Covers and bookings
Fill the quiet shifts, own your bookings, and stop renting your customers
Hospitality marketing is judged on covers, occupancy and average spend — not on reach. We build the local visibility, direct booking path and repeat-visit programme that reduce commission dependency and smooth out the weak nights.
- Direct bookings prioritised over commission-based platforms
- Campaigns planned by daypart and shift, not by week
- Review velocity and response treated as a distribution channel
Venue types we plan differently
Independent restaurants
Local, occasion-driven, weekend-weighted
Weekday demand generation, direct booking and review velocity
Multi-site groups
Brand consistency with genuinely local demand per site
Per-location profiles and reporting inside one brand system
Hotels and accommodation
Occupancy-led, seasonal, heavily intermediated by OTAs
Direct-booking share, rate-parity-safe messaging and package offers
Bars, cafés and quick service
High frequency, habit-driven, low ticket value
Loyalty mechanics, daypart offers and proximity visibility
Acquisition challenges
What actually breaks in restaurants & hospitality customer acquisition
Hospitality operators are usually excellent at the product and under-served by the systems around it.
Commission platforms own the customer
Booking and delivery platforms take both margin and the customer relationship. Without a direct channel, every increase in their fees comes straight out of your profit.
Marketing planned by week, not by shift
The business problem is rarely 'more customers'. It is Tuesday lunch, or the 9pm sitting, or February. Undirected promotion fills already-busy shifts and gives away margin.
Reviews left to chance
Review recency and volume drive local visibility and the human decision. Most venues collect them accidentally and respond inconsistently, if at all.
Profile details that are quietly wrong
Outdated hours, missing menus, wrong holiday times and stale photos push guests to competitors before they ever consider the food.
No usable guest data
Thousands of guests, no list. Without contact data and visit history, every quiet shift has to be filled by paid reach instead of by people who already like you.
Discounting as the only lever
Deep discounts bring volume at a loss and train guests to visit only on offer. Value framing and package design work better and survive longer.
Customer journey
How your customers actually buy
Hospitality decisions are fast, local and made on a phone — usually within an hour of the visit.
- 1
Occasion trigger
A date night, a work lunch, a celebration, a trip. The search starts with a category and a place, not a brand.
Category and occasion visibility in local search and maps, with photos that match the occasion.
- 2
Shortlist
Maps, reviews, photos and menu in about ninety seconds, almost always on a phone.
Profile completeness, recent photos, current menus and a steady flow of recent reviews.
- 3
Practical check
Availability tonight, parking, dietary options, price level. Any unanswered question loses the booking silently.
Accurate hours, current menu with prices, dietary information and real-time availability.
- 4
Booking
A direct booking widget, a phone call, or a commission platform — whichever is easiest at that moment.
A mobile booking flow that is genuinely faster than the platform alternative, plus tracked phone numbers.
- 5
Visit
The experience itself, which determines everything that follows.
Post-visit review requests timed correctly, and data capture at booking so the guest is known.
- 6
Return
They come back within weeks, or they drift to the next new opening.
Guest data, loyalty mechanics and occasion-timed campaigns aimed at the specific shifts you need to fill.
Channel mix
What we recommend, and in what order
Local visibility and direct booking dominate. Everything else supports filling specific shifts.
Local SEO and Google Business Profile
Maps and local search are where hospitality shortlists are formed; profile quality and recency are decisive.
Review generation and response
Review velocity affects both local prominence and the human choice between two similar venues.
Direct booking conversion
Every direct booking is margin recovered from a commission platform and a guest relationship you keep.
Paid social by daypart
Geo-fenced, time-targeted promotion is the fastest tool for filling a specific weak shift.
Guest data and lifecycle
A guest list turns quiet shifts into an email or SMS problem instead of a paid-media problem.
Photography and menu presentation
Food and room imagery is the primary conversion asset in this category; stale photos actively cost bookings.
Local partnerships and events
Hotels, offices, venues and local organisations produce repeatable group demand.
Influencer and creator visits
Useful for openings and relaunches with a defined local audience; unreliable as an ongoing demand channel.
Packages built for restaurants & hospitality
Fixed scopes with published inclusions and exclusions. Final scope is confirmed after a discovery call.
Local Essentials
From $1,500/mo
Get the local fundamentals correct and measurable in one service area.
- Google Business Profile management
- Local keyword and competitor tracking
- Citation and NAP consistency review
- Review-generation workflow
Local Growth
From $3,000/mo
Add paid demand, landing pages and tracked follow-up across up to three areas.
- Everything in Local Essentials
- Location and service landing pages
- Ongoing local content
- Conversion tracking
Local Market Leader
From $5,500/mo
Multi-location strategy, authority building and full CRO across the funnel.
- Everything in Local Growth
- Multi-location or expanded service-area strategy
- Advanced content and digital PR
- Paid search and remarketing
- • Media spend (Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, or any other paid platform) is billed separately by the platform and is not included unless a package explicitly says otherwise.
- • Software, hosting, domains, call tracking, review platforms, backlink or placement purchases and other third-party costs are separate unless explicitly included.
- • Results are not guaranteed. We do not publish or promise lead volumes, rankings, revenue or ROAS.
Solutions we deploy here
Local SEO & Maps
Google Business Profile, map-pack visibility and local search for businesses that serve a service area.
Paid Search & Social
Google, Meta and LinkedIn campaigns built around cost-per-qualified-lead, not impressions.
Websites & Conversion
Fast, accessible websites and landing pages designed to turn traffic into booked work.
Branding & Creative
Identity systems, creative assets and messaging that make you the obvious choice.
CRM & Automation
CRM setup, pipeline hygiene and automations that remove manual follow-up work.
Client examples shared under NDA
Our client work is covered by confidentiality agreements. We'll walk you through comparable engagements on a call.
See our workWhat we measure for restaurants & hospitality
Covers, occupancy and direct-booking share — reported by shift, because that is how the business runs.
Direct bookings and direct share
Bookings taken through your own channels versus commission platforms.
Covers by daypart
Performance per shift, so the weak sittings are visible instead of averaged away.
Commission saved
Estimated platform fees avoided through direct bookings in the period.
Review volume, rating and response rate
New reviews, rating trend and how consistently the venue replies.
Profile actions
Calls, direction requests, menu views and website clicks from local listings.
Repeat visit rate
Identified guests returning within a defined window.
Average spend per cover
Whether promotions are adding volume or simply discounting existing demand.
Cost per incremental cover
Media plus fees divided by covers attributed to the campaign, reported by shift.
These are definitions of what we track and report, not promised outcomes. We do not publish or guarantee rankings, lead volume, revenue or ROAS.
Implementation
How the engagement runs
- Week 1–2
Venue and shift audit
We review covers by daypart, commission exposure, profile accuracy, review velocity and booking-path usability on a phone, then identify which shifts are actually the problem.
- Week 2–4
Profile and review system
Profiles corrected per location, photography refreshed, menus updated, and a review-request and response workflow put into service routine.
- Week 3–6
Direct booking build
A mobile booking path faster than the platform alternative, with tracked phone numbers and guest data capture at the point of booking.
- Week 5–8
Shift-targeted campaigns
Geo-fenced, daypart-targeted campaigns aimed only at the sittings that need filling, with offers designed to protect average spend.
- Week 6–10
Guest lifecycle programme
Guest list building, segmentation by visit behaviour, occasion campaigns and win-back for lapsed guests.
- Monthly
Monthly covers review
Covers by shift, direct-booking share, review trend, average spend and which shift to target next.
Restaurants & Hospitality questions we get asked
Compliance and scope
- • Review generation follows platform guidelines: we request reviews from genuine guests and never incentivise or filter for positive ratings.
- • Offers and promotional pricing are subject to your terms and availability.
Get a covers and bookings review
Tell us your venues, your quiet shifts and your current booking mix. We will map where demand and margin are leaking, and what to fix first.
Related reading
Hospitality
Restaurant Marketing: 10 Strategies That Drive Covers
From Google Maps to UGC campaigns — marketing that fills tables.
Hospitality
Hospitality Marketing: Hotels, Restaurants & Event Venues
From Google Maps dominance to Instagram-worthy campaigns — marketing that fills rooms and tables.
Local SEO
Google Business Profile Optimization: The Complete Checklist
Your GBP listing is your most important local marketing asset.