Every business experiences seasons of slowness. Your bar is no different. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it.
You probably have thought long and hard about it, and maybe tried a few things without any results.
Relax, I have got you covered.
Wait…
Did you consider running promotions?
Promos are an excellent way to move the needle on your bar (or restaurant) business. Promotions can be anything from freebies, discounts, special events, and whatever you can do to get people excited about your bar.
While promotions may not be a new thing, it certainly requires a few things to get it to work well. One of such things is creativity. Regardless of how effective the tips given in this post are, without a bit of creativity you won’t get the best out of them.
There’s one more thing you require to make the tips in this article work.
Data.
You need customer data in order to make your promotions effective. Customer data gives meaning to your promotions. Because how else would you know what to promote when you don’t know what your guests want?
But the question is…
So how do you go about getting customer data?
You could hire a marketing firm to carry out a market research for your business. After which they will provide you with their results and tell you how to use the data.
Or a less expensive method will be to offer free Wi-Fi and use a Wi-Fi marketing & analytics platform to collect customer data. With the Wi-Fi marketing and analytics platform you can collect data such as age, gender, visit frequency, visit days, amount spent per visit, and more.
Using this data, you can better plan and launch a promo campaign that will yield significant results.
Now, let’s look at the 7 promo tips:
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Offer Special Deals On Drinks
It’s a bar, right? Which means drinks are at the centre of what is served. You can offer deals on drinks on certain occasions. For instance, you can offer deals on beer during sporting events (sport nights). To get more people to buy, you can offer special pitchers deals for beverages.
If you know what drink mix your guests love the most, offer it as a special treat of particular nights. A buy-one-get-one-free deal would go well in this instance. Just get it all over your social media page and watch the magic happen.
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Offer Special Deals On Food
Do you know what’s better than a drink at the bar? A drink and a matching meal. You can pick one of your best finger foods, say, chicken wings, and offer it at a discount to your loyal customers on a themed night. Be sure to make the food extra spicy so that they will order a beer with it.
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Organize Game Nights
Humans love to compete. Therefore, organizing a game night is an excellent way to draw attention to your bar. There are a lot of games you could introduce to your guests such as trivia games, ping pong, singing competition, billiard, snooker, etc.
There’s another thing humans love more than competing – rewards! For the winners of the game nights, you could reward them with gift cards or discount coupons for certain meals. This will encourage more people to come around to your bar to play, thereby increasing foot traffic and improving sales.
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Organize Open Mic Nights
Open mic night is a great way to help people ease off their stress. Stand-up comedy, or maybe, storytelling, perhaps? Combine this with delicious meals and cool drinks, and you have got yourself one heck of a night rush.
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Get Some Live Music Going
Music goes well with good food and drinks every time. With this in mind, you can collaborate with local talents and invite them to your bar every now and then (perhaps weekly). To amplify the effect of this, get on social media and spread the word about which local talent would be performing next.
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Take Advantage Of Every Season
Nearly every month of the year has a holiday or season you could take advantage of to run a promotion. June 4th, March 21st, December 25th or 26th, thanksgiving, etc. the list goes on and on. You can organize a bar party to welcome the spring season. Or create new menus for the arrival of the warm summer.
You get the picture?
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Setup A Speed Dating Meet-Up
Speed dating meet-ups can be fun if done properly. It’s a great way to get your guests to interact with each other and make new friends. Since people love these sorts of things, you will see an increase in foot traffic in your bar.
You can charge your guests a small fee for participation as a way to generate revenue on the side.
So there you have it; 7 promotion tips to put an end to slow nights at your bar. Try to use social media and email newsletters to create awareness for every promotion you run.
Remember, your promotions are only as good as the customer data you have.
To learn more about how you can collect valuable customer data with Wi-Fi marketing, contact us today. We will show you how it’s done.
POSTED ON October 25, 2019