Restaurant Marketing Budget: Where Should You Actually Spend Your Money?

Henry Kaminski Jr.: Where should restaurants actually spend their marketing money? That's the topic of today's Brand to Table podcast episode. What's going on, everybody?

Welcome to another Brand to Table Podcast episode. I'm your host, Henry Kaminski Jr., your go-to for restaurant marketing and branding. And today I want to talk about something that a lot of restaurant owners struggle with.

And that is where the hell should you actually be spending your marketing money? Because there's a million places you could spend it. Meta ads, Google, influencers, content, video, photography, SMS text, email, private events, and the list goes on. And the problem I see all the time is restaurants are spending money in all these different places, but there really isn't a clear reason behind any of it.

Then at the end of the month. Everybody's looking around going, did any of this work? Did we get more covers? Did we get more reservations?

Did we sell more tickets? Is online ordering up? Did we get more private event leads? Or did we just make ourselves busier?

And that's really what I want to dig into today because I think there's a huge difference between doing marketing and actually having a marketing strategy. So we got to start with what actually needs help first. So for me, that always starts with the business. Before we talk about ads, before we talk about content, before we talk about how many times you should post this week, I wanna know what actually needs help right now.

That's the conversation. Maybe Tuesdays and Wednesdays are dead. Maybe you have a great dinner business, but lunch sucks. Maybe brunch isn't taking off the way you want it.

Maybe you have a beautiful private event space, but nobody really knows it exists. Maybe you just opened up another location and people in the area still don't really know where you are. Whatever it is, we gotta identify that first. because if we don't know what problem we're trying to solve, everything after that is just throwing shit against the wall.

And I see it way too often. Somebody says, we need to post more. Why? We should boost this.

Why? We should get some more influencers in here. Why? What exactly are we trying to accomplish?

That's the question I keep coming back to. So your marketing budget should follow the opportunity. So here's a quick and easy example. Let's say Friday and Saturdays are already slammed.

You're busy, the bar's full, the dining room's full, the kitchen's getting crushed. Awesome. Why are we spending a ton of money trying to get more people in there on a Saturday night? What's the point?

You're already winning and crushing those days. Meanwhile, Tuesday looks like a friggin' funeral. That's where I'm looking. How do we create another reason for somebody to come in on a Tuesday?

Maybe it's a special promotion, maybe it's an event, maybe it's trivia, maybe it's some type of menu feature, maybe it's a loyalty offer. Maybe it's just something cool that gives people a reason to choose Tuesday instead of waiting until the weekend. Then we build the marketing around that. Now the marketing has a job.

That's the big difference. We're not just posting because Tuesday came up on the content calendar. We're marketing Tuesday because Tuesday needs help. So we gotta get specific about the goal.

And this is another thing I push pretty hard with my clients. The goal can't just be we need more awareness. Okay. Awareness for what?

We want more engagement. Cool. What are we actually trying to get people to do? Give me something real.

We want 40 more covers on Tuesday. Great. We want Sunday brunch reservations increased. Awesome.

We want fifty more online orders this week. We want 20 private event leads. We want to sell a hundred tickets to X event. Now we have something to work with.

Because once we know that, we could start working backwards. So who needs to see this? What do they need to hear? What's going to make them care?

Where do we reach them? What does the creative look like? What's the call to action? And most importantly, what's How are we going to know whether this thing actually worked?

So stop confusing activity with strategy. This is probably one of the biggest pet peeves in restaurant marketing. A lot of restaurants are measuring activity, the feeds look nice, the posts are going out, the reels are getting made, stories are getting posted. The agency looks really busy.

The manager looks very busy. Everybody's doing stuff, but is the restaurant busier? That's what matters. Because you can have the prettiest Instagram feed on the planet and still have empty seats.

You could get 50,000 views on a reel and have it generate absolutely nothing. And on the flip side, you can get a reel that gets 5,000 views and drives 20 reservations. Which one's better? The answer depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

And that's why I say activity is not the same thing as results. The next thing we want to talk about is who are we actually trying to reach? This is another place restaurants get really, really vague. They want to reach everybody.

This is not how this works. if I'm marketing a family pizzeria and I want to increase Tuesday takeout orders, I probably care about families. Living within a pretty tight radius. If I'm promoting a hundred and fifty dollar wine dinner, completely different person.

If I'm trying to fill private events. There's another audience for you. Maybe it's parents. Maybe it's office managers.

Maybe it's couples. Maybe it's local professionals in the area. Maybe it's people searching for a rehearsal dinner venue. The point is, the audiences change everything.

It changes the message. It changes the creative. It changes the platform we go on. It changes the offer.

So when somebody tells me, let's target foodies, I'm like. What does that even mean? Everybody likes food. So we gotta get more specific.

So before you advertise it, ask if it's actually good. And this is a big one, guys. You can't fix a weak offer by putting more money behind it. I see this all the time.

"We need to spend more on ads." Well, maybe, what you're advertising just isn't that interesting. And I always ask the same question. Why should somebody care?

Why should they leave their house? Why should they drive 15 minutes? Why should they choose you instead of somewhere else? There needs to be something there.

And it doesn't always have to be a discount. I'm not a huge discounter. It could be an experience. It could be a special menu.

It could be a chef's dinner. It could be live music. It could be a new brunch or an LTO. Or leverage your loyalty program.

Whatever. Give me something to work with because if the offer sucks, all you're doing is increasing the ad budget and showing a bad offer to more people. And here's another thing, guys. A lot of people ask me, like, should we be doing more Facebook ads and Instagram ads?

And I'll be honest with you guys, not everything needs to be paid ads. This one saves you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Not every campaign needs to be advertised. Before I start paying Meta or Google.

To find new people, I want to know what we already have. How big is the email list? How many people are on SMS? How many followers do we have?

How many loyalty members do we have? How many past customers do we have? You have people sitting right there who already know the brand. We should be talking to them first.

So let's get more strategic with email. Let's get more strategic with SMS Text. Let's hit stories a little harder. Talk about the offer more inside the restaurants.

So have your servers mentioning it more, your bartenders talking it up. Use in-house signage, use your loyalty program or DM automations, which I'm a huge fan of. There's a ton of ways to get the message out there before spending more money. And here's something to think about.

If the people who already know, like, and trust your restaurant don't really care about the offer. Why do you think paying meta? To show it to twenty thousand strangers. Is automatically going to fix that.

But let's get into where meta ads actually make sense. Now, I'm not anti-ads at all. We use meta all the time. It works, it really does, but it works a lot better when you know why you're using it.

Restaurant openings are a perfect example. You're new, nobody knows who you are. You definitely need awareness. Fantastic.

Show me the restaurant. Show me the food. Show me who's behind it. Who the founders are.

Show me what makes the place different. Show me when you're opening. And if I could build a VIP list before opening. So much better because now I'm not paying for somebody to see an ad.

I'm actually capturing a contact, maybe a phone number or an email. Now I can talk to that person again. And that's way more valuable to me. Brunch is another good one.

Brunch can be a great meta campaign, but stop selling brunch with boring graphics. Show me the brunch. Show me the drinks. Show me the pancakes.

Show me the room. Show me the people experiencing it and having fun. Show me what Sunday actually feels like at your restaurant. Because people aren't just buying eggs.

They're buying an experience. They're buying Sunday with their friends. They're buying a date day. That's what the content needs to sell.

Here's one that's super easy to measure. Ticketed events. Let's say you have 100 tickets. They're $125 each.

There's $12,500 sitting right there. Fantastic. Now we have a number. Now we can have a real conversation about marketing spend.

How much are we willing to put behind this thing to actually sell out the room? That makes sense to me. That's a hell of a lot better than let's put $2,000 behind this reel and see what happens. I hate let's see what happens.

That's not a strategy, guys. Now I do get some questions about Google too, and here's where Google makes a lot of sense. The biggest thing here, guys, is intent. Meta interrupts people.

Google catches people who are already looking for something. So if I'm scrolling Instagram, I might not be thinking about booking a rehearsal dinner, but if I go to Google and type rehearsal dinner venue, Morris County, New Jersey, now I'm looking. This is completely different. This is why Google can make a lot of sense for things like private events, catering, rehearsal dinners, birthday parties, corporate events, restaurants near me, waterfront dining, outdoor dining.

The question isn't is Meta better than Google? That's the actually the wrong question. The question is where is the customer when they're most likely to take action? That's what I care about.

Now let's talk about discounts because you don't want to discount just because you can. Because yes, discounts work, but they can also become a disaster if you're not careful. We all saw what happened to Red Lobster, right? With the all you can eat shrimp.

If Saturday nights are already packed, why are we discounting Saturday? If we're giving away margin to people who were probably coming anyway, that makes zero sense to me. Now, if Tuesday's dead, different conversation. Maybe we create something that gets people in the door.

But even then, I want to think it through. Does this promotion actually make us money? Can the kitchen handle it? Can the staff actually explain it?

Is this easy to redeem for a guest? Are we training people to only come in when there's a deal? So I'm not against discounts. I just don't like lazy discounts.

And there's a big difference there. At the end of the day, marketing has to work in the restaurant as well. This one gets overlooked all the time. Some promotions, they look amazing on paper.

Then they hit the restaurant floor and nobody knows what the hell's going on. the server doesn't know the rules, the manager doesn't know the rules. The POS isn't set up yet. The kitchen was never told.

The customer thinks the offer means one thing, And the staff thinks it means something completely different. Now everybody's pissed. that's why operations has to be part of the marketing conversation. I do do this a lot.

I'll come up with tons of different marketing campaigns to potentially run. But if I don't run those through operations first to get a stress test, to get the reality check, we might be setting up something for failure. And that's the last thing that I want to do. So before you launch anything, can the server explain it in one sentence?

Does the kitchen know what's going on? Can the POS handle it? Does the manager have a clear understanding of it? Is the CTA super clear?

Can the restaurant actually handle the volume if this thing works? Because that's another thing people forget. Sometimes you can market too good. You drive all this business into the restaurant and operations just isn't ready for it.

And that doesn't help you, it doesn't help the restaurant, it doesn't help your guests. So how much should you actually spend? That's another big question. That's probably one of the most common questions that I get.

So how much should a restaurant spend on marketing? And to be honest, there's no magic numbers. I hate arbitrary numbers to begin with. I want you to know what the opportunity is.

So if we have a $12,500 event, cool. Now we can work backwards. If we're trying to generate $20K in private event business, now we can think about what a lead is worth to us. If we're trying to grow online orders, we can look at order volume.

The spend should make sense based on the opportunity. Otherwise, we're just spending because Somebody told us we need a bigger budget. So I wanna give you seven questions I would ask yourself before spending another dollar. If you're listening to this and trying to figure out what to do inside of your own restaurant, here's the simplest framework I could give you.

So ask yourself these seven questions. Number one, what are we trying to sell? and be specific. Number two, who are we trying to reach?

Again, get specific. Number three, why should they care? What's the reason to take that action? Number four, when do we need them to act?

What's the time frame? Number five, where do we reach them? Is it email? Is it Instagram?

Is it TikTok? Is it Google? Is it SMS text? Is it inside the restaurant?

Number six, how are we tracking this? Figure that out before the campaign starts. I'll give you a quick example. we have POS systems directly integrated with Open Table, because that's the platform we use the most.

And we know when we send out an email how much. That email brought in in dollars to the penny. Very, very important. You want to track your metrics.

And last but not least, number seven, what actually has to happen for this thing to make sense financially? If you can't answer that question, be very, very careful because that's where restaurants start throwing money around without knowing if they're getting it back. The one thing I want you to understand though is I want you to stop thinking one campaign means one channel. A campaign is not the same thing as a platform.

Let's say we have a wine dinner coming up, right? The wine dinner is the campaign. Instagram's one channel. Email is another channel.

SMS is another channel. Meta Ads is a different channel. Signage inside the restaurant, another channel. So maybe we shoot a reel, maybe we run ads to it, maybe we send an email, maybe we hit the stories, Maybe we send an SMS out closer to the date, or we have some table tents.

Now that's one campaign that has a lot of support behind it. That's way stronger than having seven random marketing ideas floating around all at the same time. I'll be honest, most restaurants don't need more ideas. And this is probably one of the biggest things I've learned.

Most restaurants don't need it. They don't. They have a ton of ideas. They need focus because everybody wants to promote everything.

Brunch, happy hour, private events, the new burger, the cocktail menu. Lunch. Everything becomes the priority. And when everything's important, nothing's important.

So I'd rather take one or two bigger opportunities in the business right now and go ham on those. Build the campaign, get the creative right, repeat the message, use multiple channels, and then measure it. Learn from it. And then we move on to the next priority.

And guys, do me a favor. Please, please stop posting something once. Restaurants are terrible with this. And I hate to, I hate to bash.

And I'm not trying to bash, but I always hear, yo, we posted the event. Okay. Once? How many times?

Nobody saw it. Or at least most people didn't see it the first time. People are busy. The algorithm's the algorithm.

Stories disappear. Emails get ignored. You have to repeat yourself. And that doesn't mean using the same graphic 15 times.

You gotta switch it up. Talk about it from different angles. Show the food. Have the chef talk about it.

Have the bartenders talk about it. Create a reel around it if you already have graphics created. Use stories, use signage, use digital screens in the building. Same message, different format.

So frequency matters here a lot. And also, we don't want to forget about the people who already like you. Everybody wants new customers, and I get it, I would too. But restaurants sometimes overlook the people who already gave them money.

You may have thousands of people who already ate there. They know you, they trust you, they've liked the experience so far. What are you doing to bring them back? Sometimes the smartest marketing move isn't finding another new stranger.

It's getting somebody who already likes you to come back more and more that month. That's why email matters. That's why SMS matters. That's why loyalty matters and bounce back offers matter.

What happens inside the restaurant matters. Acquisition is great, but retention is where you really make the money. So if there's one thing I want you to take away from today's episode, it's this. Your marketing budget should follow the business opportunity.

That's it. Don't spend because you think you need to post more. Don't run ads because everybody else is running ads. Don't hire an influencer just because somebody told you influencer marketing is hot right now.

Start with the business. Where are you weak? Where's the opportunity? What are we trying to sell?

Who are we trying to reach? Why should they care? Where do we reach them? How are we measuring the success of everything?

That's the strategy. And that's how we approach things here at Brandt Table. Because at the end of the day, I don't care if we made the marketing department busier. I care if we made the restaurant busier.

That's the goal. So if you're a restaurant owner or operator in Jersey, And you feel like you're spending money on marketing, but you're not really sure what's working. This is exactly the type of stuff that we help our clients figure out. So check out Branded Table.

There's a link in the description. You could jump on a call with me and we could go over where you're struggling and how we can potentially help you. So if you got something out of this episode, guys, send it over to another restaurant owner or operator who needs to hear this. I'll catch you on the next episode.

Peace.