Restaurant marketing, without the sales pitch
Plain-English, operator-first guides to getting more diners through the door — Google Ads, Facebook ads, local SEO, and email. No product to sell you, no jargon.
Vendor-neutral. No software to sell.
Operator-first. Real budgets and steps.
Public sources only. No made-up stats.
Six areas cover how a restaurant gets found, fills tables, keeps its costs in line and runs day to day. Each guide answers the real questions owners ask, then walks the exact steps.
Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram, and paid search — how to run them on a local budget and only spend where it fills tables.
Local SEO, Google Business Profile, and the map pack — the free foundation that reaches people at the moment they decide where to eat.
Email, loyalty, and the channels you own outright — no algorithm deciding who sees you. Turn one-time diners into regulars.
Menu engineering, food photography, and the practical craft behind marketing that works.
Food cost, prime cost and profit margin: free calculators and the formulas behind them, so you can price dishes and spot a cost that is out of line.
What to run the restaurant on, job by job: POS, payments, ordering and delivery, scheduling, inventory and the menu itself.
What it costs to open a restaurant depends most on the space you take: in the best survey available, a ground-up build cost more than twice as much as taking over an existing restaurant. A line-by-line startup checklist, a budget sheet for your own quotes, licenses to plan for, and how restaurants fund an opening.
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A free food cost calculator for restaurants: list what goes on the plate, allow for trim and waste, and see your food cost percentage and the menu price that hits your target. With the formulas, a worked example and how to set your own target.
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Prime cost is your cost of goods sold plus your total labor cost. It is the biggest cost a restaurant controls week to week. How to calculate it, what counts, what is typical, and how to bring it down, with a free calculator.
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How to design a restaurant menu that is easy to read and makes your best dishes easy to find: layout, writing descriptions, printed versus QR menus, and what to check before you buy digital menu boards.
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The typical restaurant keeps only a few cents of every sales dollar: in 2024 the median full-service restaurant made 2.8% before tax and the median limited-service restaurant 4.0%. How to work out your own margin, how it compares, and where profit usually leaks.
Read the guide →Restaurant technology is easier to choose when you start from the job, not the brand. What to set up first, what each tool does, what to ask before you sign, how card fees and delivery commissions really work, and the stack by type of restaurant.
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