Three options. Only one actually works for your business.
Wedding October, corporate December, then five months of bench-fill.
A caterer's year is wedding season (October through April), corporate Christmas (last week of November through 22 December), and weddings again (February through April). Those windows generate the cash that pays the rent and the prep kitchen for the off-peak. The marketing job is two-fold: win the booking eight to twelve weeks out for each peak (corporate Christmas is booked in October, weddings are booked twelve months ahead) and fill the May-to-September bench with corporate-lunch drops, private events, and the occasional grazing-table consumer enquiry. Almost nobody plans both: most caterers either ride the peaks and accept the off-peak gap, or they over-extend into the off-peak with no marketing pre-warmed, and lose the next peak by being too busy to respond to enquiries in October.
Good caterer marketing is four things, in this order: a corporate-Christmas-party landing page that goes live by 1 October and ranks for 'Christmas party catering [suburb]' before the corporate bookers start shortlisting; a wedding-portfolio Instagram with venue-tagged shoots from every wedding you've catered, so couples shortlisting twelve months out can find you when they search the venue name; a corporate-lunch landing page that ranks year-round for 'corporate lunch catering [suburb]' and ' office catering near me'; and a private-event funnel with grazing-table photos, head-count pricing bands, and a one-tap enquiry form that pre-qualifies the enquiry (date, head count, dietaries, budget).
Six agents, working in your accounts.
Account Lead, Web, SEO, Advertising, Social Media, and Content. One platform, one bill, you approve the work.
Builds your annual plan around the three peaks (wedding October-April, corporate Christmas late November-22 December, wedding February-April) and the off-peak bench. Briefs the other agents so the Christmas-party pages go live by 1 October, the wedding-portfolio Instagram runs year-round to feed the twelve-month booking pipeline, and the corporate-lunch funnel runs continuously through the off-peak.
Imports your existing site and makes spinning up a seasonal or service-line page a five-minute job. Ships a fresh page for every peak and every service line (Christmas party catering by suburb, wedding catering by venue, corporate lunch drop by CBD, grazing table by occasion), with head-count pricing bands and structured enquiry forms, to your live site in two taps.
Owns the work that decides whether you rank for 'christmas party catering [suburb]', 'wedding catering [venue]' and 'corporate lunch [suburb]': complete Google Business Profile set up as a service-area business across every delivery suburb, schema for catering and event services, review prompts after every event, and the technical fixes that keep the seasonal pages indexed in time. Auto-applies the low-risk fixes.
Launches Google and Meta campaigns that RAMP into each peak: Christmas corporate spend climbs from $30/day in mid-October to $250/day in the first week of November, then drops back; wedding-portfolio Meta spend runs year-round at a steady $40/day with retargeting on portfolio visitors. Pauses when there's no peak in sight or the prep kitchen is at capacity.
Turns every event into a post in your voice: a reel of the grazing-table setup at the Centennial Homestead wedding, a carousel of the canapé tray from Thursday's Surry Hills corporate lunch, a behind-the-prep-kitchen shot at 5am, the cool-chain rig leaving the kitchen. Builds the wedding-portfolio grid that gets you on the shortlist twelve months out. You shoot one frame per event, the agent drafts, you approve.
Drafts the long-form pieces that catch corporate bookers and couples: 'wedding catering Sydney: what does $120 per head buy you', 'corporate Christmas party catering: when to book and what to budget', 'grazing table vs canapés vs sit-down: which is right for your event'. Two drafts a fortnight, in your voice, that bring the careful researcher to your site weeks before they enquire.
Your first 30 days.
- Wedding-season Oct-Apr ramp and corporate-Christmas Nov-Dec calendar loaded for the next 90 days
- Grazing-table and canapés-package pages indexed with menu, head-count and pricing
- Venue-partnership preferred-supplier list page live and linked from the homepage
- Head-count plus dietaries booking form live, replacing the email back-and-forth
- Service-staff hire upsell sequence wired into the booking flow
- Google profile flipped to service-area mode across every delivery suburb
- Wedding-portfolio Instagram grid built with venue tags
- Three-peak plus off-peak corporate-lunch bench plan delivered by Sam
Caterers lose the peaks not because the food isn't good, but because the Christmas-party landing page goes live in November and the wedding portfolio looks like every other caterer's grid. The kitchens that fill the bench through the May-to-September gap are the ones treating each peak as customer-acquisition for the corporate-lunch and private-event work that pays the off-season.
Agencies are too dear to actually run the seasonal landing pages and the peak-ramp ad campaigns for $3.5k a month. Tools are cheap but you write the Christmas-party page at midnight in late October. In-House is the third option: for $299 a month the agents ship the seasonal pages, ramp the campaigns into each peak, post the grazing-table reels, and draft the wedding guides. You stay in the driver's seat, two taps to approve, minutes a day. Stop losing December to a national aggregator with a generic menu.