Marketing a restaurant when the budget is small and the margins are smaller

Restaurant marketing advice usually assumes a brand budget. This assumes forty pounds a week and a kitchen that is already busy.

Most restaurant marketing advice is written for restaurants that do not need it. It assumes a photographer, a brand budget and someone whose whole job is the account.

This is for the other kind. Small team, thin margins, a kitchen that is already busy at seven and empty at five.

Fix the listing before you touch anything else

More people decide whether to eat at you from a search result than from anything you will ever post. That result is your opening hours, your photographs, your rating, and whether the phone number works.

Three things, in this order:

1. Hours that are actually right, including the bank holidays and the day you close early. Nothing costs more goodwill than a locked door at an advertised time.
2. Ten photographs you chose. If you do not upload any, the listing fills with whatever customers took, which will be dark, at an angle, and mostly of the car park.
3. A menu that is text, not a PDF of a JPEG. A menu nobody can search is a menu nobody finds. It is also unreadable on a phone, which is where it is being read.

None of this is marketing exactly. It is the part that decides whether marketing has anywhere to land.

Reviews are a conversation, not a scoreboard

Two things matter and neither is the number.

Recency. A four-point-three with reviews from this month beats a four-point-seven that stopped in 2023. People read the dates.

Whether you reply. Not to defend yourself. A reply is not written for the person complaining, it is written for the two hundred people who will read the complaint later and want to know what kind of place this is.

The formula that works is short: thank them, name the specific thing, say what changed. Skip any of the three and it reads as a template, which is worse than saying nothing.

A defensive reply to a bad review does more damage than the review. The review is one person's evening. The reply is your character, in public, permanently.

Pick the empty hour, not the whole week

"More customers" is not a target. Restaurants are not uniformly empty. There is a specific shift losing money, and it is usually the same one every week.

Find it, then aim at it. A Tuesday offer is a business decision. A general discount is a margin cut you gave to people who were coming anyway.

The thing to avoid: a discount deep enough to move someone who would have paid full price. You did not win a customer, you sold the same cover for less.

What to post, if you post

You are not competing with other restaurants for attention. You are competing with everything else on the phone. That is not a fight you win on frequency.

What works: the thing that is only true today. A special, a delivery that came in, something going in the oven. It is timely, it is real, and it takes ninety seconds.

What does not: the quote graphic, the "Happy Friday", the stock photograph of a plate that is not your plate. It fills a calendar. It moves nothing.

If posting five times a week means five posts that could have come from any restaurant, post twice with things only yours could have said.

Email is unfashionable and still works

Anyone who has eaten with you and left an address is worth more than a hundred strangers who followed you. They have already decided you are good.

One message a month is plenty. Something that is genuinely news: a menu change, a closure, a night worth booking for. The moment it becomes a discount every time, it becomes a coupon list, and people only open it when they want a discount.

How to know whether any of this worked

The honest measure is boring: covers on the shift you were aiming at, this month against last, with a note of anything unusual like weather or a local event.

Not followers. Not reach. Not impressions.

A restaurant that is full on a Tuesday and has two hundred followers is winning. The reverse is a hobby.