Three options. Only one actually works for your business.
The Saturday class sells itself. The Tuesday evening and the corporate calendar do not.
A serious cooking school runs three customer types out of the same kitchen and the website usually only speaks to one. The single-class consumer ($120-to-$450 a head) books a Sunday-evening gift for a partner or a Saturday Hens-party class with eight friends, and decides on the cuisine (pasta, sushi, Thai, Vietnamese, Middle-Eastern, plant-based, sourdough, knife-skills, cocktail-and-mixology) before they pick the school. The corporate-team-building client ($3K-to-$12K a session) books the Wednesday-afternoon offsite eight weeks out, wants a custom menu and a private room. The 8-week-evening-and-12-week-pro-and-cert student ($1500-to-$5K) is the career-changer or the keen amateur who saw a Le Cordon Bleu or William Angliss accredited reference and is comparing to the TAFE evening course. The owner is on the bench Saturday teaching the pasta class, in the prep Sunday for the corporate team build, on the Mother's Day gift-voucher pre-sell Monday morning, and replying to the Hens-party enquiry at 10pm. The marketing that wins each lane (a class-plus-cuisine page, a corporate-team-building landing, a 8-week-evening-course curriculum page, a Mother's Day gift-voucher pre-sell) is exactly the work that never happens between the pack-down and the next bench reset.
Good cooking-school marketing has five jobs running at once: a class-plus-cuisine page library that ranks 'pasta class [suburb]', 'sushi class [suburb]', 'sourdough class [suburb]', 'Thai cooking class [suburb]' and the other 10-to-14 cuisine-and-style combinations you actually teach (lead with the cuisine, not the school name); a corporate-team-building landing page with the capacity (16-30-pax kitchen), the custom-menu starter, the half-day and full-day tiers ($3K to $12K), the COI and WorkCover details and a one-tap enquiry firing an auto-reply inside ten minutes with the date held; an 8-week-evening-and-12-week-pro-and-cert program page with the accreditation references (Le Cordon Bleu, William Angliss, TAFE, IACP) and the curriculum the career-changer is comparing to the TAFE course; a Mother's Day and Christmas gift-voucher seasonal pre-sell campaign that runs the seven-to-ten days before each date with the last-minute-gift Meta ad on a 10km radius; and a Google Business Profile rebuilt around 'Cooking School' (or 'Culinary School' where it fits better) with the eighteen-strong service list and the IACP-member badge or Le Cordon Bleu partnership pinned. Most cooking schools do one of the five and let the corporate enquiry sit till Wednesday.
Six agents, working in your accounts.
Account Lead, Web, SEO, Advertising, Social Media, and Content. One platform, one bill, you approve the work.
Sets the plan around the three customers that actually grow a cooking school: the single-class gift-buy consumer, the corporate-team-building HR booker and the 8-week-evening-course career-changer student. Briefs the other agents so the class-plus-cuisine pages, the corporate-team-build flow, the Mother's Day pre-sell and the chef-led social posts all push toward the same cuisine and chef positioning. Locks the seasonal calendar (Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Christmas, Easter) in onboarding so the pre-sell campaigns are loaded before the season hits.
Ships a clean class-plus-cuisine page library (pasta, sushi, Thai, Vietnamese, sourdough, knife-skills, plant-based, French, Indian, cocktail-and-mixology and the other cuisines you actually teach) so 'pasta class [suburb]' and 'sushi class [suburb]' each find the right page instead of a generic 'cooking class' page. Imports your existing site, makes the gift-voucher CTA bigger than the logo, points the booking link at direct (not Eventbrite's 7%), and updates the calendar availability so the gift-voucher pages reflect what's actually free.
Owns the work that decides whether you're in the map pack for 'cooking class [suburb]' and the long-tail cuisine searches: complete Google Business Profile as 'Cooking School', schema for the cooking school and each class, the IACP-membership and Le Cordon Bleu or William Angliss partnership pinned, review prompts after the Saturday pack-down, and the technical fixes that keep you indexed. Auto-applies the low-risk stuff.
Runs the seasonal gift-voucher pre-sell campaigns (Mother's Day May 1-11, Father's Day August, Valentine's Day Feb 7-14, Christmas Dec 15-24, Easter) on Meta and Google at a 10km radius for the last-minute-gift buyer, a steady corporate-team-building Google Ads spend on 'corporate cooking class [suburb]' and 'team building cooking class [city]' for the HR-booker line, and a steady 8-week-evening-course Meta spend for the career-changer line. Pauses gift-voucher ads at voucher capacity. ABAC-compliant on the cocktail-and-mixology class promos.
Turns every class into a post in the chef's voice: a Saturday-afternoon pasta-roll reel from the morning class, a Sunday-evening sushi-knife-skills carousel from the intermediate, a Wednesday team-build group photo from the corporate session, a Friday Hens-party-cocktail-and-mixology story. Builds the chef and the cuisine positioning that the next gift-buy customer reads before deciding between you and the Sydney Seafood School. You snap one frame per class, the agent drafts the caption, you approve. The 18+-only cocktail-and-mixology classes are templated with the RSA-and-licence copy.
Drafts the longer pieces the gift-buy customer and the corporate-team-build HR booker read between bookings: 'best pasta classes in [suburb]: a chef's honest pick', 'how a corporate team-building cooking class actually works (and what $3K vs $12K buys)', 'should I do TAFE or an 8-week evening course at a cooking school: a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef's view'. Two a month, in your voice, that bring search traffic in at the consideration stage and double as corporate-enquiry warm-up.
Your first 30 days.
- Class-plus-cuisine page library indexed and ranking for 'pasta class [suburb]', 'sushi class [suburb]' and the cuisines you actually teach
- Corporate team-build enquiry page live with half-day and full-day tiers, custom-menu starter and ten-minute auto-reply
- Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day and Christmas gift-voucher pre-sell campaigns loaded for the seasonal run
- Google profile corrected from 'School' to 'Cooking School' with IACP-membership and Le Cordon Bleu partnership pinned
- Direct gift-voucher booking flow live, no Eventbrite 7% margin lost
- Class-bench reels queued in the chef's voice for the next month of Saturday and Sunday classes
- Hens, birthday and corporate-private auto-reply flow live with BYO-bottle policy and 18+-only cocktail-and-mixology rules templated in
- Three-customer single-class-and-corporate-and-course plan delivered by Sam
Cooking schools that book the year out aren't the ones with the prettiest pasta-on-marble flat-lays. They are the ones whose pasta-class page ranks for 'pasta class [suburb]' on Sunday evening when the partner is buying the Mother's Day gift, whose corporate enquiry gets the auto-reply at 4:10pm with the date held, whose 8-week-evening-course curriculum sits beside the Le Cordon Bleu partnership badge, and whose Mother's Day pre-sell ran May 1-11 before the gift-buying panic. Every one of those is a job that has to happen every cuisine, every season, every week, forever, and it's the work that gets eaten by the pack-down and the next bench reset.
Agencies are too dear to actually run the 14-cuisine page library plus the corporate enquiry flow plus the seasonal gift-voucher pre-sell for a cooking school at $3k a month. Tools are cheap but you write the pasta-class caption between the pack-down and the Sunday prep. In-House is the third option: for $299 a month the agents ship the pages, post the chef-led class reels, run the Mother's Day pre-sell, draft the corporate team-build outreach and chase the Hens-party enquiry before it goes cold. You stay in the driver's seat, two taps to approve, minutes a day. Stop losing the corporate offsite to Otao Kitchen down the road.