Growth marketing for restaurants and hospitality.

For most operators, no, at least not abruptly. Those platforms are where a large share of hungry people already search, and disappearing from them usually costs volume faster than direct orders replace it. The better framing is margin mix. Keep the marketplace as a discovery channel and make direct ordering visibly better: correct menus, honest pricing, faster checkout, loyalty that only works direct, and something in the bag telling the guest how to order next time. Watch the ratio of direct to marketplace month over month. Once it moves reliably in your favour, you are negotiating from a stronger position.

They are close to decisive, and recency counts as much as the average. A guest comparing two places reads the newest few, not the lifetime score, and a run of recent complaints about wait times outweighs years of praise. Volume and response rate also feed how prominently you appear in local results. The practical work is unglamorous: a consistent, compliant way of asking every satisfied guest, a real response to negative reviews within a day, and the habit of reading them for operational signal. Reviews are the cheapest customer research in hospitality and most operators only read the bad ones.

Yes, and it does a narrower job than most operators expect. It is where the accurate menu lives, where a large booking or a private event enquiry is made, where a search engine and an AI assistant confirm who you are, and where you own the transaction without paying commission. It does not need to be elaborate. It needs to load fast on a phone, show current hours and menu, take a booking or an order in as few steps as possible, and never contradict what your map listing says. We build on WorkspaceCMS so a menu change takes minutes.

Do not spread it evenly. Spend into and just ahead of the peaks, where demand already exists and you are competing for a decision that will be made anyway, then pull back to a maintenance level in the genuinely dead stretches rather than trying to buy demand that is not there. The exception is the shoulder period before a season, which is when bookings for the peak are actually made and where most operators start too late. Photography and content for a season should be finished before it opens, because once it starts nobody has the time.

The guest who already came and never heard from you again. Operators spend heavily on finding new people while doing almost nothing with the ones who liked the place enough to visit once. A direct ordering or booking system, an email list, a simple loyalty mechanic and a reason to return turn a single visit into a habit at a fraction of the cost of acquisition. The second is photography. Most menus are sold by a picture, and a lot of otherwise excellent kitchens are represented online by photographs taken years ago in bad light.