How much should a restaurant spend on marketing?

“How much should I spend on marketing” is one of the most common questions we get from independent owners, and most get an unhelpful answer: a vague industry average with no connection to their actual revenue, stage or goals. Here is a practical way to work out your number, split it across channels, and avoid the mistakes that waste it.

Why "just spend on marketing" fails

Ask ten venue owners what they spend on marketing and most will not have a real number. It is a boosted post here, a sponsorship there, a photographer once a year, added up after the fact rather than planned before it. That approach almost always underspends on the channels that would actually fill tables, and overspends on the ones that feel like marketing without doing the job.

A budget fixes that. It is not about spending more, it is about deciding, in advance, how much you can afford to put behind getting customers, and then making sure every dollar of it has a specific job: more covers on a Tuesday, more direct bookings, a bigger email list, better rankings in the map pack. Once you have a number and a plan for it, you can tell within a quarter whether it worked.

The benchmark: what percentage of revenue

The simplest way to set a marketing budget is as a percentage of revenue, because it automatically scales with your business and forces the number to stay honest. For an established independent restaurant or cafe with a base of regulars, 3% to 6% of revenue is a reasonable working range for most venues.

• Toward the lower end (3% to 4%) if you already have strong repeat business, good reviews and steady bookings, and marketing is mostly about staying visible.
• Toward the higher end (5% to 6%) if you have real spare capacity you want filled, a quieter night or two to fix, or a second site to build awareness for.

Treat these as a sensible starting range you adjust from, not a rule. A venue with almost no spare capacity does not need to spend more to fill seats it does not have; the budget there is better spent on average spend per head and repeat visits than on new customer volume.

New venue or established: different numbers

Stage matters more than most benchmarks admit.

• New openings start with zero reviews, zero email list and zero local recognition, so the first six months usually need a heavier push, often 8% to 12% of projected revenue, to build the Google Business Profile, the review base, the email list and the local awareness that a five-year-old venue already has for free.
• Established venues are mostly maintaining and compounding what already exists, so they can run leaner, in the 3% to 6% range above, with occasional short bursts above it around a launch, a renovation, or a genuinely slow season.

If you are opening soon, budget like a new venue for the first two quarters, then re-set the number once you have real covers data to work from.

A worked example in dollars

Take an established cafe doing $50,000 a month in revenue, sitting mid-range at 4%. That is a $2,000 monthly marketing budget. A sensible split for a venue at that size might look like:

• $400 on paid social (Meta ads), run as a focused test on your best-performing offer, not spread thin across everything.
• $300 on email and SMS tools and the time to run them consistently, usually the highest return per dollar you have.
• $400 on content: a monthly photo or video session so you always have fresh, appetising material for social and Google.
• $300 on local SEO and Google Business Profile management, posts, photos, review replies, so you keep winning the map pack.
• $300 toward a loyalty or repeat-visit offer, because a returning customer costs far less to keep than a new one costs to find.
• $300 held back as a flexible pool for whatever is working best that month.

Recalculate this every quarter against your actual revenue, and shift the split toward whichever channel is genuinely producing bookings, not whichever one is easiest to spend on.

Where the budget should actually go

Not all channels return the same per dollar. In rough order of return for most independent venues:

• Local SEO and Google Business Profile cost mostly time, not money, and drive people who are already searching to eat nearby. See our Google Business Profile guide for the setup that ranks you.
• Email and SMS are cheap to run and go to people who have already chosen you once. See restaurant email and SMS marketing.
• Loyalty and repeat offers are almost always cheaper than new customer acquisition and improve average spend at the same time.
• Paid social (Meta ads) is powerful but should be tested in a small, trackable slice before you scale it. See Facebook and Instagram ads for restaurants.
• Content and photography is the fuel every other channel runs on, so it is rarely the place to cut first.

For the full breakdown of channels and how they fit together, see the complete guide to restaurant marketing in Australia.

DIY or pay someone to run it

Once you have a number, the next decision is who runs it. Broadly, independent venues choose one of two paths:

• Run it yourself. The Playbook is a one-off $499 system, templates, scripts and step-by-step plays, built so an owner or manager can run the whole thing in-house without hiring an agency. This suits venues with some spare time and a preference for keeping marketing under their own control.
• Hand it over. Packed Out, Managed runs your marketing for you on an ongoing retainer, measured in covers and revenue rather than likes. This suits venues where the owner's time is worth more spent on the floor or in the kitchen than on a content calendar.

Either way, the budget you set above still applies, the DIY path just spends more of it on tools and ad spend and less on labour, while the managed path folds the labour into the retainer.

Common budget mistakes

• No number at all. Ad hoc spending almost always underfunds the channels that work and overfunds the ones that feel productive.
• Boosting posts with no goal. A boosted post with no offer, no tracking and no clear next step for the viewer rarely turns into a booking.
• Chasing followers instead of covers. A bigger following that never becomes bookings is not a return on your budget, it is a vanity number.
• One and done campaigns. A single burst of spend around an opening or event fades fast. Consistency, even at a smaller monthly figure, outperforms occasional large pushes.
• Not tracking where bookings come from. Without a simple way to ask "how did you hear about us" or tag your booking sources, you cannot tell which slice of the budget is actually working, and you will keep funding the wrong one.

FAQ

How much should a small restaurant spend on marketing each month?

As a starting point, most established independent restaurants and cafes do well putting 3% to 6% of monthly revenue toward marketing. A venue turning over $40,000 a month would land somewhere between $1,200 and $2,400. New openings usually need more for the first six months, often 8% to 12%, to build awareness from a standing start. These are starting ranges, not rules; your number should move based on how full you already are and how much room you have to grow.

Is $500 a month enough for restaurant marketing?

It depends entirely on your revenue and what you need it to do. For a smaller venue turning over $10,000 to $15,000 a month, $500 sits inside a reasonable 3% to 5% range and can cover consistent email and SMS, an active Google Business Profile, and a small, focused paid social test. For a venue turning over $60,000 a month, $500 is well under 1% and unlikely to move the needle on its own. Judge the figure against your revenue, not in isolation.

What percentage of revenue should hospitality businesses spend on marketing?

General small business guidance often lands in a broad 5% to 10% range, and hospitality tends to sit at the lower end of that once a venue is established and has a base of repeat customers, closer to 3% to 6%. Businesses actively growing, opening a new site, or trying to fill a genuinely quiet room usually need to spend nearer the top of the range, or briefly above it, until the extra covers catch up.