We've helped open restaurants in South Florida where the waitlist hit 200 covers on night one. We've also watched openings fall flat because the marketing started the week of. The difference is almost never the food. It's whether the marketing infrastructure was live before the doors were.
This checklist is what we actually run for restaurant opening clients. It's organized by when things need to happen — not by channel — because the sequencing matters more than any single tactic.
12–10 Weeks Out: Lay the Foundation
This is infrastructure work. Nothing here is glamorous, but everything downstream depends on it.
- Claim and verify your Google Business Profile. Verification can take two to three weeks by mail, sometimes longer. If you wait until your soft open to claim your profile, you'll be invisible in Maps during the exact window when word-of-mouth is peaking. Set your opening date, add your category (be specific — "Neapolitan pizza restaurant" beats "restaurant"), and upload your logo.
- Build your website — or at minimum, a landing page. You need a URL that Google can index and that you can link from every other channel. Include your address, hours, concept, and menu (even a preliminary one). A "coming soon" page with just a logo is a wasted month of indexing time.
- Set up citation profiles. Yelp, TripAdvisor, OpenTable (if applicable), and the 40+ directories that feed local search data. Consistency matters: your name, address, and phone number need to be identical everywhere. One mismatch — "St." vs. "Street," a suite number on one listing but not another — creates ambiguity that pushes you down in local results.
- Register your domain and set up email. You'll need a branded email for press outreach, vendor communication, and reservation confirmations. A Gmail address signals that you're not ready for coverage.
9–7 Weeks Out: Build the Narrative
Now you start telling the story — but only to the people who will amplify it.
- Launch your Instagram account. Post three to five pieces of content before you follow anyone. Construction progress, menu development, the team — anything that shows motion. An empty profile with a follow request looks like spam.
- Begin press outreach. Local food editors work on lead times. In South Florida, publications like Boca Magazine, The Palm Beach Post, and Eater Miami need pitches weeks before they publish. Your pitch should have a hook beyond "new restaurant opening" — what's the angle? A chef's background, a concept that doesn't exist in the market, a design story. Attach two to three high-resolution images.
- Identify your influencer shortlist. In our market, we typically line up 8–15 food creators for a restaurant opening. The goal is a staggered rollout: some visit during soft open, some on opening week, some the week after. You want sustained content, not a single spike. Start outreach now because creator calendars fill up, especially on weekends.
- Set your content calendar through opening week. Map out what's posting and when. You need a minimum of three posts per week leading up to open, ramping to daily during launch week.
6–4 Weeks Out: Generate Anticipation
This is where organic buzz starts compounding.
- Launch a "coming soon" email list. Put a signup form on your website and link it from your Instagram bio. Even 200 emails is enough to fill your first few nights. Offer early access or a soft-open invite as the incentive.
- Ramp social content. Behind-the-scenes works exceptionally well in this window. Menu tastings, bar setup, signage installation. The content doesn't need to be polished — it needs to feel real and current.
- Confirm your influencer calendar. Lock in dates, confirm what you're offering (comped meal for two, drinks included or not), and establish content expectations. We always negotiate usage rights — you want to be able to repost their content on your own channels and in paid ads.
- Finalize your Google Business Profile. Upload your menu, add photos of the space (even mid-construction shots if the space looks good), set your service options, and write your business description with your target keywords included naturally.
- Submit to local event calendars and "opening" roundups. Many publications run monthly or weekly "new openings" lists. Getting included is usually free — you just need to know the submission process and the deadline.
3–1 Weeks Out: Activate Everything
- Run your soft open. Invite your email list, friends and family, and your first wave of influencers. This accomplishes three things: it stress-tests operations, generates your first round of user-generated content, and seeds your Google reviews. Ask every guest to leave a review — the first 10–15 reviews carry disproportionate weight.
- Publish your first press hits. If your outreach worked, some coverage should be live or scheduled by now. Share it everywhere: Instagram stories, your website, your email list. Press placement is credibility, and credibility converts.
- Set up your review response workflow. Decide who responds to Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor reviews, and how quickly. The standard we hold our clients to: every review gets a response within 24 hours. Positive reviews get a genuine thank-you. Negative reviews get addressed calmly and taken offline when needed.
- Launch paid social. A small-radius campaign targeting your neighborhood and the surrounding zip codes. You don't need a huge budget — $500 to $1,000 for the first two weeks is enough to build awareness. Target food enthusiasts, people who follow competitor restaurants, and recent movers in the area.
Opening Week: Execute and Capture
This is the harvest. Everything you built in the prior 11 weeks is paying off now.
- Post daily. Reels of the kitchen in action, stories of the line out the door, reposts of creator content. Your content volume should be at its peak this week.
- Monitor and respond to every mention. Tag, repost, and engage with everyone who posts about you. This is free amplification and it compounds — when people see you're responsive, more people tag you.
- Send your email blast. "We're open" with hours, reservation link, and one strong image. Keep it short.
- Check your local search presence. Verify your Google Business Profile is live, your hours are correct, your location pin is accurate, and your menu is showing. Search your own name and your key terms ("pizza near me" + your neighborhood) to see where you're appearing.
The Week After: Don't Disappear
The biggest mistake we see: restaurants go all-in on opening week and then go silent. The algorithm doesn't care about your grand opening — it cares about consistency. Keep posting three to five times a week. Keep responding to reviews. Keep your influencer calendar running for at least another month.
Your second and third weeks are when the initial buzz either turns into sustained traffic or fades. The restaurants that sustain it are the ones that treated the marketing plan as a 90-day commitment, not a launch-week event.
The restaurants that fill tables on month three did the same work on month one — they just didn't stop.
If you're opening a restaurant in South Florida and want to hit the ground running, we build and execute the full launch plan — from local search to influencer to press placement.