/ 6 min read / Restaurant SEO Company team
How Much Do Restaurants Spend on Marketing?
Skip the industry averages. Set a restaurant marketing budget from your own sales, count your time, see what each channel costs and where search fits.
Free Maps audit for your restaurant
There's no single honest number for what restaurants spend on marketing, and we won't give you an industry average. A neighborhood pizzeria, a two-location bar and grill and a caterer have different margins, different slow days and different ways guests find them, so somebody else's percentage tells you very little about yours. The useful answer is to set your budget from your own sales, count your own time as part of it, and split it across the few channels that fill the dayparts you actually need.
Here's how to do that with your numbers, what each channel costs in money and in hours, where search fits, and what ours costs, as one reference point.
Start from your own sales
Pull the last three months of sales from your POS and take the monthly average. Then pick a percentage you can afford to spend for six months as a test. Not a benchmark you read somewhere: a number that fits your margins after food, labor and rent.
A worked example, with made-up figures you should replace with yours:
- Say your restaurant averages $60,000 a month in sales.
- You decide you can test 3% of sales on marketing for six months. That's $1,800 a month.
- You already pay for some marketing without calling it that. Your website hosting, your email software and any promotions you run on the delivery apps all count. Say those come to $300 a month on your statements.
- That leaves $1,500 a month for anything new.
Now look at it from the other end: what is one new regular worth? Say your average check per guest is $28 and a regular comes in twice a month. That's $56 a month in sales from one person, before food cost. If a channel costs you $400 a month, it needs to bring in roughly seven or eight new regulars to cover that in sales, and more to cover it in profit once you take out food and labor. Run that math for every channel you're considering and the budget conversation gets much shorter.
Count your time as money
You pay for marketing twice: once in dollars, once in hours that come out of the evening, the weekend or sleep. Put a number on your hour. Say it's $40 (pick your own). Five hours a week of posting, shooting photos and answering messages comes to about 21 to 22 hours a month, or roughly $850 of your time. That doesn't mean it's wasted. It means it belongs in the budget next to the line items you pay by card.
What each channel costs, in money and time
| Channel | Money | Your time | What it does best |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | Free | An hour or two a week for photos, posts and review replies | Catches people searching nearby right now |
| Your website | Hosting and domain fees, plus a build or redesign if you need one | Menu, hours and specials updates | Gives Google and guests your menu, hours and ordering link |
| Email list | Your email software's fee, which often depends on list size | 20 to 30 minutes per send | Brings regulars back on the nights you choose |
| Social media | Free to post; paid boosts are optional | Several hours a week to do it well | Shows the food to people who weren't searching |
| Search and social ads | The budget you set; click prices vary by market and competition | Setup and weekly checks, or a management fee | Fast reach for a specific offer, and it stops when spending stops |
| Delivery app promotions | Fees and promotion costs set by your contract | Menu and promotion upkeep | Reaches app users who have never heard of you |
| Print, sponsorships and events | Per item | Varies | Local goodwill and word of mouth |
| SEO | Your time if you do it yourself, or a monthly fee | A monthly check-in if someone else does it | Steady visibility for searches like "pizza near me" |
Delivery app costs are easy to leave out, because they come off the payout instead of arriving as a separate bill. Pull your own statement and look at commissions, fees and promotions together. The app commission calculator takes your order count, average order and your own rate, then shows what you pay a month and a year, and what you'd keep if some regulars ordered direct instead.
If you need ideas that cost almost nothing before you spend anything, start with the restaurant marketing ideas for a slow Tuesday: most of them are time, not money.
Where search fits
Search catches people who are already hungry and looking: "pizza near me", "brunch open now", "private room for 20 downtown", "gluten-free bakery" plus your town. It doesn't create demand the way a great Instagram reel can. It meets demand that's already there, at the moment someone is choosing.
It's also slow. Search work takes months to show results, and how many months depends on how many places near you compete for the same searches and how much they've already done. A cafe on a quiet main street and a ramen shop in a dense downtown are not the same job. The upside is that visibility built through search doesn't switch off the day a payment stops the way ads do, though it needs upkeep to hold.
Ads are the opposite trade. They can put an offer in front of people tomorrow, and that's a real strength when you need to fill a specific night. We don't run ads, social media accounts or email campaigns, so we have no reason to talk you out of them. Using both is a reasonable plan: ads for a push, search for the base.
Our tiers, as one reference point
Our prices are published, and every package is month to month, with no long contract, so you can cancel anytime. Every package includes Google Business Profile optimization, citation building and cleanup, and review-generation work.
- Silver, $125 a month: 10 keywords, 10 guest posts on DA 20+ sites, 10 Web 2.0s on DA 50+ platforms, 3,000 amplification links.
- Golden, $235 a month: 20 keywords, 20 guest posts, 20 Web 2.0s, 5,000 amplification links, plus in-depth keyword research, an on-page audit, a content gap analysis and premium indexing.
- Platinum, $325 a month: 40 keywords, 30 guest posts, 30 Web 2.0s, 10,000 amplification links, 2 domains and competitor research.
- Titanium, $575 a month: 100 keywords, 50 guest posts, 50 Web 2.0s, 20,000 amplification links, 4 domains and a toxic link check.
In plain terms: guest posts are articles placed on other websites through outreach, each linking to yours. Web 2.0s are pages we publish on high-authority publishing platforms that point to your site. Amplification links are second-tier links that point at those guest posts and Web 2.0 pages, not at your site. Every month you get a report listing every live URL, the page it targets and the anchor text.
The domain counts matter for groups: if your locations or concepts each run their own website, Platinum and Titanium cover more than one. Content writing plans start at $26 a month for four 500-word posts, and websites start at $400 one time, quoted per project.
Back to the example: with $1,500 a month free, Golden at $235 would leave room for an email tool and a Tuesday event, with your own hours going to the Business Profile and replies. That's an illustration, not a recommendation for your restaurant; the right split depends on what you're trying to fill.
Set yours this week
- Pull three months of sales and average them.
- Pick a test percentage you can carry for six months.
- List everything you already spend, app promotions included.
- Write down how many hours a week you or your staff put into marketing, and price them.
- Name the daypart or service you most want to fill: weeknight dinner, lunch, catering, pickup.
- Choose two channels that fit that goal, and set a date to check the numbers.
When you're ready to compare the packages line by line, every tier and what it includes is on our pricing page. If something there doesn't fit your setup, tell us what you're trying to fill and we'll say plainly whether search is the right place for the money.