Every owner asks this eventually, usually around 9pm on a Tuesday when the dining room has eleven people in it and two of them are staff. How much am I supposed to be spending on this?
The internet will tell you 3 to 6 percent of revenue. That number is fine as a starting point and useless as a plan, because it treats a brand new place fighting to be known the same as a fifteen year old institution that just needs a steady hum of reservations. Those are completely different problems with completely different price tags.
Start with what the money is supposed to do
Good marketing for restaurants starts with a job, not a budget. Are you trying to get found by people who do not know you exist? Get people who came once to come back? Fill a specific daypart that is dragging the whole week down? Those cost different amounts and take different amounts of time.
A new opening in a competitive market is going to spend heavier for the first six months because awareness is expensive and there is no shortcut. An established neighborhood spot with a strong regular base is usually better off spending less, but spending it consistently, on the handful of things that bring people back.
"Spend less on everything and more on the one thing that is working."
What you are probably overspending on
Discounting is the big one. Deals feel like marketing because they move covers, but a discount that runs too long stops driving traffic and starts training people to wait for the next one. If your Tuesday special is the only reason anyone comes on Tuesday, you did not fix Tuesday. You just made it cheaper.
The other one is spreading a small budget across five channels so thin that none of them do anything. Three hundred dollars split five ways is five ineffective campaigns. Three hundred dollars aimed at one thing you can measure is a test you can learn from.
What is usually underfunded
Photography. It is the single highest leverage thing most restaurants ignore, and it quietly limits everything else. Bad photos cap what your social can do, what your delivery listings convert at, and whether a food writer covers you. Editors pass on great stories with unusable images all the time.
The other underfunded piece is the stuff that keeps existing guests coming back. Email, loyalty, a reason to return within thirty days. Getting somebody in the door the first time is the expensive part. Getting them back is comparatively cheap and almost nobody works at it.
A number, since you asked
For a single location doing steady volume, a realistic all in marketing budget usually lands somewhere between one and three thousand dollars a month once you include creative, media, and someone managing it. Newer places and multi unit groups run higher. If that range makes you wince, start with photography and one channel you can measure, and grow it out of results instead of hope.
The worst version of this is spending nothing for eight months, panicking, and spending four thousand in one month on a campaign nobody planned. Consistency beats intensity in this business, same as it does in the kitchen.