Pubs & inns
A pub marketing agency that understands wet-led trade
Pubs don't market like restaurants. Trade is split between drinkers, diners, functions and rooms; the competition is the sofa as much as the pub down the road. We build pub marketing around the sessions that actually need filling — and around the locals who never see an advert.
The short answer
A pub marketing agency that understands wet-led trade — what it involves and what it costs
Pubs don't market like restaurants. Trade is split between drinkers, diners, functions and rooms; the competition is the sofa as much as the pub down the road. We build pub marketing around the sessions that actually need filling — and around the locals who never see an advert.
A pub is three or four businesses sharing a roof. Wet trade on a Friday, food trade on a Sunday, functions in the back room, and in many cases rooms upstairs. Each has a different guest, a different lead time and a different margin — and a single generic "come to the pub" campaign speaks to none of them.
What pub marketing agency costs — and where you rank today
Two quick answers before you read on: the price of the work, and a free audit showing which competitors currently outrank you.
The problem
What makes pub marketing different
A pub is three or four businesses sharing a roof. Wet trade on a Friday, food trade on a Sunday, functions in the back room, and in many cases rooms upstairs. Each has a different guest, a different lead time and a different margin — and a single generic "come to the pub" campaign speaks to none of them.
Pubs also compete against staying in. Supermarket alcohol, streaming and delivery have made the default evening a night at home, so the marketing job isn't only choosing you over the pub down the road — it's giving someone a specific reason to leave the house on a specific night.
And the most valuable audience — locals within a mile — is the hardest to reach with conventional advertising and the easiest to reach with disciplined basics: an accurate Google listing, a legible events calendar, a WhatsApp or email list, and a food offer that shows up when someone searches for Sunday lunch nearby.
Built to answer
- “pub marketing agency”
- “how to get more customers in a pub”
- “gastropub marketing”
- “pub quiz and event promotion ideas”
- “marketing for country inns with rooms”
- “how to increase pub food sales”
If you searched one of these, this page is the answer — no generic agency deck, no minimum twelve-month lock-in.
What’s included
What we run for pubs
Session-by-session campaigns
Separate plans for quiet weeknights, Sunday lunch, live sport, quiz nights and seasonal peaks — each with its own audience, creative and target number.
Local search and the map pack
Business Profile with correct categories, attributes like dog friendly, beer garden and live sport, current menus, and a steady flow of recent reviews.
Events that actually sell tickets
An indexable events calendar, event schema, Facebook events and paid promotion timed to how far ahead people book each type of night.
Functions and private hire
A dedicated enquiry page for wakes, birthdays, christenings and Christmas parties, with a response process that gets a quote out the same day.
Rooms, where you have them
Direct booking work for inns with letting rooms so weekend stays don't arrive with 18% commission attached.
The local list
Building an email or WhatsApp list of regulars and using it weekly — the cheapest, highest-converting channel a pub owns and the one most pubs never build.
Ready to price this scope?
Every deliverable above is covered by the two plans — or start with a free audit to see which ones you need first.
How it runs
The first 90 days
- 01
Audit and baseline
Week one is measurement: search visibility, booking and enquiry paths, commission exposure, review recency, and what a booking currently costs you by channel. Nothing gets changed until we know the starting number.
- 02
Fix the fundamentals
Weeks two to six clear the blockers — listings, tracking, page structure, booking friction — because paid spend on top of a broken path just buys expensive proof that the path is broken.
- 03
Scale what converts
From week six we push budget and content behind the segments that produce revenue, and cut the ones that don't. You get a monthly report in revenue terms, not impressions.
Start your first 90 days
See what the weekly and annual plans include, or run the free audit that phase one is built from.
Local pack
Winning the map pack: Business Profile, local keywords and reviews
Roughly the first thing a guest sees for “hotels in {your town}” is three map results — not ten blue links. Ranking there is a different job from ranking your website: it is decided by your Google Business Profile, proximity and relevance to local queries, and the volume, recency and handling of your reviews. We work all three in parallel, and report map-pack impressions, calls, direction requests and booking-link clicks separately from organic sessions.
Google Business Profile checklist
Primary category set to Hotel — not Lodging
The primary category decides which map queries you are even eligible for. Hotels, inns and B&Bs each have a distinct category; secondary categories cover the restaurant, bar, spa or wedding venue you also operate.
Hotel attributes and amenities filled in completely
Free parking, pet friendly, hot tub, EV charging, family rooms, accessible entrance, check-in and check-out times. Google filters the map results by these attributes, so an empty field is a search you cannot appear in.
Booking link pointing at your own engine
Where your profile allows a direct booking link, we point it at your engine with tracking attached, so the commission-free path is the default rather than a metasearch listing.
Photos refreshed on a schedule, geo-context included
Rooms by type, exterior, breakfast, bar, garden and the nearby landmark guests search for. Fresh uploads every month correlate with map impressions far more reliably than a one-off photoshoot.
Q&A seeded with the questions reception answers daily
Parking, late arrival, dogs, cots, nearest station, dinner availability. Owner-answered questions reduce phone friction and give Google more matched text for long-tail local queries.
Posts, offers and events published weekly
Midweek breaks, Sunday lunch, seasonal packages and event nights, each linking to the matching page on your site rather than a generic homepage.
NAP consistency across the citation set
Name, address and phone identical on your site, profile, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, industry directories and tourist board listings — mismatches dilute the entity Google is trying to rank.
LocalBusiness and Hotel schema wired to the profile
Address, geo coordinates, price range, star rating, check-in times and sameAs links tie your site to the profile so both reinforce the same entity.
The local keywords we build pages against
Local demand splits into predictable patterns. Each one needs a specific answer — a profile field, an amenity page or a nearby-anchor page — rather than one homepage trying to cover everything.
| Search pattern | Intent | What answers it |
|---|---|---|
| hotels near me / hotels in {town} | High-intent, map-pack dominated, often booked same or next day | Business Profile + location page with rates, parking and arrival detail |
| hotel near {landmark, station, venue} | Guest is anchored to a place, not a brand — proximity wins | A page per major nearby anchor with walking times and transport |
| dog friendly / family / accessible hotel {area} | Attribute-filtered search, decided by profile attributes | Profile attributes plus a dedicated amenity page |
| hotel with parking / hot tub / EV charging {area} | Facility-led comparison shopping | Amenity page + attribute coverage on the profile |
| wedding venue / function room {area} | Commercial enquiry, high value, long consideration | Venue page with capacities, packages and an enquiry form |
| best sunday lunch / restaurant in {area} | F&B demand that also fills rooms | Restaurant page with menu, sittings and booking link |
| {your hotel name} + reviews / offers / phone number | Brand search — currently intercepted by OTAs | Brand defence: profile, sitelinks, best-rate message |
Review response plan — who replies, how fast, in what tone
Reviews are the part of local ranking most operators leave to whoever has a spare ten minutes. We run it as a rota with response-time targets, so every review is answered, the recovery conversation happens offline, and your reply text keeps reinforcing the rooms, occasions and locations you want to be found for.
| Response target | Scenario | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| Within 24 hours | 1–2 star review naming a specific failure (noise, cleanliness, check-in) | Owner-signed reply: acknowledge the specific issue, state the fix already made, offer to continue offline with a named contact and direct number. No defensiveness, no legal tone, no discount in public. |
| Within 48 hours | 3 star review — the ones that quietly cost you the map pack | Thank them, address the one thing that stopped it being a 5, and name the change. Mid reviews convert best into upgrades because the guest is usually still winnable. |
| Within 72 hours | 4–5 star review | Short, human, specific reply that repeats the room type, occasion or nearby attraction they mentioned — useful matched text for local queries, and it visibly signals an owner who reads. |
| Same day | Review that breaks policy — fake, off-topic, or about a different property | Reply factually for other readers, then submit a removal request with evidence. We track the case rather than assuming the report worked. |
| Ongoing, weekly | Review volume and recency | A checkout-triggered request flow (email or SMS) sent to every departing guest, targeting a steady weekly trickle rather than a one-off spike — recency is a ranking and conversion factor. |
We publish replies under your name, never a fake persona, and we never solicit or incentivise a rating in exchange for anything — both breach Google’s policies and risk your profile. More on the mechanics in our guide to ranking in Google’s local pack.
See where you sit in the map pack today
The free audit includes your current local visibility, the competitors holding the three map slots for your town, and the profile fields costing you eligibility.
Illustrative outcomes
What pub marketing tends to move
Hospitality operators are pragmatic, so we lead with outcomes rather than adjectives: covers, room nights, direct revenue and commission saved.
+42%
online bookings in 3 months
Independent gastropub, Surrey
+31%
Sunday lunch covers
Village inn, Cotswolds
£45k
annual OTA commission moved back in-house
14-room country inn, Yorkshire
2.4x
function enquiries in party season
Town-centre pub, Nottingham
Illustrative examples for demonstration, not verified client results.
FAQs
Pub marketing questions we get asked
- We're wet-led, not food-led. Is this still relevant?
- Yes, though the plan changes. Wet-led pubs live on events, sport, atmosphere and locals, so the work weights towards the events calendar, the local list and social rather than menu pages and reservation funnels.
- Do you work with tenanted and leased pubs?
- Yes. We work within pubco constraints on branding and offers, and we're used to the reality that some decisions aren't yours to make.
- How do you market a pub with rooms?
- As two connected businesses. Rooms get direct-booking and destination work; the pub gets local trade and food work. Bundling them — dinner, bed and breakfast — is usually where the fastest revenue sits.
- What's the fastest thing we can fix?
- Almost always the Google Business Profile plus a proper events calendar. Both are quick, both are cheap, and between them they cover how most people decide where to go tonight.
- How much does it cost?
- £49.99 a week, or £999 paid once for the year — around 62% below the weekly rate. The weekly plan has no long lock-in; advertising spend is separate and stays in your accounts.
Still deciding? Two ways to answer it
Compare the plans side by side, or get a free audit of your current rankings before you commit to anything.
Book your call
Book a 20-minute pub marketing agency call
Pick the plan you want to start on, tell us about the property and we’ll come back within one working day with two slots and your free ranking audit.
Where to go next
Costs, comparisons and a free check on your pub marketing agency
Most operators arrive here wanting three things: a price, a way to compare the options, and proof we know their market before they talk to anyone.
- See what the £49.99/week Starter Package covers
Weekly billing, no minimum term — the plan most independents use to fund pub marketing agency alongside a website, Google Business Profile and local SEO foundation.
- Compare the £999/year Super Deal (62% cheaper)
The same scope paid once for twelve months, so a full trading cycle — including your peak season — is covered by a single invoice.
- Run a free SEO audit for your pub marketing agency keyword
Enter your site and one target keyword to see the SERP competitors, the pages outranking you and a prioritised content plan — no call required.
Next step
Get a free pub growth audit
We'll review your listings, events, food offer and function enquiries, and come back with the three changes most likely to lift trade on your quietest sessions.