Want to be the hottest bar in town every night of the week? These promotional tips coupled with our awesome marketing set-up offer, will help get you there!
Be Strategic with Discounts
When it comes to offering discounts, you will need to come up with your own strategy that ensures your discounts are helping you meet your sales goals, without impacting your bottom line. It has to be enough to entice customers, but not so much that you appear cheap or of a low calibre, and it should be often enough to keep people interested, but not so much that your specials get taken for granted.
Finding the perfect balance for discounts and specials can be tricky, but not impossible. If you want to have a special every night of the week, try to stick to just one thing. For instance Monday might be Parma night, Tuesday might be beer night and so on and so forth. Happy hour specials are also a great incentive that are popular across the board, as they attract customers in for their first drink, and if they enjoy themselves, they will likely stay long after drinks have gone back up to full price.
Just make sure your customers know about any specials you have going. Advertise them on-site using digital signage, your POS receipts, your website, across social media and even through other marketing channels if you feel it’s necessary.
Maximise Your Online Presence
Online visibility is something that can’t be stressed enough in this day and age, especially in terms of social media. Your social accounts – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube – is where you can keep your customers updated, share any events and advertise your promotions. You don’t need to utilise every social platform that’s available, just make sure you’re posting quality images and captions on the big ones like Facebook and Instagram.
Online reviews are also a big one, especially on sites like Zomato and TripAdviser, as well as on your Google My Business page. More and more consumers are turning to online reviews to make purchasing decisions, so it’s essential for you to monitor these reviews and strive to provide a service that’s so good your customers want to jump online and leave a good review.
Attract Customers Every Night of the Week
It’s pretty standard for bars to have Friday and Saturday night drink specials, but what about those quieter nights when getting people in the door to begin with is much harder. Drinking on a Monday or Tuesday night isn’t exactly the trendy thing to do; but with a little promotional work, you can make your bar the place to be early to mid week, as well as on the weekends!
Try to attract customers and small groups earlier in the week with low-key after work drink specials or bar food specials, like ‘Martini Monday’, while later in the week, focus on offering more than your competitors do by having live music, comedy and etc.
Working with some of your suppliers to assist in supporting your promotions particularly beverage promotions can be a great idea. Using banners, posters and merchandise creates an added impact for customers.
Get Involved with Your Local Community
Getting involved with events in your local community, sponsoring local sporting teams and joining in on fundraising activities is all great for business. You’ll not only get your brand out there, you’ll also build a positive image that will help you build up a loyal, local customer base. Local area marketing is a must for any business, both big and small.
Here’s a great little idea. Attend a training night of your local sporting club ie football, netball or cricket. Promote that your venue is offering a rebate back to the club with every dollar the club members spend. Hand out loyalty cards already registered to the venue. Ready to go. What sporting club doesn’t need some assistance with fund raising!
Utilise Your POS System’s Data
What’s working and what’s not? You might be able to get a general feel for how things are going just by being on the floor each night, but your POS system will be able to tell you just how well a certain promotional effort is or isn’t working. For instance, let’s say that on Monday night you run a special on house wines and beers to get people in the door. A quick check of the data stored in your POS system will show you in a clear, easy to read/understand format exactly how many have been sold, what percentage of the overall sales the special contributed to and etc.
By utilising the data stored on your POS system, you’ll be able to analyse the success of your promotional efforts, and if need be, tweak your campaigning to achieve maximum results.
If you want to learn more we have a great marketing promotion to set you all set up with memberships, JoinApp, marketing vouchers and email campaigns. You’ll also receive 250 loyalty cards and 32gb iPad for the JoinApp. Read more here.
