After helping 2500 restaurants analyze tens of millions of dollars in marketing spend, I've discovered something pretty shocking, which is a lot of restaurants waste money on strategies that stopped working years ago. And so today, what I'm going to do is I'm going to break down every restaurant marketing strategy into a tier list from absolute money wasters to gamechanging solutions. And I'm going to explain it so clearly that even if you've never done marketing before, you're going to know exactly what works and what doesn't. If this is your first time here, I'm Jace. I'm the COO and one of the co-founders at Dimeline, and we specialize in helping restaurants grow using a datadriven marketing solution that actually works. Before we dive in, hit that subscribe button and get weekly videos showing exactly how our clients crush it in 2025. So, I've said this many times before on our channel, but this stuff isn't exactly theory. Everything that I'm going to share with you comes from real data, real restaurants, and real results. Basically, we give you exactly what we're working on with our clients right now and just give you the information for free so you can grow your business. All right, so let's go ahead and dive in here. And so when I break down each of these marketing solutions, it's important for you to understand that everything theoretically makes money, but there are opportunity costs when you spend $5,000 on a billboard versus $5,000 on a Google ad. Both can theoretically return customers. But when I give you this tier list, I'm going to be ranking this from worst to absolutely best in terms of best use of your investment. All right, so first tier is the F tier. This is what I like to call the the money pits. Let's start with the strategies a lot of restaurants are still using, and I'll explain exactly why you should just stop doing this and allocate your money elsewhere. At the 1.0 level, we have flyer distribution. So, I get it. You print out a stack of beautiful menus, flyers, hire some college kids to hand them out, and it feels like you're doing something productive. It's tangible. You can physically see the marketing that's happening, and when business is slow, it feels like you're taking action. But here's just the reality of the situation. We've analyzed over 2500 different restaurants, and Flyer distribution has the worst return on investment of any marketing strategy. Moving up slightly at level 1.5, we have the daily deal sites like Groupon. This is a marketing equivalent of a sugar rush. So, it feels great at first, then crashes hard. And I know why restaurants still do this. You're looking at empty tables during slow periods, and Groupon promises to fill them. They show you fancy projections about exposure to new customers, but here's what they don't tell you. According to our data, less than 2% of Groupon customers ever return at full price. So you're not actually building a customer base. You're training people to only visit when they get a steep discount. All right. So we're moving up from the F tier now and now we're in the D tier. Now you might be thinking, okay, so what about traditional advertising, the more professional, right? Well, let's talk about the D tier strategies. And this is what I call traditional traps. So the first person up in the 2.0 D tier is print advertising. And so this is what I call like country club trap. The local magazine rep that takes you to lunch, shows you the glossy spreads of other restaurants. Makes you feel like you need to be in there. It feels prestigious. It feels professional. But let me tell you what's actually happening here. You're paying a premium price for declining readership. That $2,000 full page ad, it's like buying a billboard in the desert. You can't track who sees it, can't measure if it works, and you also can't change it once it's printed. So, and the worst part is that the people who do see it probably aren't even hungry when they're reading the magazine. At least you wouldn't be able to know. The second group that we're going to put at the 2.0 level is billboard advertising. And this is a perfect example of what I call visibility without accountability. So, look, I get the appeal of billboards. Your restaurant's name up on the lights and the towering over the traffic makes you feel like we've made it. We have a billboard. And sure, thousands of people drive past it every day. But here's the brutal truth. You're paying premium prices for impressions you can't track, targeting you can't refine, and results you can't measure. It's like throwing a bottle into the ocean. Sure, someone might see it, but you have no idea who, when, or if they were even hungry when they did. Right above billboards at at level 2.5, still in the D tier, but slightly better than billboards and print, is going to be boosting random social media posts. So, this is what happens when Facebook's marketing seems easy. You post a beautiful photo of your signature dish and see it get likes and think, "Hey, why don't I put $50 behind it? It help. It's going to help more people see it." But when you're doing this, it's really just like throwing darts blindfolded at a dart board. And so you see without proper targeting, you're showing your steakhouse ads, for example, to vegetarians, your happy hour specials to people who don't drink and lunch specials for people who work from home and never eat out for lunch. You're not there's nothing strategic about boosting a post. You're just getting more people to see it. All right, so we're moved from the F, the D, and now let's go to the C tier. So the C tiers I still think are good strategies that restaurants can use. As we work through these tiers, there's just going to be better strategies that are going to get restaurants a better ROI. So moving up into the C tier, we'll hit at level 3.0 with basic social media marketing. I see this all the time. restaurant owners spending hours crafting the perfect Instagram post, taking photos from 12 different angles, writing clever captions, crossing their fingers for trying to brag to their friends about getting a lot of likes. So, I get why you're doing it. It's free to start. Everyone tells you that you need to be on social media and it feels like modern marketing. Plus, when some comments people say, "Look delicious." It feels like you're making progress. But here's the harsh reality. I've seen this play out hundreds of times. You're trading your most valuable asset, time, for likes that don't pay bills. Let me tell you about a client who came to us last year. He was spending 20 hours every week managing his restaurant social media. That's half of a full-time employees hours. And when we asked him how many customers mentioned finding him through social media, two or three per month. So that's 80 hours of work for maybe $200 in revenue. You're essentially paying yourself $2.50 50 cents an hour to be a social media manager instead of running your restaurant. At level 3.5 in the C tier, we have the influencer marketing gamble. Basic influencer marketing. This is tempting because it feels current and exciting. Influencer marketing is all the rage. An influencer with 50,000 followers offers to post about your restaurant and you start dreaming about all the people that you can reach by partnering with them. So, the fear of missing out kicks in. Your competitors are also doing influencer marketing, so you should too. So, what happened with a client of ours, the Ren, in New York, when they first came to us, they were down 33% in revenue, spending thousands on influencer marketing with nothing to show for it because that's what people said they were supposed to do. They were doing $22,000 a month, throwing money at influencers, hoping they would stick. But here's the thing. after switching to our system. They hit plus 15% growth, pushing $297,000 a month, and they're still growing. So, down 33% to plus 15% in growth in the first 6 months of working with us. So, moving on from the C tier, we're going to head to the B tier. And you might be wondering if social media influencers aren't the answer, well, what is? This is where we enter the B tier territory and things start to get more strategic. At 4.0, You know, we have email marketing feels like safe territory. You're directly reaching out to people who've already visited your restaurant. It's cheap per message, easy to understand, and feels personal. But here's where restaurants get stuck. They collect 5,000 email addresses and then hit a wall. Why does this happen? Because they have no system to grow that list and no automation to nurture those relationships and no way to track if those emails are actually driving visits. you kind of just post the email and just hope people show up. At one tier above email at 4.5, still in the B tier, is SMS marketing, which seems like the perfect solution. After all, 98% of text messages get read within 3 minutes. It's immediate. It's direct. It's measurable. But here's the trap. One of our clients learned this the hard way when they sent too many texts, lost 30% of their subscriber list in a single month. careful with text message because there's a ton of rules and regulations. If you're not doing it correctly, you could get sued and we don't want that. So, graduating from the B tier here, let's go to the A tier. Now, if you're following along, you might notice a pattern. As we move up in tiers, we're getting more sophisticated with data and targeting. So, this brings us to the A tier strategies where artificial intelligence, advanced targeting finally enter the picture, and this is where restaurants are start seeing real measurable growth. All right, so now we're getting to the good stuff. At 5.0, Google Performance Max represents a huge leap forward. It's AI powered, has wide reach, and feels professional. I had a client getting decent results, about 40 new customers per week. So, it sounds pretty good, right? They were missing 40% of potential customers because they didn't have their account set up correctly. So, this in this case, it was like having a Ferrari, but they were only driving it in first gear. So by actually having the AI solution and setting things up correctly made all the difference and we helped them break through that next tier. At level 5.5 in the A tier you have meta or Facebook and Instagram custom audiences takes targeting to another level. You can find people similar to your best customers, retarget previous visitors and track everything. But here's where most restaurants don't realize these platforms are just a piece of the bigger puzzle. We actually had a Vietnamese food hall that was doing about $162,000 a month when they came to us. Everything changed when we connected them to our chain marketing framework and within six months they skyrocketed to $375,000 per month. That's more than double their revenue just by integrating their marketing systems properly. So the chain marketing framework, which is our proprietary way that we do our advertising, is what turns good marketing into great results. It's how we help restaurants create a complete system where every marketing channel works together instead of competing with each other. If you want to learn more about how the chain marketing framework works, I've actually created a detailed video breaking down every component and you can click the link above to watch it if you want to know more about the chain marketing framework in greater detail. Okay, so last but not least, we have the S tier and this is where I'm going to put our software dishio standing alone at the top. So instead of juggling multiple systems hoping they work together, imagine having everything work in perfect harmony together. That's what our software dishio accomplishes and I'll break down more how it works. So let me show you why this isn't just another tool. It's a complete transformation of how your restaurant operates and grows. And so I want you to think about everything that we've talked about so far in this video. All those disconnected marketing strategies, all the wasted time and money. Dishio solves all of that really with what we call smart restaurant technology. And I'm going to actually break it down into four gamechanging components. So, first it's about turning those website clicks into actual guests in your restaurant. You know how most restaurant websites look terrible on phones and are impossible to navigate? Well, Dishio creates what we call a smart site. Think of it like an app experience that actually converts 10 to 20% more visitors into paying customers. So, one of our clients, Talking Tacos, saw their online conversion jump from 2% to 15% in the first month alone just by having this in place. Second, Dishio transforms your guests into valuable data. Instead of guessing who your customers are, what they want, you're going to know exactly who's visiting, what they're ordering, and when they're likely to return. But here's where things get really powerful. You can use this data to automatically reconnect with guests across any platform for upcoming events, specials, or promotions. We actually just had a steakhouse increase their repeat business by 40% just by using this feature. And third, this is where it gets exciting for your bottom line. Dishio increases your average guest lifetime value through smart upselling. Imagine if every time someone looked at a steak, they were automatically suggested the perfect wine pairing when they viewed a burger. And then they were also shown your most profitable sides. We're seeing restaurants increase their average ticket by 25% using these smart suggestions. But here's where Dishio really sets apart the insights. You're going to completely get visibility into everything including guest behavior, ordering patterns, website interactions, even which menu items people are looking at and don't order. One of our clients used this insight to revamp their menu and saw a 30% revenue increase in just 90 days. And so what about your staff? This isn't just going to be another system that they have to learn. Dishio helps them turn tables faster, earn bigger tips, and when guests can browse the menu on their phone before the server even arrives. With automatic suggested pairings and specials, your staff's going to spend less time playing the menu and more time providing great service. So, I want to share a quick story to follow up on that point about Chef Adrian's restaurant. She actually told us, "Aside from all the data benefits that help me understand where my customers are coming from and keeping them coming back, Dishio is the bridge between the guest and the server experience, helping our guests get what they really want." And they saw average ticket size increase by 35% while actually reducing the time servers spent at the table, which is pretty crazy. And so the best part about all this is it's going to run 24/7 for you whether you're in the kitchen, at home, or on vacation. It's like having a full marketing team, data analyst, and customer service department all working around the clock for your restaurant. And unlike those lower tier strategies we talked about, every aspect of Dishio is measurable. You'll see exactly how many new guests it brings in, how it increases your average check size, and how it grows your repeat business, all in real time. All right, guys. So, if you found this tier list helpful in understanding what actually works for restaurant marketing, hit that like button and subscribe to more videos just like this one. Whether you're a restaurant owner who's just looking for marketing tips to implement yourself, or you're ready to talk about our done for you service that handles everything we discussed today, we got you covered. We drop new videos every week breaking down real strategies that are working right now for restaurants all across the country. And hey, I even put together a free marketing course that dives into everything that we talked about today, and you'll find the link in the description below. That restaurant marketing course, by the way, is amazing if you want to binge everything that's working for our business right now in 2025. Anyways, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next