How much should a restaurant spend on social media marketing?

The short answer: it depends on whether your bottleneck is skill, time or both. A venue doing its own content well spends $400 to $1,500 learning the skill properly. A venue that wants a month of content made for it spends around $3,500 a quarter on shoot days. A venue that wants social media fully handled spends $3,000 to $8,000 a month. I'll break down what each level actually buys, and the mistake I see venues make at every single one of them.

I worked in hospitality for years before I started doing this, so I know exactly how that question lands when margins are what they are. I'm not going to pretend a pub has tech-company money. What I will say is this: social media is where people decide where to eat now. Not Google. They see a venue in the feed, they send it to a mate, and Google reviews are the final check, not the discovery. If your marketing budget doesn't reflect that, it's pointed at the wrong decade.

First, the proof it's worth spending anything at all

St Andrews Hotel, a family pub in Fitzroy, went from about 35,000 to over 300,000 monthly organic views with zero ad spend, and social became the venue's main driver of foot traffic. The Sunday roast sells out because of videos. That didn't take a celebrity budget, it took consistent, well-made content that gave people a reason to come in. The budget question is really just: who makes that content, and how good is it?

Level one: you make the content, you pay to get good — $400 to $1,500

If you or someone on your team genuinely enjoys making content and has the time, the cheapest real option is coaching. One call ($400) gets your current content diagnosed and a clear direction. A six-week package ($1,500) gets three sessions plus message support, so you can send a video before you post it and fix the hook while it still matters. The mistake at this level is buying no help at all and spending a year posting into the void. The skill is learnable, but feedback is what compresses a year of guessing into six weeks.

Level two: the content is made for you — about $3,500 a quarter

A shoot day produces roughly 12 to 16 edited videos, which is three to four posts a week, a month of content. To be clear on what this is: it's not a crew with lights and a cinema camera, it's social-first content shot the way social actually rewards, planned around your venue and edited natively for the feed. Most venues don't change enough month-to-month to need a shoot every month, so a shoot each quarter, topped up with your own phone footage in between, is the sweet spot for a lot of venues. Your time cost is two to three hours per shoot. The mistake at this level is treating it as a one-off: a single beautiful month of content followed by silence reads worse than steady, decent posting.

Level three: fully handled — $3,000 to $8,000 a month

This is strategy, monthly shoot days, editing, captions, scheduling, comments and reporting as one system. Across the Australian market that runs anywhere from $3,000 to $8,000 a month depending on inclusions; mine starts at $5,000. It's the right level when the maths works: if your average table is worth $80, around 15 extra tables a week covers a $5,000 retainer. That's a couple of extra tables a night, and everything past that is profit the content keeps earning. The mistake at this level is buying it too early, before you know your product is right. Content amplifies what you are. Amplifying an average venue just tells more people it's average.

Whatever you spend, spend it in this order

• Organic before ads. Test what works for free first. Boosting content that didn't work organically is paying to flop in front of more people. Ads come later, behind proven videos.
• Video before photography. Beautiful photos have their place, but video is what travels, and lo-fi phone-shot video outperforms polished camera work on reach almost every time.
• A reason before a budget. The best money I ever helped a venue spend wasn't on content at all, it was creating the thing worth filming: the weekly special, the signature night, the dish people make their personality. Engineer the reason to come in, then film it.

And whichever level you pick, hold it for six months before you judge it. A venue that spends $1,500 consistently will beat a venue that spends $8,000 for two months and quits.