome to highlight the food illustrations or have a texture that reminds of natural materials used in the kitchen, like woodchoppers or stone tabletops. There is a growing trend of using a chalkboard background for the contrast, but it is becoming overused. Photos of your restaurant or a lovely table setting can also work unless they are making the flyer too complicated. Try to stick to a simple design for your restaurant flyer. Less is more.

Although you need to keep text to a minimum, fonts are essential. You need to select a combination of maximum two complimentary typefaces which are in line with your brand, logo and other written communication, like the menu.

The color scheme doesn’t have to follow precisely that of your logo or branding; it can be adjusted to the event. Since you are dealing with food, use food-related colors that are known to make people hungry. Neuromarketing research shows that food sales are greatly influenced by color. It is best to keep away from blue tones unless they are used for décor.

Resources to Help You Create a Restaurant Flyer

Now that you have some inspiration and strategy, it’s time to create a flyer that will be hard to resist for your patrons. For the best restaurant flyer designs, we advise you to use existing template services. Most online tools will give you excellent templates and are also very cost-effective compared to a graphic designer. Some of the best websites for designing restaurant flyers are:

• Canva
• PosterMyWall
• PiktoChart
• PlaceIt
• Crello

After you have selected a tool you feel comfortable with; it is time to create your restaurant flyer design.

You can also find lots of inspiration if you follow our Pinterest account, where we have a special GloriaFood Board with hundreds of flyer designs for restaurants. Use these as a starting point or select a few of them on your board and show them to your designer.

Final Words

Although these restaurant flyer ideas are primarily for printed flyers, you can implement most of them successfully when creating banners for the online environment as well. Place these digital restaurant flyers on your website or on those of your partners to attract more visitors. Remember that flyers are a way to keep your marketing fresh and up to date. They show your patrons and potential clients that you are always thinking about bringing something new to the table.

Restaurant flyers, or their cousins, the online banners, are a great way to grab the clients’ attention. The key is to focus it on your latest promotion to sell more or get rid of stocks. If you fail at creating an attractive design, you will see your brand lying in the trash or abandoned under a pile of papers.

Flyers are a communication vehicle for your brand that can do wonders for awareness. You can also use them to attract new clients or be top-of-mind for existing patrons. They are cheap, easy to make, and you can change them as often as you want without hurting your brand.

A restaurant flyer is your silent brand ambassador even before the client sees your menu, venue, or website. That is why the design of this small piece of paper or digital real estate is crucial for the profit of your restaurant.

Reasons to create a restaurant advertising flyer

You can design flyers every day to advertise your menu, but here are a few of the other reasons successful restaurant owners make them:

• Holiday offers: organizing a special dinner for Valentine’s, Thanksgiving, or Christmas? Let your clients know by designing an appropriately themed flyer for your restaurant;
• Corporate parties: if your location is open to host company parties, be sure to let potential patrons know this. Distribute the flyers in office buildings and even at subway stations near office districts.
• New menu: every time you introduce new items to your menu or go through a seasonal change, don’t just assume people will notice it. Create a flyer to let them know. Also, use the digital version as part of a newsletter.
• Deals: Attract clients to your restaurant by offering them hard to pass deals like 20-50% off your most popular items or a daily menu for a fixed price.
• Happy Hour: make sure you attract clients as soon as they leave work by creating a special offer after 6 PM.
• Themed Nights: a flyer can be an effective way to advertise an exclusive night, like a live music act taking place in your restaurant or a wine tasting event. You can also think about food-centric nights like Sushi Night, Oyster Dinner, or Taco Tuesdays.
• Live cooking: if your kitchen set-up allows it, you can have live cooking nights, where patrons get to see your chef in action and maybe get some tips and tricks to try at home.

If you are just getting into the business, design a restaurant opening flyer to tell people you are ready to receive guests.

Or you can simply use our restaurant ordering system that comes with a great Marketing module, as well. So you can design your restaurant flyers faster than you can say "blueberry pie".