Critical Marketing Mistakes Bar & Restaurant Owners Make-Part 1
Nick Fosberg here with Bar Restaurant Success and this is part 2 of Critical Marketing Mistakes Bar & Restaurant Owners Make. If you haven’t seen part one, click the link above, and I highly suggest you watch that because I revealed a simple fix that could triple the results of your marketing and two other mistakes that could be costing you tens of thousands of dollars per year.
Today, I’ve got 2 more mistakes to give you and the solutions to fix those so you make more money and get more customers in the door.
#4 – Not Having A Back End Product To Sell
Mistake #4 is not having a back end product to sell. Now you’re probably thinking, “What the hell are you talking about?” and those were my exact words to my marketing coach who helped me implement this.
For example, you should definitely be running lead generation campaigns such as collecting people’s contact information in exchange for some kind of valuable offer to your business. When you do this, you can set up an automated e-mail, text, or letter to go out to these people with another offer to get them back in the door. I refer to this as a “profit maximizer.”
A perfect example would be to make them an offer designed around where it’s good for 4 people to boost the check average. Why try to get only them back in the door? Instead, send them a follow-up offer designed to get 4 people in the door. If people usually spend $20 with you, that’s an $80 tab rather than $20. This right here is a very simple way to increase your sales and profits using marketing automation. Once you set it up, it runs forever, consistently bringing you profits.
#5 – Not Understanding
Your Customers’ Real
Needs & Desires
Mistake number 5 would be not understanding the real needs and desires of your customers for the offer or promotion you are running. If you think about it, there are many different types of demographics of people who go to bars and restaurants.
If you’re a fine dining restaurant and you’re trying to get people in for dinner for two – instead of just mentioning your promotion and prices, get into their minds and figure out what makes these type of people want to take you up on your offer. For a promotion like this to bring up the ambiance, the fact that couples getting away for a night out from the kids would better the relationship, tell them what is going to happen when they come in. You need to get into selling the benefits of the promotion because this is what they really care about – the experience they will have.
Another example is people go to bars and restaurants to obviously, eat. Why are they doing this? Because they don’t want to cook and do all the clean-up. They want to be catered to. They want to eat food that tastes better than home cooking. Convenience! When you understand the wants and desires of why people are going to an establishment like yours, you need to tell them how you offer a solution to an issue or problem they may be facing.
The two mistakes I mentioned today are not topics you will hear about within our industry because nobody is really teaching strategies like these. I learned about these through marketing books and going to marketing seminars. But it’s the small but critical things like this that will differentiate you from the competition, allow you to convert way more potential customers into paying customers, and ultimately make more money.
If you want to see an example of how to use a back end marketing system in your business and how the one I’ve used with several clients has brought them between $8,100 and $59,000 in sales from sending 3 automated e-mails after an opt-in, click on the link below. I promise you, after you watch it, you’ll be addicted to this style of marketing. Please leave any questions or comments below.