Sectors // Independent restaurants
Restaurant marketing, measured in bookings
The food is rarely the problem. Being found and booked is.
Marketing for independent restaurants and hospitality businesses, pointed at the one number that matters: covers in the diary. Six weeks after I relaunched The Galley in Topsham, the year's worst month had become its first to grow, and every booking now names the channel that produced it.
Sound familiar //
- 01
Reviews are excellent, yet bookings are down on last year
- 02
You can't say where any given booking came from
- 03
Commission platforms take a cut of tables you'd have filled anyway
- 04
The website is a brochure guests read before phoning, or not
- 05
Quiet months get a discount and a boosted post, not a plan
- 06
Christmas, Valentine's and Mother's Day arrive as a surprise every year
What’s usually going on //
A restaurant's diary already knows why it's quiet. It knows guests decide later than they used to, which channels fill tables and which just take commission, and which months are carrying the year. Most restaurant marketing never looks: it’s bought on instinct and judged on likes. Read the diary first, and the marketing stops being a gamble.
The work //
01Start with the diary.
A state-of-the-restaurant snapshot: a year of bookings, cancellations, reviews, channels and website data read together. It names the months driving the decline, what guests are doing differently, and the shortest route back to growth, as a prioritised plan.
02Fix being found and booked.
The Google Business Profile and Reserve with Google, so guests book straight from Search and Maps without commission. A website that works as a booking engine rather than a brochure, menus search engines can read, and the restaurant SEO and AEO that put you in front of diners, including the ones asking AI where to eat.
03Then run the seasonal calendar.
Christmas pages built in September, when the searching starts. Vouchers pushed when they sell. Every push measured in a one-page monthly report: bookings against last year, where they came from, and what's already booked ahead.
Six weeks after The Galley's relaunch: August bookings up 21% year on year, turning the audit's worst month into the first to grow since December. 51 commission-free bookings arrived straight from Google Search and Maps, same-day cancellations fell from 37 to one, and the restaurant now sits at #1 on Google for “restaurants Topsham”. The previous December, a focused festive push grew the quietest month of the year by 50%.
Where I’ve done it //
Education Student recruitment is a marketing problem with a very short window.
Green Tech & Clean Energy Novel technology that the market hasn’t got language for yet.
Tech & SaaS Technically complex products, buyers who don’t speak the language.
Charity & Purpose-led Small budgets, real constraints, and no room for waste.
SMEs & small businesses Big-brand marketing thinking, at your size of business.
Startups Most startups have a product. Fewer have a proposition.
Raising a round Investors buy the story and the plan. Not the product.
Straight answers //
How do I get more bookings for my restaurant?
Fix being found and booked before spending on promotion. Claim the Google Business Profile, connect Reserve with Google so guests book from Search and Maps without commission, make the menu readable by search engines, and give the website one job: the booking. At The Galley, that work took August bookings up 21% year on year.
Is Reserve with Google worth setting up?
For most independent restaurants it is the highest-impact single fix available. Guests book straight from Google Search and Maps without touching a third-party site, and nobody takes commission. In one August at The Galley it produced 51 bookings (16% of the month) through a channel that hadn’t existed a year earlier.
Do I need a restaurant marketing agency or a consultant?
They sell different things. A restaurant marketing agency usually executes a channel: social content, adverts, restaurant website design. A restaurant consultant owns the question above the channels: what fills tables at your margins, in your location, at your price point, and then briefs whoever executes. If bookings are down and nobody can say why, the strategy layer comes first.
How much should a restaurant spend on marketing?
Judge spend by cost per booking, not by a percentage of turnover. Connect the till, the booking diary and the analytics first, so every pound of promotion shows the bookings it produced. On local paid search, £250 a month can reach around 20 bookings once the searches and adverts that convert are proven, but the measurement comes first, or the answer is a guess.
Do AI tools like ChatGPT actually send diners?
In small but growing numbers, and they book at a higher rate than any other channel. At The Galley, visitors sent by ChatGPT went on to book 8.8% of the time, the best conversion rate on the site. AI tools recommend restaurants they can read about, so reviews, local guides, press and accurate listings now count twice.
Where would you start with my restaurant?
With the diary and the analytics, because between them they already hold the answer: which months are hurting, where bookings come from, and what guests do on the website. That snapshot ends in a prioritised plan your own team can act on. It starts with a conversation.
Worth reading //
Restaurant marketing strategies that fill tables A working strategy for an independent restaurant starts in the booking diary, fixes being found and booked, then builds each season before the searching starts.
Restaurant marketing ideas, ranked by payoff Ten ideas an independent restaurant can run without an agency: ordered by what they return, with numbers from a restaurant that ran them.
Restaurant branding: what it is and when it pays Restaurant branding is the position you hold against the place down the road, carried through everything a guest reads before they taste anything.
8.8%: what ChatGPT referrals did for a restaurant Thirty-four visitors, three bookings, and the best conversion rate of any channel on the site. One number from a Devon restaurant’s analytics, unpacked.
Local SEO: getting found by nearby customers Local SEO means making sure nearby customers find you first, through your Google listing, reviews, and consistent details across the web.
How to get your business cited by ChatGPT and AI answers Getting cited by AI answer engines comes down to a handful of practical habits (answering directly, structuring for extraction, being easy to trust) a business can start on this week.
Next //
Running a restaurant?
Start with a conversation.
Tell me where you are and what you’re trying to do, and we’ll work out together whether I’m the right person to help. No commitment, no pressure.
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