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You know your food cost to a tenth of a percent. Ask the same owner what they spend on marketing as a share of revenue and most give a monthly amount, not a percentage — which means nobody can say whether it is enough.
Marketing is the one line in a restaurant's budget that is set by feel rather than by formula. Rent is a contract. Payroll is a rota. Food cost has a recipe behind every euro. Marketing is usually whatever is left over after everything else is paid, or whatever a sales rep for a delivery app happened to pitch that month.
That would be fine if the number did not actually matter, but it does: a new restaurant that under-markets its opening spends the next two years fighting to be discovered, and an established one that quietly lets its marketing line drift to zero is the one that is suddenly "struggling" eighteen months later with no single visible cause.
This guide walks through seven numbers — what the research and the industry data actually say a restaurant should budget, split across channels, and by stage of the business. At the bottom, a calculator turns your own revenue, stage and concept into a euro figure and a digital/offline split. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
Why almost every restaurant gets this number wrong
Most owners size their marketing spend against last month's bank balance rather than against next quarter's covers. That produces a budget that shrinks exactly when it should grow — the slowest month is the one where cutting the Google Ads budget feels responsible and is, in fact, the surest way to make the next slow month worse.
The second mistake is treating marketing as one number instead of two decisions: how much, and on what. A restaurant can spend a perfectly healthy 5% of revenue and still get nothing from it if all of it goes to a single boosted Instagram post a week, because the channel mix matters as much as the total.
The third is judging a channel after two weeks. Paid social can show results in days; SEO and content routinely take three to six months to move a single position. Reallocating a budget every few weeks measures noise, not performance — and it is why so many owners conclude "marketing doesn't work for restaurants" after testing nothing for long enough to know.
The ultimate guide Restaurant Marketing: The Complete Guide Every channel, every tactic, in one place — this article is the budget behind it. Open the guideThe 7 numbers, one at a time
The first four size the budget by the stage your restaurant is actually in. The next two decide where that money goes. The last one tells you how long to wait before judging whether it worked.
1. 3-6% is the band for an established restaurant
Once a restaurant is past its first year and running on repeat guests as much as new ones, the marketing-budget guides that track this converge on the same range: 3% to 6% of revenue. On a restaurant doing €600,000 a year, that is €18,000 to €36,000 — a Google Business Profile kept current, a modest paid-social budget, email to your own list, and enough left over for a photographer twice a year.
That band is not a ceiling to hit and forget. It is a floor: a restaurant spending under 3% is relying entirely on the reputation it already has, and reputation depreciates the moment a competitor opens two streets over with a marketing budget you do not have.
2. 5-10% is what a launch year actually needs
A brand-new restaurant has zero of the thing an established one is coasting on: a base of guests who already know it exists. Every guide on this topic, and every operator who has actually opened one, lands in the same place — 5% to 10% of projected revenue in year one, weighted towards the opening months rather than spread evenly across twelve.
The gap between 5% and 10% is mostly the market: a restaurant opening in a neighbourhood with three similar concepts within walking distance needs the top of that range, because it is not just building awareness, it is taking share from somewhere. One with genuinely little local competition can sit nearer the bottom.
3. 10-12%+ is the deliberate, temporary push
A second location, a full relaunch after a rebrand, or clawing back covers after a bad quarter each justify a marketing budget above the established band — 10% to 12% or more of revenue, for a defined window rather than indefinitely. The general small-business rule of thumb repeated across marketing-budget guidance (and echoed by the U.S. Small Business Administration's own guidance for businesses under roughly €5 million in revenue and 10-12% margins) sits in exactly this range.
The distinction that matters is that this is a push, not a new baseline. A restaurant that stays at 10%+ two years after a relaunch is either still recovering — worth investigating why — or has simply never brought the number back down, which quietly erodes the margin the marketing was supposed to protect.
4. ~2% is what restaurants actually spend
Here is the real story hiding behind the first three numbers: independent data on restaurant advertising spend puts the average closer to 2% of revenue — less than half of the established-restaurant band, and a fifth of what a launch year calls for.
That gap is not restaurants being disciplined. It is restaurants treating marketing as the first thing to cut and the last thing to plan, which means most owners reading this are not overspending on marketing at all — they are quietly underspending it, and have been for years without a number attached to say so.
The chart below puts the three bands side by side against that 2% reality, so the gap is a euro figure rather than an abstract percentage.
Three moments in a restaurant's life, and the band that fits each one.
A restaurant only sits in the growth band for as long as the push lasts. Staying there past the window it was meant for is the most common way a marketing budget quietly outlives its purpose.
5. 60-80% of it should be digital
Within whichever total you land on, industry research on where restaurant marketing budgets actually go puts 60% to 80% into digital channels — paid social, search and your own website, email and loyalty, and paying to be visible on the delivery apps your guests already use to decide where to order from.
That leaves 20% to 40% for the offline half: local press and community sponsorship, print and signage, and the kind of relationship-building a restaurant's own neighbourhood still runs on. Neither half replaces the other — the offline share is smaller, not zero, because a restaurant is a physical place a search result can point at but never replace.
6. Your concept moves you inside the band, not out of it
A quick-service or delivery-heavy concept commonly sits at 5% to 8% even once established, because visibility on delivery platforms is pay-to-play in a way a sit-down restaurant's Google listing is not — every competitor on the same app is bidding for the same slot. Fine dining typically sits at 3% to 5%, leaning on press, reviews and word of mouth that a quick-service concept has no equivalent of.
The mix moves with the concept too: a delivery-heavy business often pushes digital spend towards 75-80%, almost all of it on the platforms themselves, where fine dining leans closer to 50-55% digital and puts real weight behind PR and events.
The graphic below shows a representative channel split — adjust it for your own concept in the calculator further down, which weights the digital share the same way.
A representative split for an established, casual-dining concept — digital first, offline still present.
70% of this example goes to digital channels. A delivery-heavy concept pushes that further; fine dining pulls it back towards PR and events.
7. 90 days is the shortest honest test
A boosted post can show a click-through rate within 48 hours. A change to your Google Business Profile, a new blog article or an SEO fix routinely takes three to six months to move a ranking at all, and search engines and AI answer engines alike need repeated signals over time before they trust a page enough to surface it.
So 90 days is the minimum window before deciding a channel isn't working and reallocating its budget elsewhere. Judging it sooner does not measure the channel — it measures whichever random two-week period you happened to be watching, and it is the single most common reason a restaurant cycles through five marketing tactics a year and concludes that none of them work.
Work out your own number
Enter your annual revenue, pick the stage you are actually in and the concept closest to yours. The target percentage and the digital share are both derived from those two choices — never a flat slider — the same way the rest of this site's tools work.
Marketing budget calculator
Your revenue, your stage, your concept — the target, the split, and the gap against what restaurants actually spend.
These are planning bands from published restaurant-marketing research, not a guarantee — your own market, competition and concept are the final judge. Everything is calculated in your browser; nothing is sent or stored.
Two things worth remembering when you read the result. The target percentage is a planning band, not a law — a restaurant with an unusually strong word-of-mouth base can run leaner, and one entering a saturated market can justifiably run higher. And the digital share moves with your concept for a reason: spend it on the channel your actual guests use to decide, not the one that is easiest to buy.
What to do with this number, this month and this quarter
A budget on paper changes nothing until it is actually allocated. This order works because each step makes the next one measurable.
This month — put a real percentage against your revenue
- Work out what you actually spent on marketing last year as a share of revenue, not as a monthly amount.
- Compare it against the band for your stage and concept above, and write down the euro gap, not just the percentage.
- Split whatever you already spend into digital and offline, and check it against the 60-80% digital guide.
- Pick one channel that has had no real budget in the last six months and give it a defined test.
This quarter — commit to the 90-day test
- For any channel you start or change, set a 90-day review date before you start, not after results disappoint you.
- Track one number per channel that actually matters — bookings, not likes — so the 90-day review has something to judge.
- If you are in a launch or growth window, put the extra spend into the two channels your calculator above weighted highest.
- Read the channel-by-channel advertising guide before choosing where the extra goes.
Ongoing — protect the number when it is tempting to cut it
- Treat the marketing line like payroll: budgeted before the month starts, not decided from whatever is left at the end.
- Revisit the percentage once a year, not the euro amount — a growing restaurant needs a growing budget even at the same percentage.
- Put a fixed share of any spend increase behind guest retention, not only new-guest acquisition — see the customer lifetime value numbers for why.
- Use the free marketing plan generator to turn this budget into the actual document your team works from.
The number was never the hard part
Almost every restaurant that works through this finds the same thing: the target percentage is not a mystery, and it was never actually hard to calculate. What is hard is treating it as a fixed cost instead of the first thing to cut when a month is slow — which is exactly the month a competitor's ad is most likely to reach your regular guest instead.
Size the number for your stage, split it the way your concept actually needs, give every channel ninety honest days, and put the result next to the rest of your restaurant benchmarks — a marketing line that nobody ever measures is the easiest one in the building to quietly starve.