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Increase Your Bar Sales with These Unique Promotions

Increase Your Bar Sales with These Unique Promotions

To give you an edge and speed up your slow nights, we have compiled for you a list of Bar Promotion Ideas to speed up your slow nights and further boost your bar sales. 

Here is a list of innovative bar promotion ideas for you to look at when you are in a tight spot but want to increase your bar rush! 

Run Happy Hours 

The list of bar promotion ideas will be incomplete if Happy Hour is not mentioned. One of the most tried and tested ways to promote your bar and rope in several people on slow nights or even daytime is to run a happy hour or one on one scheme. 

Such bar ideas not only boost the sale of your liquor but also act as promoters as they catch attention for your brand. You can post about this on your social media pages to create a hype and even send personal messages to your regulars to act as reminders to visit you. You can use your restaurant management software to run these campaigns by using the already existing customer information in your POS. 

Run Loyalty Programs 

Running rewards-based loyalty programs can work as a stellar bar promotion technique. You can decide if you want to offer a point-based or a visit-based loyalty reward system depending on your average ticket size and customer demography. If you are targeting a growing customer base that visits your bar frequently but does not spend much, you should consider running a visit-based loyalty rewards program. On the other hand, if your customer base comprises of people who visit rarely, but spend more, you should run a point-based loyalty rewards campaign. In both cases, running loyalty programs is going to encourage repeat visits to your bar and increase your sales. 

Send Targeted Promotional Texts and Emails 

Even if you are running special offers or hosting events, all your bar marketing efforts are going to go to waste if you don’t promote them the right way. While you should tap social media to promote your bar events and offers, your marketing will not generate many results unless you target the right customers at the right time. 

Restaurant marketers have been sending bulk SMS and emails to their customer database and often wondered why they never converted to actual sales. The reason is the promotional message may not be relevant to your customers! For instance, if you are hosting a Ladies’ Night at your bar, you should be sending an SMS or email about the same to your female customers, and not to the entire database. Targeted marketing campaigns result in 15 times better ROI. 

Host Live Screening Of Games 

Ever thought how well you can use sports for the publicity of your bar? Drinks and sports go hand in hand, and you can use that fact to promote your restaurant. You can run a drinking game about the next sports event, put up a huge screen, and have live screening of different sports or leagues. You can even give out surprise vouchers or one free drink to celebrate the success of the winning team. This is sure not just to catch the eye of your patrons but of the press as well. 

Get a Special Menu Item 

This bar promotion idea is less of an event idea and more of a marketing strategy. Be known for something, then that dish or drink will automatically promote your bar. Get yourself a signature dish or drink and publicize yourself as the house of that item on all your social media pages. Add it to your bestsellers and be known for it. Next time, the very mention of the dish will remind people of your bar. 

Launch Theme Nights 

A little tried and tested but, effective bar idea is having a theme night in your bar. You can create a different sort of experience for your customers when you introduce a theme to the night as it creates a fun element and gives people a break from the monotony of routine. Come up with different themes that match your bar and its concept and then go on to invite your patrons. Don’t forget to publicize the theme on all your social media channels. You can even create an event page for it if this is a less regular feature of your bar. You could keep different discounts on your drinks that go with these theme nights, and thereby ensure an increase in restaurant sales despite discounts offered. Using a restaurant POS would help you achieve higher strata of marketing, and thereby attract more customers.  

Host Online Competitions 

Who said that competitions to promote your bar had to be offline only. You can run an online campaign and generate a hashtag for the competition. Now this competition can be anything ranging from the wackiest drink a customer can think of if he/she was the bartender to giving a redesign to your classic cocktail or mocktail. The prize can be vouchers for your bar, a free drink for the winner for a month, or even a feature on all your social media pages. You can create a hashtag based on your bar name for this and then let the participants promote your bar to the fullest. 

Engage With An Influencer 

Never underestimate the power of micro-influencers. Bloggers have the power to make your brand when promotions come. Given that they have a huge fan base and people take their word as true, they can go a long way in promoting your bar. Letting them on the other side of the bar, getting your team, and the workings of your bar on their channel and giving them the best of experience would mean, by extension, letting their entire fanbase understand how your bar is. A recommendation from a food blogger will create the buzz that your bar needs. 

Start A Blog 

A blog for a bar may sound like a bizarre idea, but the fact that you are a bar allows you to add elements that you might not normally see in a blog. You can promote your bar through the blog and get people to love the blog by making it casual and fun. You can add humorous stories that happened in the bar, talk about a new dish, tell your customers about gastronomy, and whatnot. A blog for your bar can get you, regular readers, and patrons, for your bar, create a dialogue among your patrons and improve your online discoverability beyond social media pages and online delivery channels. 

Running a bar is stressful and taxing. Promoting your bar efficiently is important if you want to run a successful venture. Employ these bar promotion ideas and watch your profits soar! 

Source: The Restaurant Times