Marketing for Restaurants

The short answer

Restaurant marketing is a margin problem before it is a traffic problem. Full-service net margins run 3% to 5%, and third-party delivery takes 15% to 30% of every order it touches. The work is owned demand: Google Business Profile, reservations, first-party ordering, paid social. From $5,000 a month.

Who this is for — and who it isn’t

This is for you if:

• You run two or more locations, or one location doing $2M+, and you can pull a P&L with food cost, labour cost and third-party commission on it.
• You want covers and first-party orders, not followers.
• You have a real product. Food people talk about, a room worth photographing, service that earns the review.
• You are willing to change the ordering path on your own site, not just the ads pointing at it.

This is not for you if:

• You want a social media manager posting three times a week. That is a content vendor, and it is cheaper than us.
• Your margin is already negative and marketing is the rescue plan. Fix prime cost first.
• You will not touch your delivery mix. If every incremental order routes through a 30% marketplace, more demand makes the problem larger.
• Your budget is under $5,000 a month across everything.

What makes restaurant marketing different

The constraint is margin. Toast puts the average restaurant profit margin at 3% to 5%, with full-service at the bottom of that band and quick service at 6% to 9%, and recommends prime cost — food plus labour — near 60% of revenue (Toast). On a 4% net margin, a $30 cover contributes $1.20. That single number governs every media decision. It means you cannot buy a customer for $25 and call it acquisition unless they come back, and it means anything skimming a fifth of the ticket is a strategic decision, not an operational one.

The delivery economics are the whole argument. DoorDash Marketplace charges 15% on its Basic plan, 25% on Plus and 30% on Premier, with 6% on pickup orders (DoorDash). Uber Eats runs 20%, 25% and 30% marketplace fees by plan, 15% for self-delivery and 7% on pickup with validated in-store pricing (Uber Eats). A 30% commission on a 4% net margin business does not leave a margin. It leaves a customer acquisition cost you pay again on every reorder, forever, on a customer whose name you do not own.

That does not make marketplaces wrong. It makes them a paid acquisition channel with a permanent rent attached. Treat the commission difference between plans as media spend, and treat the goal as converting marketplace customers into first-party ones.

The category is big and the competition is local. The National Restaurant Association projects industry sales of $1.55 trillion in 2026 with employment reaching 15.8 million (National Restaurant Association). None of that matters to you. What matters is the three-mile radius, the local pack, and whether your Friday 7pm slot is full.

Seasonality is weekly before it is annual. The important cycle is Monday-to-Sunday and lunch-to-dinner. Media that cannot be shifted by daypart is media that fills seats you would have filled anyway.

The channel mix that works

What you actually get

How it works — 1, 2, 3

1. The 20-minute fit call. Locations, average check, current delivery mix and commission plans, current spend, what you want full. You get a straight read on fit and a real price on the call.
2. The first 30 days. POS, profile and ad account access in week one. Channel margin model at day 14, profiles rebuilt and the first daypart campaigns live by day 30.
3. The ongoing cadence. Weekly creative and budget shifts by daypart, a monthly report on cost per incremental cover and first-party order share, quarterly planning around your calendar.

What it costs

From $5,000 a month for management, separate from media. Location count is the main driver — five profiles, five review streams and five radius campaigns is five times the operational load of one. Beyond that: whether paid media runs alongside local SEO, whether the ordering path needs rebuilding, and how much spend sits under management. Groups running ten or more locations usually need systems work before media. Pricing is given on the first call.

Where restaurant marketing budgets get wasted

• Buying more marketplace demand instead of buying it down. Moving from a 30% Premier plan to a 15% Basic plan changes the economics of every order more than any campaign will. Model both before spending a dollar on ads.
• Brand awareness with no radius. A campaign reaching people forty minutes away is buying impressions you cannot seat. Radius, daypart, and nothing else.
• Followers as a KPI. Nobody in the P&L is paid in followers. Measure covers, first-party orders and repeat rate.
• Neglected profiles. Wrong hours on a holiday weekend, no photos since 2023, no menu link. That is free traffic converting at a fraction of what it should.
• Discounting without a capture step. A 20% off promo on a 4% margin buys a customer you never contact again. If you discount, you take the email.

Questions we get asked

Should we drop the delivery apps?

Usually not. Drop the plan tier, not the platform. Compare incremental orders on a 25% or 30% plan against the same orders on the entry tier, and put the saved commission into first-party ordering and paid social where you keep the customer.

Why does paid social work for restaurants when it fails elsewhere?

Because the product photographs well, the purchase is impulsive, the price point is low and the audience sits inside a small radius that is cheap to buy. The decision is made in the feed, not after a research process.

How do you measure a cover that came from an ad?

Reservation and order links carry tracking, and everything else is measured against a control period by location and daypart. Dine-in attribution is never exact. It is directionally reliable enough to allocate budget correctly.

Do you manage reviews and responses?

We build the request flow and the response templates and report the rating trend by location. Responses come from someone in your business who can actually fix the problem. Outsourced replies read like outsourced replies.

What about our email list?

It is the only channel with no commission attached. We set up capture at every order and reservation point, then run a simple monthly cadence. Owned data is the entire point of first-party ordering.

The bottom line

On a 3% to 5% net margin, the highest-return marketing decision most restaurant groups can make is structural: shift orders off a 30% commission and onto a channel you own. Then buy covers by daypart, inside a radius, with creative that makes people hungry.

Book a 20-minute fit call at calendly.com/tack-media-agency/talk-to-an-expert or call 310-620-1141. You will get a real price on that call.

Sources

• Toast: average restaurant profit margin
• DoorDash Marketplace partnership plans and commission rates
• Uber Eats merchant pricing
• National Restaurant Association 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry
• LocaliQ 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks by Industry
• BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey 2026
• Google Business Profile: guidelines for representing your business