Digital marketing for restaurants & hospitality
Tonight's tables are being decided on Google Maps right now: photos, rating, opening hours, menu. I help restaurants, cafes and takeaways win that moment, fill quiet services and take back margin from the delivery and booking platforms.
What Restaurants & Hospitality are up against
The hurdles I hear most often, and what I do about each one.
Quiet Tuesdays, chaos Saturdays
Demand lands unevenly and nothing in your marketing evens it out.
Delivery apps eating the margin
The platforms bring orders and take a slice that turns busy nights into break-even nights.
Photos doing you a disservice
Dim, outdated or customer-shot photos on Google while the food deserves better.
Rating stuck under the bar
A handful of old complaints holds the score below the level diners filter by.
Bookings lost to friction
No easy way to book or order directly, so third parties own your customer relationship.
Invisible beyond the postcode
Great reviews from regulars, but visitors and new locals never discover you exist.
What I do for Restaurants & Hospitality
Hospitality marketing lives and dies on the basics done daily: search presence, photos, reviews and a booking path with no friction.
Marketing Restaurants & Hospitality: what actually works
Restaurant marketing gets romanticised, but the nightly reality is simple: people nearby look at a map, compare a handful of places for thirty seconds and pick one. Win that comparison consistently and the rest of this page is refinement.
Your Google profile is your real front door
"Restaurants near me", "[cuisine] [town]", "open now": these searches decide more covers than any campaign. The profile that wins is complete and alive: accurate hours including holidays, a current menu, prices, attributes people filter by, and photos that make someone hungry. Upload your own photography regularly, because left alone, your profile becomes a gallery of customers' worst-lit efforts. Posting weekly specials and events through the profile keeps it active, and active profiles get shown.
Ratings move on volume, not perfection
A 4.1 with two hundred recent reviews beats a 4.6 with twelve old ones. The fix for a stuck rating is rarely arguing with past complaints; it is volume of fresh, genuine reviews from the guests who enjoyed themselves tonight. Make the ask natural at the moment of payment, or with the bill, or via a QR on the receipt. Reply to everything, especially the bad nights, with grace: future diners judge the reply more than the complaint.
Take back the direct relationship
Delivery apps and booking platforms are useful demand, on rented terms. The margin maths only improves when regulars can book and order directly: a fast website with the menu as text rather than a PDF scan, direct booking one tap from your Google profile, and direct-order incentives the platforms cannot match. I built QRMenu.Global, a menu platform used by restaurants, so this side of hospitality is not theory to me; I know where the friction hides and how to remove it.
Fill the quiet services deliberately
Marketing that fills Saturday is wasted; Saturday fills itself. The wins are Tuesday and the 5:30 sitting, and they respond to deliberate offers: early-week set menus, local group lunches, event nights, community tie-ins, each promoted to the postcode through your profile, your social channels and a modest boost budget. Social content, done honestly, travels here more than in any other sector: dishes, people and the room, shot on a decent phone in good light, posted consistently.
Give visitors a reason to find you
Beyond the regulars, there is a steady stream of people new to the area searching "best [cuisine] in [town]" and reading whatever answers. A handful of genuinely useful pages, your story, your signature dishes, private dining and group menus, plus presence in local guides and press where you belong, catches this demand year-round. It is slow-burn work that compounds, exactly the kind that never feels urgent on a busy service and pays for itself all year.
A sensible first 90 days
- Overhaul the Google profile: hours, menu, attributes and a proper photo set.
- Start the nightly review habit at the point of payment.
- Fix the direct path: text menu, one-tap booking or ordering from the profile.
- Launch one deliberate quiet-service offer and promote it locally.
- Review covers, direct orders and rating movement together at day 90.
Restaurants & Hospitality: common questions
Other sectors I work with
Ready for busier services?
Tell me where you are now and where you want to be. I'll prepare a clear, tailored plan, in plain English and with no obligation.