How do you compare restaurant marketing agencies that work with small businesses?
Send the same short brief to two or three teams and compare the reply, not the speech. For a small venue, tuinsta.design looks at month one: which pieces come out, whether there is a photo session in the restaurant and how you leave the agreement. Carlota Fermín sums it up on WhatsApp. If you cannot repeat what they will deliver, do not sign the year.
Write half a page: kind of venue, neighbourhood, what you want to happen (bookings, orders, being found) and what you already have (menu, photos, Google listing). You do not need a strategy deck. You need the three replies to talk about the same thing.
Ask for examples of the same kind of business and a similar radius. A national ecommerce case does not prove they can fill a terrace in Galapagar or a dining room in Malasaña. An agency for a venue is tested locally.
What to score, and what is theatre
Score deliverables, not adjectives. Number of pieces, whether there is a session in the venue, whether there is a campaign or only a calendar, reply time and who signs the work. “Accompaniment” without a list is fog.
Theatre: an email funnel before they state the scope, a promise of going viral, an unreadable report, disdain for WhatsApp. A good sign: questions about margin, the shift and how a booking comes in. At tuinsta.design the working channel with the venue is WhatsApp, because it is the guest’s channel.
The same measure for three agencies
Criterion
What has to be written
Month 1
Pieces, the session and what gets published
Who does it
A name, not “the team”
Visit to the venue
Yes, no, or remote only
Media and production
Ads and photos kept separate
Exit
A short trial before a closed year
Production and bids are not the same budget
If they only talk campaigns and never the photos those campaigns use, you will pay for clicks with weak creatives. A small restaurant runs out of images fast. The comparison has to separate what you spend on media from what you spend on making the pieces.
Ask about the exit too. A one- or three-month trial with something you can count — messages, noted bookings, calls — teaches more than a blind annual. Rigid contracts before you know the service usually benefit one side.
How we answer that brief
Carlota Fermín runs content and marketing; Cristina Osuna does the photography and design in the venue. We do not subcontract the visit to someone who has not seen the room. Month one can be explained: what gets photographed, what gets published and which channel is touched first, almost always Google and WhatsApp before a decorative grid.
If you want to use us as a contrast, send the brief on WhatsApp to +34 634 11 28 99. We reply with scope, not a twenty-slide deck.
How the comparison looks in an afternoon
You do not need a consulting matrix. A sheet with the three replies to the same brief and five rows is enough: what is in month one, who comes to the venue, whether photography is included, how much is ads and how you leave. An empty cell is already an answer. Whoever will not fill it is asking you to sign the fog.
When we answer that brief, Carlota writes the scope and Cristina confirms whether the photo visit fits that first phase. Sometimes the honest reply is that month one is not a campaign: it is fixing the listing and doing a session. If another agency promises floor results without asking how many covers you have, the sheet shows it without a second meeting.
Keep the three replies. At ninety days you can see who met the month-one row and who changed the story. That review is worth more than the tone of the opening proposal.
Once you have the three sheets, do not break the tie by who was nicer on the video call. Break it by who named the person walking into the kitchen. At tuinsta.design that name is Cristina for the photography and Carlota for what gets published afterwards. If another proposal also puts it in writing, compare them properly. If it does not, the sheet already chose.
