Three options. Only one actually works for your business.
Friday and Saturday sell themselves. Tuesday is the actual problem.
Most full restaurants are booked solid Friday and Saturday night and run at 35 to 50 percent of covers Tuesday through Thursday. The weekend pays the food cost and the wine bill; the midweek covers are what pays the lease, the head chef and the front-of-house. The marketing job is to fill those midweek tables, lift the average spend with a set menu or wine pairing, and shift direct bookings off the aggregators (TheFork takes 7.5 percent, SevenRooms-via-Google takes a click but not a margin, Uber Eats takes 30 percent on delivery). Almost nobody does this consistently because the work that fills midweek (menu-plus-suburb pages, Tuesday-to-Thursday ads, set-menu landing pages, no-show deposit flows) is exactly the work the owner can't get to between Friday service and the Sunday clean.
Good restaurant marketing has four jobs running at once: a Google Business and SEO presence that wins 'best [cuisine] in [suburb]' (which is what 70 percent of new bookings now search before they ring), a menu-plus-suburb landing page library that catches the long tail of 'private dining [suburb]', 'set menu [cuisine]', 'function room [suburb]', a midweek-fill campaign on Meta with a 5km radius targeting 'restaurants near me' Tuesday through Thursday, and a direct-booking funnel through SevenRooms or ResDiary that keeps you off the 7.5 percent aggregator tax. Most restaurants do one of the four and let the others slide.
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 what actually moves your covers: filling the midweek tables, lifting the per-head spend with set menus and pairing, and pulling direct bookings off the aggregators. Briefs the other agents so the menu-plus-suburb pages, the midweek ads, the pass reels and the deposit booking flows all push toward the same outcome.
Ships a clean menu-plus-suburb page library so 'best Italian restaurant Surry Hills' and 'private dining Newtown' find you instead of the venue two suburbs over. Imports your existing site, makes the booking button bigger than the logo, points it at SevenRooms or ResDiary (not TheFork), and keeps the menu pages live as the kitchen changes them.
Owns the work that decides whether you're in the map pack for 'best [cuisine] in [suburb]' and 'restaurants near me': complete Google Business Profile, menu-plus-suburb schema, review prompts after the table-check-out, and the technical fixes that keep you indexed. Auto-applies the low-risk stuff.
Runs a Tuesday-to-Thursday set-menu campaign on Meta with a 5km radius, lifts bids on 'private dining [suburb]' and 'function room [suburb]' Google searches the weekend doesn't cover, and pauses the lot when the midweek floor's already full. The whole point is to fill empty tables, not to spend money when you're booked.
Turns every service into content in your voice: a kitchen-pass reel of the new dish, a carousel of the wine list with the head sommelier's notes, a behind-the-pass shot of plating, the cellar restock. Builds the consideration content that earns the second-look booker and the wet-weather plan post that fills a rainy Thursday. You shoot one frame per service, the agent drafts the caption, you approve.
Drafts the longer pieces that catch bookers between visits: 'how long is a tasting menu at a Sydney restaurant', 'set menu vs à la carte: when each is the better deal', 'how to book a private dining room in [suburb]'. Two a month, in your voice, that bring search traffic in at the consideration stage and feed the booking link.
Your first 30 days.
- SevenRooms direct-booking flow live, TheFork or OpenTable aggregator off every CTA
- Midweek-vs-weekend ad calendar split, Tue-Thu Meta fill plus Fri-Sat Google bookings
- No-show deposit booking flow live on Friday and Saturday large tables
- Wine-pairing tasting menu page indexed with the sommelier's by-the-glass list
- Function-room hire page indexed with capacity, layouts and minimum spend
- Google profile rebuilt with SevenRooms link, current menu and consented pass photos
- Pass reels and dish carousels queued in your voice for the next fortnight
- Direct-booking lift and midweek-fill targets delivered by Sam
Restaurants that win the midweek aren't the ones with the prettiest plate shots. They are the ones whose menu pages rank for 'best [cuisine] in [suburb]' on Tuesday evening, whose direct booking page sits where the aggregator used to, and whose pass reels close the second-look booker who's comparing three menus on a phone at 9pm Wednesday. Every one of those is a job that has to happen every week, forever, and it's the work that gets eaten by Friday service.
Agencies are too dear to actually run the menu-page library and the midweek fill ads for $3k a month. Tools are cheap but you still write the set-menu caption between services. In-House is the third option: for $299 a month the agents ship the pages, post the pass shots, run the midweek ads and pull bookings off the aggregator tax. You photograph one dish, approve the week from the pass, done.