A Practical Marketing Checklist for Restaurants and Cafés

Start with one guest action

Choose the next action you want to make easier: viewing the menu, making a reservation, ordering, or finding your location. A campaign becomes easier to plan when the destination is specific. For example, a weekday lunch campaign should lead to the current lunch menu and clear opening hours, rather than leaving people to search through unrelated posts. This is a planning example, not a client result.

Check the details people rely on

Review your Google Business Profile, website, and social profiles together. Check the address, phone number, opening hours, menu link, and booking or ordering destination. Google recommends keeping business information complete and accurate; its local results consider relevance, distance, and prominence. Good information supports discovery, but does not guarantee a ranking position.

Build content around real questions

Use the questions your team hears every week as editorial prompts. Show what a dish contains, explain the atmosphere, introduce the people behind the service, or make a practical detail easier to understand. Plan a manageable mix of food, people, process, and useful information. Choose a schedule you can maintain with current assets, then review what helps guests take the intended next step.

Review the whole journey on a phone

Open a post as a visitor would. Follow its link, find the relevant information, and check whether the next action is obvious. Confirm that buttons work, menus are readable, and forms clearly explain what is required. If an enquiry form reports success, verify that the enquiry actually reaches the team before relying on it for a campaign.

Use a small review routine

At the end of each campaign, compare the action you intended with the evidence available: visits to the relevant page, reservation-link clicks, enquiries, or completed orders where your systems support them. Separate clicks from confirmed bookings. Record what you changed and what happened so the next plan starts from evidence rather than a guess.

Start with the most useful fix

Choose one discovery issue, one content gap, and one website improvement. Resolve those before adding more channels. A current menu link and a clear booking route may be more useful to a guest than another post with no obvious next step.

Google Business Profile: Tips to improve your local ranking