How Distl's brand strategy, organic and paid social helped Perth Japanese restaurant Hiyori book 130 covers in a month and double its audience.
Hiyori is a Japanese bistro in Manning, quiet, considered and big on craft. It opened in late 2024 with excellent food and a pure point of view.
What it didn’t have yet was a crowd. Tucked down a side street with little passing trade, Hiyori needed people to know it was there, and a reason to book. That’s where we came in, across brand strategy, organic social and paid social.
Hiyori’s whole appeal is a feeling. Calm, considered, a place to slow down and eat well. The content had to carry that same feeling, not look like advertising.
So we made the food and the space the hero, kept everything warm and unhurried, and let people sense what a night at Hiyori is actually like. Each post worked as a quiet invitation rather than a hard sell. We set that direction in the social strategy and held every piece of content to it.
We shot on location at the restaurant, building content around the menu as it changed through the seasons. Each shoot mixed photography and short-form video, framed to feel natural and unhurried, the way the room does.
The same shoots fed both feeds: organic posts to grow the audience, and paid ads to drive bookings. For paid, we kept the creative clean, short text and strong visuals. But the food didn’t lead alone. We showed the feeling too, that dining at Hiyori is more than a meal but a chance to slow down and escape. We showed connection as much as good food.
On organic social, we kept a steady rhythm of posts a month, daily community management, and regular shoots to keep everything looking and feeling like Hiyori.
On Instagram, the following grew from 2,662 to 5,584, more than doubling in under a year. Facebook went from 110 to 579. The content looked the way the restaurant feels, and the audience grew with it.
We ran paid social across Meta and TikTok to get Hiyori in front of Perth’s food lovers. The brief was awareness and traffic, getting the place seen by people who’d want to be there.
In the first month, the Meta campaign brought in 130 bookings at around $12 each. On TikTok, the same content reached 3.35 million impressions and 1.65 million video views, at five cents a click.
For a new restaurant on a modest budget, that filled tables and put it in front of a lot of new people.
WA Good Food Guide featured Hiyori on merit. Their reviewers stay anonymous and pay their own way, so there’s no buying a spot. A handful of Perth food creators and local pages covered it too, all unpaid.
Thoughtful and built with heart, a welcome new voice in Perth’s ever-evolving Japanese scene. – WA Good Food Guide
In under a year, Hiyori went from a quiet new opening to a doubled audience, a steady run of bookings, and coverage from Perth’s food press.
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