🎉 Marketing Your Restaurant as an Event Space: Case Study

Most restaurant owners focus their marketing on daily dining, takeout, and reservations—but what about your event space? If you have room for birthday parties, private dinners, or celebrations, you’re sitting on untapped revenue. Just ask The Garden Restaurant in Elizabeth, NJ.

Over the past 90 days from March 1st to May 31st, 2025, we’ve executed a highly targeted event space advertising campaign focused on birthday event packages and birthday celebration registrations. The results:

• 📞 537 phone calls
• 🖱️ 10,446 ad clicks
• 👀 2,428 landing page views from Facebook and Instagram Ads
• 📝 119 web form submissions from people ready to book an event

All of this was achieved with a modest spend of $3,134.57—and it’s generated a steady flow of high-value leads.

What Made This Event Venue Campaign Successful

The Garden is primarily a restaurant with beautiful decor and a lively lounge atmosphere, not a traditional event venue. Our team developed a strategic event venue marketing strategy, which included advertising on Google and Facebook Meta to target specific audiences, particularly those looking to celebrate birthdays.

Social Media Ads

Advertising on Facebook and Instagram enabled us to target potential clients most likely to celebrate a birthday within the next 30 days. The exact audience included individuals with a birthday within 30 days, friends of those with a birthday in the next 30 days, and retargeting data captured by the Facebook Pixel.

These audiences worked great and allowed us to consistently show the ads to new potential clients every week.

High-quality images and Video of Past Events

The team at The Garden provided us with high-quality, high-energy video content from previous birthdays celebrated at their venue. The reel-style content featured multiple groups of people celebrating with event performers, accompanied by sparklers and smoke machines in the background. This allowed social media users to see exactly what a birthday party and previous events at The Garden look like.

Local Google Ads

A vital aspect of any venue marketing strategy is SEO. We achieved great success with an SEO campaign for VistaMar City Island in NYC, but SEO is a long-term winning strategy. We needed immediate results, so we focused on Local Google Ads.

We drove traffic primarily to the Google Business Profile from people searching for local venues by entering terms like ‘event venue’ or ‘bottle service birthday party’ near their location. From there, we were able to track other essential campaign results, including phone calls, Direction Requests, Website Visits, and profile shares.

A Dedicated Landing Page for Birthdays

All visitors from ads on all platforms were directed to a dedicated event packages landing page on the venue’s website, which showcased birthday and event packages with bottle pricing in a simple, visual format. This clear presentation, with a short yet detailed lead form, drove conversions.

From this page, an email is sent to the venue’s marketing manager and internal event planners. They can then reply via email or call the client for an immediate follow-up.

If your restaurant has an event space, it’s time to treat it like a separate revenue stream. A dedicated landing page, optimized ads, and strategic targeting can make it a growth engine for local businesses.

📲 Let’s talk about how to turn your event space into a lead-generating machine with search engine optimization.