This is part two of a two-part series on AI marketing. Look for part one here.
With AI technology, targeted strategies, and the right service provider, restaurant owners and managers can theoretically connect more readily to their specific or diverse customer groups. Intentionally selected SEOs and GEOs, in turn, can make it easier for customers to find their new favorite restaurant, hunt for the perfect special occasion destination, or learn more about what’s new at their regular hangouts through their favorite search engines and platforms. Sounds simple, right?
AI fails reflect the complicated relationships existing between businesses and the software, platforms, and strategies intended to help them stay relevant with customers. With restaurant trends in a state of perpetual change, thanks in part to AI-based marketing and third-party aggregators such as Uber Eats and DoorDash, owners and managers have the added pressure of staying on top of the technologies that promise to make their margins and marketing efforts more robust. Furthermore, they recognize the importance of being in full or nearly-full control of customer loyalty and repeat business.
Restaurateurs, bartenders, and hospitality marketers who have done their homework to find the right company or researched current SEO and GEO trends and platforms succeed by following common sense rules defined by pioneering hospitality AI experts, such as “Do not let AI do all of the work” and “Allow live humans to have imput in AI-influenced or researched text before it goes out on websites and social media.” Regardless of the strategy, the savvier among them recognize its best to truly know the customer or customer segments when plotting marketing campaigns, updates, and openings to keep branding front and center.
“AI” of the Beholder
Dallas-based bartender Sanwar Mal Khokhar, discovered this when he wanted to make his specialization in classic cocktails switched up with Indian ingredients for local bars and restaurant discoverable. “AI did not create the voice for my marketing efforts–I kept my own voice, using AI as a helping hand to refine my idea,” he said. “Before AI, I knew what I wanted to say, but saying it was always very complicated. AI helped me simplify my language without losing the real meaning or idea. Thanks to AI, my messaging is very tight, whether it is menu description or media quote response. The (messaging) is more structured and easier for the guest to understand.”
Following the experts’ practices, he uses AI as a starting point instead of a final product, with fact checking as a goal before finalizing what gets sent out. For example, he writes social media captions but uses AI to refine the text based on current cocktail trends. When creating drink menus, he asks AI to tighten the base of the description and find alternative words accessible to customers. In both cases, he takes what he learns and rewrites things himself in his own voice. Although he doesn’t use “guest targeting" capabilities of AI as often, it helps him understand how different audiences may respond to cocktails with Indian flavor profiles.
Khokhar said AI learning curve involves understanding how to guide it properly. “The most important thing I learned is that AI is only good if you are using your ideas and input (in the final product),” he says, noting he does not have a dedicated marketing team at this stage. “AI helps reduce time spent on structuring ideas and rewriting drafts, allowing me to focus more on the actual guest experience. It helped me understand how optimization and SEO work (in terms of) clear headings, simpler language, and answering specific (customer) questions. With this, I have seen better engagement on my website and stronger media visibility.”
Anneliese Place, a veteran rock club consultant and former club owner has found that AI reads patterns, but not people. Consequently, the venues that will succeed are the ones that use AI to improve efficiency, while still leading with a strong, human-driven identity. In her consulting on the restructuring of a live music venue that will include a small restaurant in Worcester, Mass., she noticed while tracking restaurant and bar marketing trends that AI may help in efficiency, but can completely miss the mark.
“In the current venue I’m working with, AI allows me to move faster, create better systems, and deliver stronger results, while keeping the actual experience grounded in real human interaction," she said.
“The biggest challenge is knowing what to use AI for and what to keep human. A bar or music venue isn’t just a business…it’s a living environment. The crowd, the music, the timing, and the feel of the room shift constantly, and that’s what drives real engagement and repeat customers. AI has helped streamline (marketing) content creation, campaign organization, and multiple variations of messaging. It’s also been valuable as a brainstorming tool, especially in a post-COVID market where audience behavior has shifted significantly.”
Juan Pablo Mayoral, owner of virtual kitchen company Nectao Foods, LLC, operating in Austin and San Francisco, found AI helpful in standardizing the voice of 18 different brands without them sounding like a carbon copy of one another even as they operate out of a shared kitchen mostly focused on delivery.
“We created brand-specific prompts based on the unique tone and personality of each brand and the audiences they appeal to,” Mayoral explained, noting that AI doesn’t replace creativity, but ensures he is being consistent with each brand's voice and personality. One of his strategies is to use AI to generate a high volume of ad copy and test out different ad copy in various locations.
“Rather than making an educated guess on customer demographics, we use AI to analyze the orders we receive and find out who our customers are at a micro level,” he said. “This allows us to create ad copy and messaging designed for a specific group of people. It has reduced our production time dramatically. Our menu descriptions, app listings, and promotions are constantly being refreshed rather than just sitting stagnant for months. We are constantly iterating and refreshing based on what the data is telling us is actually working. AI also helps us monitor our competitors’ menu items and price changes in real time. In the food delivery industry, being able to quickly adapt to spikes in demand is huge, as is (being able to) focus on high-level strategy.”
While variations are flagged through AI, Mayoral and his team filter it heavily before it goes out. “We have more engagement because we have more posts going out, and they’re actually more in line with how our customers behave online,” he continued. “We can see what promotions are actually driving profit for us, not just revenue. It helps us understand how much margin we have for every item and how our marketing spend correlates to kitchen efficiency. In a virtual kitchen, where profit is so thin, this is huge.”
Cincinatti-based Gorilla Cinema Presents, created by Jacob Treviño, is noted for its immersive, pop-culture-themed bars and restaurants including Palm Valley Cocktails, Overlook Lodge, The Lonely Pine Steakhouse, Oakley Greens, and The Video Archive. He discovered that AI works best in designing promotional materials and pop-ups when he takes some of his source ideas for any sort of event first and then guide it through AI to ensure his final result will reflect his brands’ specific style and originality.
“If you just give the AI a prompt to print a trivia flyer or need a 2-for-1, you're going to get something that looks very similar to whatever everyone else is putting out,” he cautioned. “I think what AI is extremely useful for, especially in the restaurant space, is developing marketing strategies and identifying your strengths as a restaurant or bar owner. One strategy is dumping all of your reviews from Google into AI to look for patterns and behaviors from your staff to figure out the best way to incorporate that into your marketing. If it identifies patterns such as ‘romantic,’ you can lean into the date night options, or ‘great place to watch a game’ to make sure your sports marketing is on point.”
Treviño has also found that AI tools are only as good as the information that is being fed to it, and how detailed the user is supplying AI tools with the information that it needs. It can't just automatically look up the sales of your competitors or do any sort of magical marketing. In order for it to do its job, the data needs to identify trends and patterns. Ultimately, focusing on the human element such as customer reviews is really what makes that SEO powerful.
“Using AI and hospitality industry right now feels a lot like learning to play the piano,” he admitted. “It's something that you have to work on every day to get a little bit better at the prompts and engaging with the AI and figure out the best ways to get the most out of the tools. As the free subscriptions for open AI will only take you so far, investing time into the platform that you want to use and testing its limits everyday is necessary. If you're engaging with AI to boost your SEO, it’s identifying the keywords that people are looking for in your area and plugging them into the back end of your website so that you get more hits or more clicks.”
Both Sides Now
Some hospitality veterans have gone a step further by establishing technology companies that go beyond what AI and other applications have done for their brands.
Sam Portillo, a co-owner of two restaurants (2fifty BBQ in Maryland and Washington, D.C.) went one step beyond after finding value in AI and digital marketing. Two years ago, he and his partners developed a system called “Apollo,” named for the first smoker they fired up at 2fifty. It successfully captured the restaurants’ voice, feeling, and personality in a structured format that any AI tool could reference. In turn, he found that with Apollo, anyone could speak on brand, from marketing people to the host replying to a Google review to the catering manager writing a proposal and the owner posting at midnight to produce content that’s consistent in voice and messaging.
“We're not selling AI tools,” Portillo explained. “We’re restaurant people who figured out how to build them for ourselves. We don't just use AI to make content, but also build tools, including an automation that pulls menu data from a Google Sheet and generates a printable menu that looks like it came straight off a design printing press in minutes. We also built internal dashboards, reporting templates, and Google Sheet automations the same way. Every image on our site has AI-generated SEO tags and descriptions. These are small things individually, but they compound.”
As a result, the website updates automatically, and press features and news mentions get added without anyone manually uploading anything. It also analyzes email subscriber data, including subject lines that perform, the segments that engage customers the most, and what campaigns actually convert, and feed that back into planning. Portillo, however, maintains that while the tech is the easy part, the hard part is knowing one’s brand well enough to give AI useful constraints, and having a workflow for AI to plug into. And doing the former takes work and patience.
“We spent months building the pipeline before the outputs got consistently good,” he said. “We're used to building systems and frameworks before jumping to execution. This means that the worst thing a restaurant can do with AI is use it to write Instagram captions. That's like buying a commercial kitchen to make toast. AI's real value in hospitality is infrastructure, from brand alignment to automated operations, subscriber intelligence, and compounding SEO. The content is a side effect of having the systems right. We use AI to work on deeper things, not just faster or easier ones.”
The year-old Saivory is an AI‑powered Houston restaurant technology company helping brands drive customer discovery and elevate conversion and engagement through first-party and direct customer relationships. Co‑founder/CEO Stephen Klein describes it as a collaborative endeavor with restaurateurs and software innovators who apply “intelligent automation and personalized experiences” across web, mobile, and AI‑driven ordering, especially for high‑value transactions such as large orders and catering.
“The earliest (AI related) tech was built was for the 30-unit Fajita Pete's, where half of their business is catering,” Klein said. “Shipley Do-Nuts, a roughly 400 unit brand, has benefitted from AI technology in that customers can go to a local website from the brand and create a customized order for an office breakfast or birthday party. It helps create a curated cart, with calculations and other data about how many people and who exactly will be enjoying the order. The AI that we use in SEO draws from of brand approved content, and then adding to it, augmenting it, and repurposing it as necessary, etc. to main maintain that brand voice.”
Like Portillo, Klein crossed over from restaurant ownership (Fajita Pete’s) after finding success using AI to improve personalized guest experiences and “local discovery. ” He found the technology bolstered customer engagement through high-intent occasions like catering. AI-assisted orders at Shipley Do-Nuts, one of Klein’s clients, delivered 26 percent higher average order values, while Fajita Pete’s used AI to streamline its ordering workflows and reduce reliance on phone orders resulting in a better understanding of guest behavior across channels. He mentions that it has also made his clients less reliant on services like DoorDash and UberEats, allowing them to expand their bottom line.
“The tools are powerful and the technology is really cool, but (success) is really all about using (AI) correctly and having organizations be united in their efforts to make everything work together,” Klein said. “There is a lot of press out there about ‘cool AI implementations’ that went south because they were not utilized in a way that advanced the customer experience. The two most important things that AI should optimize on a website is order flow and location pages that are going to show up on a mobile phone when a customer is looking for a restaurant.”
In today’s AI technology multiverse, third-party aggregators in the restaurant industry may be steering customer attention that brings volume to restaurants but collect big commissions that reduce their profitability bottom. However, intelligent use of AI can allow the restaurants and bars to take back their power and influence.