Keeping up with content creation, customer engagement, and competitive analysis can feel like a never-ending task for restaurant marketers. But what if you had a digital assistant that could brainstorm ad copy in seconds, scan thousands of customer reviews in minutes, and reveal your competitors’ best-kept secrets? That’s the power of AI – and it’s more accessible than you think.
Being deeply involved in AI uses for marketing and branding, we’ve seen some of the most effective ways that brands can get started with leveraging AI very easily.
Before we dive into the ‘how,’ let’s talk about an important first step – setting clear AI usage policies for your organization. Some of our recommendations to our clients that are using AI is to only use it in a private environment. When using free tools, the data you input can be used to train their models and potentially show up for others using those tools. We also believe that AI output shouldn’t be the final state, but rather a starting point. It needs to be reviewed, customized, checked for accuracy, and have the human touch incorporated. Think of it as a starting point.
Here are three practical ways your restaurant brand can start using AI right now to amplify your marketing efforts:
1. Create Custom GPTs for Your Brand
Imagine having an expert copywriter that knows your brand’s tone inside and out, that can churn out ideas in seconds. With tools like OpenAI’s GPT technology, you can create a custom language model tailored specifically to your brand voice.
Once trained, this custom GPT becomes an extension of your team – a virtual copywriter that creates content tailored to your brand. You can leverage it to craft engaging Instagram captions, witty TikTok scripts, polished press releases, or even new menu item descriptions – all while maintaining your brand’s distinct personality.
By training it on your brand guidelines, examples of past campaigns, menu descriptions, social media posts, or even customer service scripts that reflect the essence of your brand’s personality, you’ll have the ability to benefit from the speed and scalability AI can deliver.
How To Get Started:
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Gather Your Materials – Collect your brand’s style guides, social media posts, ads, menu descriptions, and past marketing
- Train the AI – Use platforms like OpenAI’s API to feed your materials into a custom GPT; ask it to play a specific role, give it context on the business, provide examples that you want it to follow, and specify instructions on how you want the output.
- Set Clear Rules – Give it instructions about your brand’s unique nuances such as avoiding certain words or emphasizing key points of differentiation or values
- Iterate and Refine: Test the GPT’s output and tweak its training data to improve accuracy over time.
With this approach, you’ll be able to move quickly, get new ideas to use as starting points, and feel like you have an extra creative assistant that can do things in a fraction of the time.
Now that you have a virtual copywriter at your fingertips, let’s look at how AI can help you analyze what customers are saying about your restaurant.
2. Intelligent Customer Feedback Analysis
What if you could instantly know what your customers love – and what needs improvement – without manually reading through thousands of reviews and comments? AI-powered sentiment analysis can give restaurant brand marketers a real-time pulse on customer feedback.
AI can sift through thousands of reviews, social media comments, and customer feedback in seconds – giving you instant insights into what’s working and what needs fixing. AI tools can identify recurring themes, detect shifts in sentiment, and even flag potential PR issues before they escalate.
For example, if multiple customers mention a menu item they love or that service was an issue at a particular location, you can then act to leverage the positive and fix the negative.
How To Get Started
- Collect Customer Feedback – Export social media comments, online reviews, and survey responses into a spreadsheet (CSV format works best).
- Use AI to Analyze Trends – Upload your data to a GPT-powered tool and prompt it to: summarize key themes (e.g., food quality, service, ambiance),break down sentiment (positive, neutral, negative), highlight emerging trends or issues (e.g., multiple complaints about slow service).
- Turn Insights into Action – If customers rave about a dish, spotlight it in marketing. If service complaints rise, address the issue before it impacts your
Large language models excel at analyzing large data sets. Using AI to do the heavy lifting, you’ll spend less time manually sifting through feedback and more time improving the guest experience based on real customer insights.
Competitive Research and Analysis
Want to know what competing restaurants are doing well – and how you can stand out? AI can help you analyze competitors’ social media, menu changes, promotions, and customer feedback to inform your own strategy.
How To Get Started
- Identify Your Key Competitors – Use a simple AI prompt like:“List the top 3 [restaurant category] in [location]. For each one, provide a brief overview, summarize their unique selling points, strengths, and weaknesses.”
- Analyze Customer Sentiment – Ask AI to pull and analyze recent customer reviews from competitors with a follow-up prompt like “Identify three customer reviews for each of the competitors. For each competitor perform a sentiment analysis on those customer reviews. Identify the overall sentiment as positive, negative, or Highlight any common themes or key takeaways from the reviews. Look for common themes in praise and complaints.”
- Compare Your Brand Positioning – Feed AI your brand’s messaging and ask it to highlight key differences from competitors.
- Adjust Your Strategy – Ensure your differentiation is coming through and sets you apart from competitors.
You can take your prompts in different directions, depending on what you want to learn. With AI, competitive research becomes quick and actionable. And seeing opportunities for helping your brand standout can become much clearer.
Final Thoughts
AI isn’t just for tech giants – it’s an incredibly powerful tool for restaurant brand marketers looking to create better content, understand customer sentiment, and outsmart competitors. These three ways you can use AI immediately are all basic but impactful. The landscape of what’s possible is vast and allows for more complex and integrated AI use cases that are even more powerful.
The restaurant brands that embrace AI today won’t just keep up – they’ll lead the industry. Whether it’s generating scroll-stopping content, decoding customer sentiment, or outsmarting competitors, AI is your new secret ingredient. The question isn’t ‘if’ you should use AI, but ‘how fast’ you can start. So, what’s your first move?
If you need help with your restaurant marketing or how to get started with AI, reach out to us!
Sign up for a complimentary 30 minute session to see how AI might help your restaurant brand:
