How to Advertise Your Catering Business: 7 Smart Moves

In the catering world, having a one-of-a-kind menu, delicious standout food, and even top-notch service won’t be enough to get you fully booked for the year—although it certainly helps.  

What will make your business profitable and put your business front and center is effective catering advertising. It’s about figuring out what makes customers choose you above the rest and using proven catering marketing strategies to showcase that. 

With 97,921 catering businesses in the US to compete with based on recent statistics, you’ll want to explore the smart advertising strategies for catering companies in this article.

Understanding Your Target Audience 

Without knowing who you’re catering to, it’s not possible to know which dishes to serve and in which channels to focus your marketing efforts. After all, your catering business won’t serve everyone who requires catering but rather a more specific subset of customers. 

For example, does your catering company focus on ​corporate events, wedding parties, large gatherings, or small get-togethers? Each of these categories has unique needs and expectations, which means crafting specific marketing materials that speak to those clientele. 

Creating client personas also helps you understand the types of customers you’re targeting, giving you a solid foundation from which to start researching. To understand your catering clients, it’s important to meet them where they are. You can conduct surveys and interviews, read online reviews, and even engage in social listening to see what’s getting the most engagement.

Crafting Your Advertising Message 

Before you decide on the advertising channels most relevant to your customers, you need to develop your messaging. Do you have a slogan or a unique selling proposition (USP) you want to make the heart of your marketing strategies? USPs highlight all sorts of features and benefits, from customization to experience with large-scale events—anything you consider a specialty.  

Once you have your USP formed, it’s important that every message leverages it to reach every audience segment. If your audience is primarily engaged couples, you’ll want to use emotional appeal and place an emphasis on romance. 

On the other hand, there’s less of an emotional component with corporate events and more value placed on efficiency and professionalism. Every advertising message should also include a clear call to action (CTA) to provide new customers with next steps, whether booking a tasting or discussing the nature of their event. 

To draw in potential clients, why not provide them with the gift of social proof from existing customers? Between 70% and 99.9% of people read reviews before making a purchase, as they want to know about specific real-life experience with your catering business in words and in photographs.  

While these customer testimonials are often placed on the home page of a website, they can be more impactful when used across other marketing channels. It allows you to highlight more specific aspects of your catering services and appeal to different customers across multiple contexts.

Choosing the Right Advertising Channels

While digital advertising is most dominant for most industries and business types, traditional media is still valuable to catering businesses due to its tangible and localized nature. Caterers usually focus on local and regional events, which means there’s a greater focus on local advertising compared to eCommerce businesses, for instance. Since word-of-mouth and local recognition are so important, using radio stations, events and expos, mailers, newspapers, and magazines to advertise your business gives your brand more exposure and increases catering sales. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean that digital platforms are completely out of the picture. People spend a lot of time online (the average American spends six and a half hours online daily), so businesses are constantly harnessing the reach and targeting capabilities of social media platforms. 

This increases the possibility of your ads being shown not only to people in general but the right target market. Ads from caterers who specialize in kids’ birthday parties can be shown directly to parents, while wedding caterers can target engaged couples. 

Advertising is demanding with the requirement to consistently publish, test, and report on new ads, not to mention interacting with your audience. Therefore, it’s only worth using marketing platforms that’ll provide the best return on investment (ROI). 

The main question to ask yourself is, “Where do your customers spend the most time online?” Are they scrolling through reels and browsing through images on Instagram or do they prefer exploring your business through Google or Facebook? Look at any of your current analytics dashboards to understand what your audience is telling you and plan accordingly.

Leveraging Digital Tools 

Each social media platform revolves around specific types of content. Learn them well, and you can use them to your advantage. 

Instagram is highly visual, which makes it ideal for showcasing everything from your food offerings to complete event setups in both photo and video form. Meanwhile, Pinterest is also visual but centers on event inspiration and ideas.  

Yet, digital tools don’t just involve social media marketing—they also encompass content marketing on your catering website, such as good old-fashioned email marketing. You can host a well-maintained blog on your website, posting articles on valuable catering topics like “Top Catering Trends for 2025” or “How to Accommodate Dietary Restrictions at Catered Events.” This drives traffic to your site, builds authority, and contributes to your site’s search engine optimization (SEO).  

Despite email seeming like an outdated form of marketing, it has more than maintained its relevancy, with 43% of marketers saying email drives the highest ROI of all marketing channels. Targeted email campaigns are the way to go, where you segment your audience depending on relevancy to avoid unwanted emails ended up in the wrong inbox. These emails might include seasonal promotions, exclusive discounts, or updates using automated email tools.

Catering Collaborations and Partnerships 

As a catering business, you specialize in food but may lack the expertise when it comes to decorating and venue selection. So, when clients are looking for the full package, it’s worth partnering with other local businesses like event planners to leverage each other’s services.  

To find these businesses, you might conduct your own research online, attend networking events, or contact them directly through email or social media. You might end up partnering with a local baker who can make custom bread creations for your bread baskets or offer a package deal with an up-and-coming photographer to your clients. These relationships boost your reputation in the events industry, increasing the likelihood of other businesses recommending you in the future.

Utilizing SEO and Online Advertising

Although we established the value of a social media presence, your website remains the hub where customers find everything they need, including pricing, detailed information on your services, and how to book you. Therefore, it’s the most crucial platform to optimize, both in terms of user-friendliness and SEO.  

While you want to make sure your website loads quickly, is easy to navigate and is accessible on all devices, you also want it to rank high in search results pages (SERPs). Using headings, descriptions, keywords, alt text, and optimized images all contribute to healthy SEO results. 

To complement your organic search strategy, Google and social media platforms let you run paid ads that can work wonders to attract targeted clients. You can freely select the target demographic you want your ads shown to and appear at the very top of search results for specific phrases like “best wedding catering business near me.”

Measuring Advertising Success

When the ads are in motion and your website is optimized and ready to go, monitor how well your campaigns are performing. The content management system (CMS), hosting, or managed hosting provider and social media platforms you use have at least one built-in analytics dashboard that gives you an overview of how key performance indicators are looking, including click-through rate (CTR), impressions, and more. 

However, there are more advanced tools that address specific needs or interests. For example, Hotjar visualizes how users interact with your website, from where they click to when they abandon the page, while event management software gives you a comprehensive look into your entire operation. 

All the insights you glean from these statistics are actionable, and you can use them to improve your results and maximize your efforts. One of your campaigns is significantly weaker than the other, signaling that it might be time to allocate resources elsewhere. 

In the worst-case scenario, your ads might not resonate with your audience at all, prompting you to go back to the drawing board. From there, you could perform A/B testing to experiment with two variations of the same feature or refine your targeting parameters. 

What This Means for Your Business 

Learning the ins and outs of how to advertise your catering business means more opportunities to thrive in a competitive landscape. With this competition comes rapid change, so continuous adaptation and innovation of advertising strategies are key to success. Through regular tweaks and improvements, your catering business is bound to stay relevant and visible as time goes on. 

Want to sharpen your advertising strategies? Book a demo with Paytronix to discover both our catering and marketing automation solutions. Read our 2024 Loyalty Guide to see how you can boost customer lifetime value through unique loyalty experiences.