Promote Your Bar with These 7 Simple Marketing Ideas

With rampant competition, ever-changing regulations and shifting trends to contend with, the trick to gaining and keeping valuable customers is to promote your bar effectively. And the good news is, there’s plenty of creative advertising, promotional and marketing ideas to help promote your bar right.

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* savings based on the average annual turnover of an Australian bar.

Here are some of the best bar marketing strategies you can try:

Nail the Bar Promotion Basics

If you don’t have the funds to pay for professional marketing services, just do the basics well.

In terms of décor and ambience, make sure your bar looks the part inside and out. People judge what type of venue you are before entering the door, so ensure your image sells who you are and sets expectations.

If you’re aiming to be a gastropub or a bar that specialises in food, have a nicely laid out menu on the wall. If you’re more of a straight up bar, get a board advertising happy hour and daily specials.

Other basics include being family friendly, wheelchair accessible, vegetarian/vegan friendly and having a tucked away smoking/vaping area. But perhaps the most important basic feature these days is offering free Wi-Fi.

Understand your purpose

First thing’s first. It’s all too common that businesses owners get a little too determined to open up a bar, without having a clear-cut purpose to their venue. In hospitality, it pays to stand out, but you need to have a reason for why you’re opening your doors.

Think carefully about the kind of experience you plan to offer your customers – are you a top-tier wine bar or are you a laid-back, casual sports bar for those loyal punters? The more defined your experience, the more iconic and memorable your culture becomes. This also makes it significantly easier to attract the exact audience you’re after.

Offer Discounts Strategically

Your pricing strategy is crucial to your success in hospitality. Ideally, it should help you meet your product sales targets, leaving you with a good reputation and be representing the value you provide against competitors. But in reality, this is easier said than done.

If your venue is well-suited to offering discounts, consider how these will be managed short-term and long-term. What’s your strategy? Discount a popular item as a draw-card that will boost sales of other items? Discount on a quiet day to generate traffic?

Discount for larger groups of people? Discount new menu items?

The options are endless, but consider what you are trying to achieve, and what discount will help you to get there sustainably. If you’re not sure where to start, stop and think about introducing events or theme nights that reflect the actual culture you’re aiming for. This will ensure you continue to attract the right audience with promotions that complement the people you want around in your environment. While sports bars may be more focused on team-based promotions, music bars can use live bands or special karaoke events to real in foot traffic. At the end of the day, if you follow a regular schedule that reflects your social media strategy, venue culture and the  discounts you’ve got lined up, you’ll be far better off than not offering anything at all.

However, be wary of discounting too much or you might fall into the trap of being perceived as low quality or of haemorrhaging money. The aim is to keep it all balanced.

Also, don’t forget that people won’t know you’ve got an awesome deal on offer if you don’t tell them! Advertising your specials or discounts on social media and websites like OzBargain or Groupon is a great way of spreading the word, if these platforms suit your customer base.

>> Track your discounts and manage data utilising Impos. Learn how by clicking here <<

Be Easily Found Online

We can’t stress enough how important it is to focus your attention on online visibility and social media marketing.

Every good venue needs an online presence, so they can be found in Google results as well as on popular hospitality sites like Zomato. It can be hard to survive if people can’t find you on Google Maps or work out what drink offerings you have on your menu on their phones. Add to that the age of portable digitalisation, and you’ve suddenly got the responsibility of ensuring you can be found on-the-go, too.

So how do you do all this? Action some high-quality search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics to help leverage your visibility on the likes of Google. Once you’ve solidified exactly how you’re planning to tackle this aspect, kick in some nifty campaigns that are centred around garnering more positive reviews. Remember that Google utilises public feedback a lot, so this is one element you’re going to want to pay attention to carefully.

If you’re not sure how to collect some good word-of-mouth, pop up some incentives in store for customers to leave a review online and be rewarded with a free drink (or other item of your choice). This will help you reap the benefits of gaining those authentic opinions that search giants like Google dote over. Not to mention the fact that this will also positively influence how well you rank in search results.

As for social media, this is your forum for establishing your image, advertising your promotions and keeping your customers updated. To keep things manageable, try investing your time in one channel like Instagram and posting quality images and captions. The rule of thumb is not to try and dabble in too many channels at once. While having a profile on Facebook is still beneficial, if your venue has a lot to flaunt visually, try your hand at really owning the Instagram space first. If in doubt, you can always cross-post using the two platforms’ integrations. By choosing one avenue and nutting down on it, you’ll iron out any gaps in your content and really start to build a loyal, engaged audience. Businesses who tend to fluctuate in their attention towards certain platforms, usually because they’re trying to do too much at once, don’t perform as well.

Ratings and reviews are also key to gaining a positive image, so you should incentivise your regulars to leave positive feedback. Holding a competition, in which a requirement is a Facebook like or share, is a great way to generate these.