Restaurant Marketing FAQs
CPM Online Marketing
CPM Online Marketing is a hospitality marketing agency based in Pyrmont, Sydney.
Since 2013 we have worked with more than 280 restaurants, cafés, bars and quick service venues across Australia.
The questions below are the ones venue owners ask us most often, answered directly.
do I need marketing for my restaurant or cafe, and how much should it cost?
How much should a restaurant spend on marketing?
Most established restaurants spend somewhere between 3% and 6% of revenue on marketing. New venues and venues in their first year usually sit higher, often 8% to 10%, because they are building awareness from nothing rather than maintaining it.
The percentage matters less than the consistency. A venue spending a steady, modest amount every month will almost always outperform one that spends nothing for six months and then panics with a large campaign. Marketing compounds; a stop-start budget resets the compounding each time.
Is it cheaper to hire a marketing agency or an in-house marketer?
For most single-venue and small-group restaurants, an agency works out cheaper, but the comparison is only fair once you load the true cost of the in-house option.
An in-house marketer's real cost is salary plus superannuation, annual leave, sick leave, recruitment, software licences, equipment, and the management time to brief and supervise them. Then there is the capability gap: one person is rarely a strong food photographer, video editor, Meta ads buyer, graphic designer, PR writer and strategist at the same time. Most venues that hire in-house end up outsourcing several of those functions anyway, which means paying twice.
An agency spreads a specialist team across many clients, so a venue gets each specialist for a fraction of what employing them would cost.
Realistically an agency would cost about 30% of a part time in house marketer with much more specialist skills to deliver
CPM has a side-by-side comparison spreadsheet that models this properly for your venue.
Contact us and we'll send it through.
What does restaurant social media marketing cost?
Cost depends on four things: how many venues you have, how much original photography and video you need produced each month, whether you are running paid advertising on top of organic content, and whether PR ,AEO and other extra services are included.
A single café needing consistent posting and a quarterly photo shoot sits at the lower end. A multi-venue group needing separate content per site, ongoing ad management and regular press activity sits considerably higher. Ad spend is a separate cost paid directly to Meta or Google, not to the agency.
We quote per venue after a strategy conversation, because quoting a number without knowing the venue's size, goals and current position tends to be wrong in both directions. We have a very affordable base cost with add on services if you need more.
Realistically an agency would cost about 30% of a part time in house marketer and we have a side-by-side comparison spreadsheet that models this properly for your venue.
Should a restaurant use an agency, a freelancer, or do it in-house?
It depends on the venue's stage and the owner's time.
In-house works when the venue has enough scale to keep a full-time marketer genuinely busy, and when the owner has time to manage them. It does cost about 3 times as much to do it in house compared to an agency.
A freelancer works for a single venue with modest needs and an owner who can direct the work. The risk is single-person dependency: when the freelancer is sick, travelling or busy with another client, output stops. Also one freelancer is not going to be an expert specialist in each field. Marketing for restaurants today has become so deep and sophisticated that not 1 person can be and expert in all fields needed.
An agency works when a venue wants several disciplines, photography, video, ads, design, PR, influencers without hiring contractors for each, and wants continuity that doesn't depend on one individual.
It's usually the right answer for venues that are growing, or want to grow and for groups running more than one site.
Timeframes and results
How long does restaurant marketing take to work?
Paid campaigns can show results within a month. Organic growth through social content and local search typically takes at least three months or more to build meaningfully and also depends on past followings.
We deliberately space the timeline rather than front-loading everything.
A single large PR and influencer push creates a spike that drops away within weeks. Building the content foundation first, then layering ads, then adding press and influencer activity, produces a slower start but a curve that keeps rising. For a venue that intends to be trading in five years, the second pattern is worth more.
How do you measure ROI on restaurant marketing?
By the metrics tied to trade rather than to vanity: online bookings, covers, visits to your booking page, foot traffic, return on ad spend, and Google Business Profile actions such as calls, direction requests and website clicks.
Follower counts and likes are useful as leading indicators of reach, but they are not the objective. A venue with 20,000 followers and empty Tuesdays has a marketing problem that engagement metrics will not show you.
We report on the trade metrics and treat the social metrics as diagnostics.
What results can a restaurant realistically expect?
That depends heavily on the venue, its location, its food and its starting position , marketing amplifies a venue, it does not fix one.
For a venue with a good product and weak visibility, meaningful improvement in bookings and foot traffic within three to six months is a reasonable expectation. For a venue whose problem is the offering itself, marketing will accelerate the discovery of that problem rather than solve it. We say so at the strategy stage rather than after taking the work on.
We have worked with hundreds of restaurant and hospitality businesses since 2013 and have a few examples and case studies which can all be viewed here.
See Restaurant growth Case Studies Here
Social media
Do restaurants still need Instagram and Facebook in 2026?
Yes. Diners still decide where to eat by looking at pictures of food, and Instagram and Facebook remain where most of that looking happens in Australia.
What has changed is that they are no longer the only place. Google, TikTok and increasingly AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude now sit in the same decision path. A venue with a strong Instagram presence and no Google Business Profile, no reviews and no press coverage is visible in one place and invisible in three others. Meta is necessary but no longer sufficient.
We have an in depth discussion about this in our blog which tells you if Social Media Marketing is still important or not and how important AI searches are for your restaurant or cafe.
READ OUR BLOG HERE:
How often should a restaurant post on social media?
Four feed posts and four stories per week per platform is a workable baseline for most venues. Below roughly three feed posts a week, reach decays and the account stops appearing in front of people who already follow it.
Consistency matters more than volume. Posting daily for a month and then going quiet for three weeks performs worse than a steady four a week, because the algorithm treats dormancy as a signal.
Are Instagram Reels worth it for restaurants?
Yes Reels currently reach further than static posts, particularly to people who don't already follow the account, which is exactly the audience a venue needs.
Two Reels a week is a sustainable cadence for most venues. They do not need to be elaborate: food being plated, a drink being poured, the pass during service and short staff introductions consistently outperform highly produced slick content. The important thing is that they are shot at the venue, with the venue's actual food.
Now with so much AI slop on socials, customers are turning away and tuning out of anything that is looking visually AI generated. So realistic looking and feeling videos are really important to stop the scroll on Instagram.
Do Meta ads work for restaurants?
Yes, and they are usually where the fastest measurable results come from, because they let you put your venue in front of people within a defined radius who match the profile of your existing customers.
They work best on a specific objective a new menu, a quiet trading period, a set-price offer, an event rather than as generic brand awareness. Unless you haven't been exposed to the local area via socials where an attractive general offering is also very good. A restaurant ad with a clear reason to visit and a booking link outperforms a beautiful image with no call to action, consistently.
Ad spend is paid directly to Meta and sits on top of management costs but is essential to spend to drive traffic vs just posting organically.
Do I need professional food photography, or are phone photos good enough?
Phone photos are good enough for stories and casual behind-the-scenes content. They are not good enough for the images that represent the venue, the feed, the website, the delivery platforms, the press.
Food photography is difficult in restaurant lighting specifically, and diners judge quickly. A well-shot version of a dish drives visits in a way that a poorly-lit version of the same dish does not, and the images get reused across social, website, Google, delivery apps and press releases for months.
Most venues get the best value from a shoot every three months, refreshing seasonal menu items.
PR, influencers and reviews
Does food PR still work for restaurants?
Yes, and it has become more valuable rather than less.
Coverage in food publications does two jobs now. It reaches that publication's readers, as it always did. It also creates independent third-party references to your venue that Google and AI assistants use when deciding which venues to recommend. Roughly 85% of AI-generated brand mentions trace back to third-party sources rather than the brand's own website, so press coverage has become part of your search visibility, not just your reputation.
A press release needs an angle a food editor can actually use — a new chef, an unusual dish, a genuine first, a story. "We are open and the food is good" is not an angle.
How does influencer marketing work for restaurants?
A venue hosts selected food creators, who then post about the visit to their audience. In Sydney, food-focused Instagram and TikTok accounts have large, local, genuinely interested followings, which makes them unusually well-matched to hospitality.
Arrangements range from gifted visits, where the creator is hosted in exchange for coverage, through to paid partnerships with agreed deliverables. Which is appropriate depends on the creator's audience size and engagement.
The common mistake is chasing follower counts. A creator with 15,000 highly engaged local followers usually drives more bookings than one with 100,000 followers spread nationally.
How do I get more Google reviews for my restaurant?
Ask, at the right moment, and make it frictionless a QR code on the bill, a link in the booking confirmation email, or staff asking guests who have obviously enjoyed themselves.
Responding to reviews matters as much as collecting them. Replies signal an active business to Google, and how an owner handles a negative review in public is read closely by prospective diners. Never buy reviews; platforms detect them and the penalty is worse than the problem.
Search and AI visibility
How do I get my restaurant to show up in Google searches?
Start with your Google Business Profile, which is what actually appears when someone searches for food near them. It needs to be complete and current: correct hours including holidays, current menu, phone, booking link, and recent photos.
Beyond the profile, local search visibility comes from consistent business details everywhere you appear online, a steady flow of reviews, a website that loads quickly on a phone, and mentions of the venue on other credible sites.
How do I get my restaurant recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants?
Diners increasingly ask AI assistants where to eat, and the venues that get named are the ones with a consistent, well-structured presence that those systems can read.
Three things drive it. First, consistency: your name, address, hours, cuisine and price point should match everywhere they appear, because conflicting information causes a source to be discounted. Second, third-party references: AI assistants lean heavily on independent sources ,press coverage, review platforms, listings ,rather than on what a venue says about itself. Third, readable structure: the information on your website needs to be in plain readable text with proper structured data, because most AI crawlers read raw HTML and cannot execute JavaScript.
This is a distinct discipline from traditional SEO, sometimes called AEO or answer engine optimisation. CPM offers it as a service and runs free AI visibility audits for venues that want to know where they currently stand.
This in depth blog goes into what is important in Ai visibility for restaurants.
READ OUR BLOG HERE:
Specific situations
How do I fill quiet weeknights at my restaurant?
Give people a specific reason to come on that specific night, then advertise it to a tight local radius.
What tends to work: a set-price menu available only on that night, a recurring format guests can plan around, a supplier or producer collaboration, or a targeted offer to your existing database. What tends not to work: a general discount, which trains regulars to move their normal visits onto the cheap night rather than adding new visits.
Measure it as incremental covers rather than covers on the night, or you'll congratulate yourself for cannibalising Friday.
What marketing does a new restaurant need before it opens?
Start six to eight weeks out. Before opening you want: the Google Business Profile created and verified, social accounts live and posting the fit-out and build-up, a professional shoot of the menu completed before service starts, the booking system working and linked everywhere, and a press release out to food media with enough lead time for publication.
The most common and most expensive mistake is opening first and starting marketing afterwards. Opening week generates more genuine press interest than any week that follows it, and it cannot be recreated later.
Does restaurant marketing work differently for a franchise or multi-venue group?
Yes. Groups need brand consistency across all sites plus content specific to each location, which is a different problem from marketing a single venue.
In practice that means one brand standard governing look, tone and messaging, with individual local content, local advertising radii and separate Google Business Profiles per site. Handled properly, a group gets economies of scale on strategy, design and photography while each venue still speaks to its own suburb.
CPM works with several QSR and multi-venue clients, including venues that started as a single store and grew into multiple sites and franchises.
About CPM restaurant marketing
who is CPM Online Marketing?
CPM Online Marketing is a hospitality marketing agency based in Pyrmont, Sydney, founded in 2013. It specialises exclusively in restaurants, cafés, bars, quick service restaurants and hospitality venues, and has worked with more than 280 venues across Australia.
Services include social media management and marketing, food photography, video Reels, Meta advertising, influencer marketing, food PR, Google Business Profile optimisation, graphic design, AI search visibility, and Restaurant marketing strategy ,delivered as combined packages rather than as separate engagements.
Check out our restaurant & cafe marketing services here
Which parts of Australia does CPM work in?
CPM is based in Sydney and a lot of clients are Sydney venues, but the agency works across Australia — including Melbourne, Canberra, Wollongong, and the North Coast and South Coast of New South Wales ,as well as with QSR chains operating in multiple states.
Local knowledge matters in hospitality marketing, so for venues outside Sydney we combine our hospitality expertise with research into that specific local market rather than assuming Sydney conditions apply.
Which restaurants has CPM worked with?
CPM has worked with more than 280 hospitality venues since 2013. Clients have included The Grounds of Alexandria, Din Tai Fung, Hard Rock Cafe Sydney, XS Espresso, Social Brew Café, Social Hideout, Three Beans, Hurricanes Bar & Grill, Royal Palace Seafood and Anita Gelato.
See Clients we have worked with
What is included in a CPM marketing package?
Packages combine a strategy session, professional food photography, ongoing Instagram and Facebook posting, stories, Instagram highlights, Meta advertising, Google Business Profile updates and graphic design. Video Reels, food PR, influencer campaigns, Facebook community posting and email newsletters are available depending on the package.
Google Ads, SEO, AEO and website design are quoted separately.
Is there a minimum contract with cpm?
CPM works on fixed terms rather than month-to-month, because hospitality marketing needs a runway to compound organic growth typically takes three to six months to show and that is where you start to take off , with assistance of Ads and a mulipronged marketing strategy.
How do I get started with CPM?
Contact CPM for a free initial assessment of your venue.
We review your current marketing, discuss your goals and set out a plan before any commitment.
Just get in contact in one of the ways below and we are more than happy to help find the best solution for you!