Hello and welcome to another episode of Bar Owner TV. I’ve been getting a lot of feed back from viewers who want more information about how to make their marketing more profitable. How to make their marketing produce better results and get more prospects to take action.
So the next few video’s that I post are going to be about the 7 rules to follow to effective ads and promotions. So lets start of with rule number one and that is There will always be an offer or offers.
What most bar owners do when they spend money on marketing is they just promote their specials or live entertainment. Whether it’s a $5 burger, a $2 bottle, a $6 martini night, or a ncaa special, that’s all they advertise. This kind of marketing should only be done in house or sent through a text message or e-mail to your own list of customers.
Anytime you are spending money on marketing you need to at least, at the very least, break even on your marketing. Get enough people in the door, spending money, to cover the cost of your marketing expenses.
By making an offer, a valuable offer I should say, in your marketing, you will at least double or triple the response of your marketing. I was working with a private client last month who was trying to pick up his Tuesday nights because they were really really slow. He started advertising $2 bottles in his newspaper. He told me he had been running a ad in his newspaper about his special for 8-10 weeks and saw very little increase in customers.
So not only did he lower his prices to everyone else that was already paying $3.25 a beer but he got only a few new faces in the door. So really he lost money on his existing customers and lost several hundred dollars marketing his $2 bottle.
What I suggested he did was change the way he promoted his bottle specials and what I came up with was “Come in with a group of 4 and get a bucket of beers FREE”. This is a valuable offer, much more powerful and more compelling offer then a $2 bottle, wouldn’t you say?
The more value you can add to your offer, the better the results your are going to get. Now you might be thinking, well no shit, your giving beer away for free, if I was to sell $2 bottles I would make more money but now I’m losing money by giving away free beer. Good point and let me clarify that.
As a bar owner and as a marketer of your bar, you need to test different offers and test different marketing media’s. Some offers work better then others and you will never know unless you test test test.
My client was very reluctant to do this too. So to make him believe this would work, I told him I would pay for him $2 on every bottle he gave away if he didn’t make more money from the campaign I created for him. I knew it would work, I knew I wouldn’t lose, because of the way I structured the offer.
What my client saw was that each person averaged about 4 beers and he didn’t keep selling the bottles for only $2. I told him to sell them at his regular price for $3.25 and in order to get this deal, the 4 people had to purchase a meal, a appetizer, or a pizza.
This way, in order to get the free bucket of beers, at the very least he broke even if they only took advantage of the free beer and didn’t order any more.
So here’s exactly what happened. The marketing campaign attracted more people because of the great offer. You see a bucket of beer for free and if you are a beer drinker, you are going to read every word of that ad! So this grabbed probably 50-75 times more attention then the $2 bottle ad that everyone else was running.
Instead of just trying to attract one customer with a $2 bottle beer, this campaign brought in 4 people for every person who wanted to take advantage of this. This campaign also raised the ticket value from one person having just 3 to 4 beers at $2 a pop to 4 people buying an appetizer or meal and then averaging 3 more beers at $3.25.
After adding up the ticket transactions, this promotion averaged nearly $74 per group of people who took him up on his free bucket offer.
That’s it for today and don’t forget, you must always make an offer or offers. The more valuable, the better the response.
