Today we’d like to introduce you to Christian Paula.
Hi Christian, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Five years ago, Button Up Media was born out of a very specific frustration, and a very specific opportunity.
Before starting the company, we spent time working in the agency world, learning the business. But we also saw the side of the industry nobody advertises: manipulative sales tactics, long-term contracts designed to trap business owners, and “social media marketing” that was really just posting a few photos on instagram and calling it strategy. The agencies we encountered were often more focused on closing deals than delivering a propper service, especially for small business owners who didn’t have time to audit what they were paying for.
Restaurants were the clearest example of who was getting left behind.
The restaurant industry is high-competition, low margin, and unpredictable. It’s a “want,” not a “need”yet people search for it everywhere: Google, Instagram, TikTok, maps, review sites, and every corner of the internet. At the same time, many restaurants, even large ones, invest little or nothing into online visibility. Not because they don’t care, but because restaurant operations are unstable by nature: costs change, staffing shifts, and customer traffic can swing week to week. That makes it hard to commit to rigid, long-term marketing contracts.
So we built Button Up Media around a different belief: restaurants deserve social media marketing that matches how restaurants actually operate: flexible, consistent, measurable, and built for modern discovery. When we started five years ago, most restaurants were either relying purely on word-of-mouth or paying agencies to post static photos on Instagram and Facebook, already outdated even then. We saw a massive gap in the market and decided to specialize: not generic “small business marketing,” but a team obsessed with the food and hospitality niche.
Our approach has always been built from the inside out. Instead of outsourcing the execution, videographers, photographers, website developers, ad managers, social managers, we built an in-house team that could own quality, move quickly, and stay consistent. Where we saw the largest difference was in our bread and butter – social media marketing. That internal structure gives clients schedule flexibility, reliable production, and the same faces working with them month after month, which builds trust and makes collaboration smoother. Most agencies dont operate this way because it ads a larger more consistent overhead cost, but to us it makes all the difference.
Strategically, we don’t just “follow trends.” We create structured content systems across the funnel:
• Top of funnel content that reaches a large local audience,
• Middle funnel content that builds trust and preference,
• Bottom funnel content designed to convert, paired with tracking efforts so performance isn’t a guess.
As we grew, we expanded in the same direction: deeper specialization, not broader offerings. Today our core pillars include organic social media growth driven by food focused videography, restaurant specific Google Ads, and website development, all designed to work together as one ecosystem.
We’ve gotten to where we are today the same way restaurants do: by earning it through results. In 2025, our small client roster, kept intentionally around 10 so we can stay hands-on; generated just under 50 million views. That performance reflects our philosophy: stay focused, stay accountable, and build marketing that’s approachable for restaurants today and scalable for where they want to go next.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
We became known for pioneering on-page, voiceover-style restaurant review content, the kind of informative, “foodie influencer” format that lives directly on the restaurant’s own social accounts.
After the pandemic, we watched food influencer content explode and noticed a clear shift in how people were choosing where to eat. More and more, customers were searching on TikTok and Instagram the same way they search on Google, things like “best Italian restaurant in ___.” What mattered most wasn’t the reviewer’s credentials; audiences primarily wanted quick, helpful context that let them picture the experience for themselves in 20–50 seconds.
So we applied a simple insight that most restaurants weren’t using yet: make the restaurant’s own account produce the exact style of content people were already searching for. We built videos that repeated the search phrase in the hook and the caption. “This is the best _ in __” so the content naturally fed into the platforms’ discovery and search behavior. At the time, almost nobody was doing this on their own page unless they had an outside influencer posting for them.
We also learned something important: viewers didn’t respond negatively to a restaurant “reviewing itself.” The value wasn’t in pretending to be an independent critic, it was in delivering fast, useful information in a format the algorithm already rewarded, posted on the account that actually benefits most from the attention.
Those videos drove real results for many of our early clients, and while platforms have evolved since then, the core strategy still applies: strong keyword signals, bold claims, clear captions, and top-of-funnel content that’s topical, interesting, or funny enough to earn attention then converting that attention into customers.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
Seeing our customers happy with our results. Hearing a client tell me that now they have customers come into the restaurants and say “I see you in the videos”. Or if a client of ours started skeptical but now is a true believer in our service.
Pricing:
- Social Media Marketing + Managment $2000 – $7000
- Google Ads %of budget
- Website Development Starting at $2850
- Website Management $250
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.buttonupmedia.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUHaAwejJoa/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
