How Much Should a Restaurant Spend on Marketing?

Most restaurants spend 3 to 6 percent of revenue on marketing, rising to 7 to 10 percent when newer or pushing hard for growth. For a restaurant doing $1.5M a year, that's roughly $45K to $90K. The harder question is where it goes: 60 to 80 percent now runs through digital, and the highest-return dollar is usually local discovery, not ads.

Here's the part owners don't want to hear: a restaurant spending 5% badly loses to one spending 3% well. The percentage is the easy half of the question. Where the money goes — and whether you can see what it produced — is the half that actually decides whether you're staffing for a full room or watching tables sit empty on a Tuesday.

Those benchmarks (3-6% of revenue, 7-10% when newer or in growth mode, with 60-80% of the budget now digital) are industry standard — a starting frame, not a target. The dollar figures are just arithmetic on those percentages. The real work is the same one we run for any local business: find what's actually holding bookings back, fix it, and prove the return in numbers you can open any time.

Where the Money Should Actually Go (Ranked by Return)

For a local restaurant, the order that produces the most covers per dollar is consistent: (1) local discovery — Google Business Profile and local SEO; (2) content that looks like the food actually on the floor; (3) email and SMS to the guest list you already have; and (4) paid, only once the first three are working. The reason that order matters more than the budget is the dollar most restaurants quietly underspend...