Written by
Abbie Mason
The 3 Things You Need in Place Before Opening a Restaurant
Get you found. Get you booked. Get people back.
Introduction
Opening a restaurant comes with quite the to-do list.
Menus. Suppliers. Recruitment. Training. Photography. PR. Socials. Signage. Launch events. And, inevitably, an urgent conversation about playlists approximately 48 hours before opening.
All important.
But before you start building hype, there are three bigger things we think every restaurant needs in place.
Because your marketing really has three jobs:
Get you found. Get you booked. Get people back.
Everything else works a lot harder when those three things are sorted.
1. Get the foundations right
We talk about foundations a lot at Lala.
For good reason.
They are the infrastructure underneath everything you are about to spend time and money promoting. There is very little point driving thousands of people towards a restaurant if what they find is incomplete, inconsistent or just plain wrong.
Before opening, we would want to see:
Clear positioning and messaging
A mobile-friendly website
A fully set-up Google Business Profile
Correct opening hours, location and contact details
Menus online
Booking links where they need to be
Social profiles ready to go
Strong photography and launch content
Analytics and tracking in place
Consistent information across listings and platforms
Google needs sorting before opening day
Your Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, should not be an afterthought.
For restaurants, Google lets you manage information including opening hours, menus, photos and reservation links across Search and Maps. Once your profile is verified, you can also see performance data including the searches people use to find you, menu interactions and completed bookings.
Google’s Business Profile guide for restaurants
So when somebody hears about your new opening and immediately Googles you, they should find useful information.
Not three conflicting opening times and a random photograph uploaded by Steve.
Your website has the same job.
It needs to look good, obviously. But more importantly, it needs to answer the questions people actually have:
What is it? Where is it? What does the menu look like? When is it open? How do I book?
And please don't hide the booking button in the footer like it has done something wrong.
Social content sits within these foundations too. You need enough imagery, video and storytelling to establish the food, the space, the people and the personality before the doors open.
Content gets attention.
Good foundations make that attention useful.
2. Make the journey from discovery to booking stupidly easy
Right. They’ve found you.
Excellent.
Now:
Can they
book?!
They find you on Instagram.
Can they book?!
They discover you on Google Maps.
Can they book?!
They land on your website on their phone, half-distracted, with approximately three seconds of patience left.
CAN. THEY. BOOK?!
The journey between “ooh, that looks good” and “booked for Friday” needs to be short.
No dead ends. No hunting around. No “link in bio” that leads to six more links and an existential crisis.
And test the whole thing on mobile. Preferably while distracted. That is much closer to how your actual customer will experience it.
This matters even more as restaurant discovery becomes increasingly fragmented.
OpenTable's 2026 UK research found that 36% of Brits plan to use AI more to discover restaurants and book reservations, while its Notify Me feature saw a 97% year-on-year increase in alerts in Britain in 2025.
People are finding restaurants through Google, social, AI, recommendations and booking platforms.
All those roads need to lead somewhere useful.
OpenTable’s 2026 UK Dining Trends Report
Your booking setup also needs to work behind the scenes.
Think:
Reservations and table management
Confirmations and reminders
Deposits and cancellation rules
Waitlists and last-minute availability
Guest preferences and notes
POS and CRM integrations
Marketing permissions
Booking attribution
That last one matters.
If you are spending money on Meta, PR, influencers, Google or email, you should be working towards understanding what is actually driving covers, not just celebrating impressions.
Because 50,000 views are nice.
50 bookings are nicer.
Your booking system isn't just an operational tool.
It is part of your marketing infrastructure.
3. Build CRM, retention and loyalty in from day one
This is the bit we would bring into the conversation much earlier than most restaurants do.
Before your first guest walks through the door, you should already be thinking about what happens after they leave.
That means CRM, customer relationship management, customer data and loyalty.
And if you're looking for a platform to help connect those pieces, Leat is one we would recommend looking at from the outset.
Leat combines loyalty with customer profiles, rewards, vouchers, memberships and marketing functionality. It can bring together activity from POS, bookings, WiFi, ecommerce and marketing systems into a single customer profile, and currently offers more than 200 native integrations.
Why does that matter?
Because not every customer is the same.
Someone has visited four times.
Someone always books Sunday lunch.
Someone hasn't been back for six months.
Someone's birthday is next week.
Someone spends twice your average guest value.
Those are very different customers.
Your marketing should know the difference.
Loyalty is not just “have 10% off”
Thank goodness.
A loyalty strategy might include:
Member benefits
Priority booking
Birthday rewards
Exclusive events
Menu previews
Referral rewards
Recognition of regulars
Personalised offers
Surprise-and-delight moments
The point isn't to discount people into coming back.
It is to give them a reason to want to.
And the numbers make a pretty strong case for it.
Square's 2026 UK research into local businesses found that loyal regulars can generate up to five times more annual revenue, typically returning 11 times a year. It also found that subscriptions to Square's loyalty product grew 46% in 2025.
For restaurants specifically, earlier Square research found 83% of restaurant leaders with a loyalty programme said it successfully increased order size, repeat visits and ROI, while 71% planned to increase their investment in loyalty or rewards.
Read Square’s 2026 Local Economy Report
And we see the same thing in our own work.
In one Lala CRM project, activating a previously untouched hospitality database generated £4,772 in tracked spend in 30 days.
One welcome campaign alone generated £3,700 in attributed spend and brought 78 customers back through the door within a fortnight.
Read our CRM, Email and Unlocking Untapped Revenue case study
Which is why we would rather start collecting and structuring useful customer data from day one than discover a year later that thousands of bookings have passed through the business and nobody has done anything useful with them.
One important caveat: customer data needs to be collected and used properly.
A booking does not give you carte blanche to email someone forever and ever amen.
Under UK electronic marketing rules, businesses generally need consent to market to individuals by email or text, unless the specific requirements of the existing-customer soft opt-in are met. Either way, permissions and opt-outs need to be built into your setup from the start, not hastily bolted on six months later.
Conclusion
Get found. Get booked. Get them back.
Of course there are more than three things involved in launching a restaurant. PR matters. Content matters. Social matters. Paid media, influencers, partnerships, local marketing, photography and launch events all have a role to play. But they all work harder when the infrastructure underneath them is already there. Before you open, make sure you have: 1. FOUNDATIONS A digital presence that makes you easy to find, understand and trust. 2. A VIABLE BOOKING JOURNEY A frictionless route from discovery to reservation. 3. CRM, RETENTION & LOYALTY A plan for turning first-time guests into people who come back. Get found. Get booked. Get them back. Then we can talk about the launch party.