By Jo van Vuuren — Fractional CMO
Most restaurant marketing advice is a list of tactics: post more, run an offer, try TikTok. A strategy is different. It starts with what the booking diary says is wrong, fixes the things that stop guests finding and booking you, and then puts effort where the diary says it will pay. Tactics fill a quiet Tuesday. Strategy stops the Tuesdays being quiet.
Where should a restaurant marketing strategy start?
In the diary, because it already holds the answers. When I audited The Galley in Topsham, the reviews said nothing was wrong (4.75 stars on average, 94% of reviews at four stars or above). The diary said otherwise: bookings down 11% year on year, with four months responsible for 73% of the decline. Guests were also deciding later (half of all bookings arrived within a week of the visit, 14% on the day).
That reading is the strategy. It tells you which months need a push, which service is underperforming, and whether the problem is awareness, conversion or something operational. Skip it, and the spend runs on instinct.
Fix being found and booked before promoting anything
Promotion pours water into a leaky bucket while guests can’t find you or can’t book you. Three fixes come first, and none is glamorous: claim and complete the Google Business Profile; connect Reserve with Google, so guests book straight from Search and Maps without commission; and publish the menu as text a search engine can read, with the website doing one job (the booking).
The Galley’s numbers after those fixes: 51 bookings from Reserve with Google in its first full August (16% of the month), through a channel that hadn’t existed a year earlier. Menu reads went from 51 in six weeks to 2,529, because the old menu was a JPG that search engines couldn’t see. And 5.6% of website visits now end in a confirmed booking, against the 2–3% considered healthy for hospitality direct-booking sites.
How do you plan a seasonal marketing calendar?
Build each page before the searching starts, post while it peaks, and measure the bookings. Search demand is predictable to the month: party-venue searching peaks in September, festive lunch searching in October, festive dinner in November (in one Devon town, Google’s keyword data shows 720 monthly searches for Christmas lunch at the October peak). A Christmas page published mid-September has time to rank before that curve. One published in November has missed most of it.
The proof this works on a weak month: a focused festive push took The Galley’s December from 127 bookings to 190 (up 50% in the restaurant’s quietest month). The same rhythm carries the year. Vouchers go on from the first of November because that is when they sell; Valentine’s gets decided early; Mother’s Day is planned, never reacted to.
How do you know whether the strategy is working?
Count bookings, and make every booking name its source. A modern diary records which door each booking came through (the website, Reserve with Google, phone, a third-party platform) and that turns marketing from a matter of opinion into a column of numbers. Four in five of The Galley’s August bookings arrived online, and every one is attributed. The month-end page worth keeping is short:
- Bookings against the same month last year: the only compliment that counts
- Lunch and dinner split, so one service can’t hide behind the other
- Bookings by source, so every channel earns its place
- What’s already booked ahead: next month’s early warning
For paid channels, the measure is cost per booking. Connect the till, the diary and the analytics before spending a pound, or the answer stays a guess.
What about social media and email?
They’re the supporting cast, and they work harder once the foundations are in. A Thursday-evening post reaches people while the weekend plan is being made. The email list grows itself once the booking form asks: a restaurant taking 300 bookings a month has 300 chances a month to build a list it owns. Both amplify a strategy; neither is one.
This sequence (the diary, the found-and-booked fixes, the seasonal calendar) is the engagement I run for independents. The shape of it is on the restaurant marketing page, and the restaurant behind the numbers is written up in The Galley case study.
Common questions
What is the most effective marketing for a restaurant?
Being findable and bookable at the moment a guest decides. Claim the Google Business Profile, switch on commission-free booking through Reserve with Google, and publish a menu search engines can read. At The Galley in Topsham, those fixes preceded August bookings growing 21% year on year, in what had been the restaurant’s weakest month.
How long does restaurant marketing take to work?
Booking channels move in weeks: Reserve with Google produced 51 bookings in its first full month at The Galley. Search rankings can move within a couple of months of fixing a site, and compound from there. Reputation-led work, like seasonal content and local links, builds over a year of consistency.
Does a restaurant need a marketing plan or a marketing strategy?
Both, in that order of importance. The strategy decides where effort goes (which months, which service, which channels) based on what the diary shows. The plan is the calendar that delivers it: which page gets built in September, which push runs in November, and what gets measured at each month’s end.
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