Get Your Bars Buzzing With These Marketing Tips
Sep 14 2016
Feeling like your bar is stuck in a rut? Bar marketing is necessary for almost any bar, but how you market your bar successfully depends on your unique bar aspects. What makes your bar special and why would customers want to go there instead of another bar? Focus on creating a strong branded identity for your bar and marketing based on that.
Come Up with a Bar Marketing Strategy that Fits Your Unique Identity
Before creating a bar marketing campaign, it is essential to create a strong identity for your bar that will set you apart from other bars in the area. If you don’t already have a well-branded bar, look for things that set your bar apart.
Do you have a world-class chef in your kitchen? Are you known for mixology or using local and/or unusual ingredients in your cocktails? Is your bar located in a historical building famous for its architecture? Once you know what makes your bar unique, you can use these aspects to create an awesome marketing brand that customers will remember and associate with your bar.
Once You Have Your Brand, Start Marketing
So, you have your marketing brand. Now you need to create a buzz around your bar. In addition to taking care of all the basic tasks (put up signs, invite customers in and spread word of mouth advertising, connect with other local businesses, etc.), take your bar marketing online. Social media can be especially effective for getting your message out to new customers and gaining more exposure for your bar. Social media management takes time, so it’s best to automate the process.
With an automated social media management solution, you can create a large amount of messages ahead of time that will post throughout the week or month automatically. When thinking of bar marketing ideas for Twitter and Facebook, ask yourself if you would be interested in that post if you read it from a customer perspective. Social media is all about creating engagement and getting visitors to share your posts with their friends. Create bar contests, promote nightly food and drink specials, post customer satisfaction surveys and share pictures and videos of fun bar events to get visitors to your page interested.
Build a List of Marketing Contacts
Once you’ve started to get the word out about your business, it’s time to start building up a loyal base of patrons who you can connect with in order to bring in consistent business. Place online signup forms on your website and social media pages so visitors can sign up to receive exclusive email campaigns or text message notifications.
In order to make customers want to sign up and also keep them engaged, focus on creating exclusive coupons, promotions and contests that are only available by signing up. If your messages excite customers and are regularly opened, your bar will get more business and you will build loyalty with your customers, creating the potential for repeat business.