Hello and welcome to another episode of bar owner tv. Football season is almost here and I’ve had a lot of emails in the past few weeks from bar owners asking me how to start promoting their football specials, how to get brand new customers into their doors, and how to keep them coming back for the entire football season.
So I thought this was the perfect topic for this episode. In my newest report The Bar Restaurant Business Manifesto I talked about a very important core concept and strategy that I use with all my clients. List building. Capturing new & existing customers personal contact information. Their email, home address, and cell numbers so we can use the most direct, low cost ways, to hit your most profitable prospects that will take you up on your offer.
Anytime I’m helping a client with a new promotion, this is the strategy I always use and I’ll explain exactly how and why in just a minute.
First I want to cover how to get brand new football customers into your doors. The first thing you need to think about is who are you trying to target? Who are you trying to get into your doors for football? My guess would be men that live within a few miles from your business who have money to spend right?
What age are they? What income bracket are they in? You need to get specific with this. Who is your best ideal prospect that you want to get into your doors for football?
Once you know this, now you need to figure out what kind of offer or incentive is going to get that prospect to walk into your doors for the next big game without even thinking about going over to the competition? Is it a free meal, a percentage off on their tab, tickets to a game, or some other valuable prize? The better the offer you have the better your response is going to be. The key idea here is to create offers that are more valuable than your competition but do it in a way where you are still going to make a good profit.
Once you figure this out, you now need to think about, “What is the best, low cost way, for me to get my offer into the hands of my perfect customer?” my answer to that is always direct mail because you can pin point exactly who you want to go after by buying a mailing list of your ideal prospect. Plus you’d want to use social media because it’s free and you get massive exposure from it.
So lets back up a quick second. The first step is to determine your perfect prospect. The second step is to create your valuable offer. The third step is pick the media you’re going to use to deliver your offer, in which I suggest direct mail and social media over anything else. Now we need to figure out what is going to be the call to action and how you are going to use list building strategies with this promotion so you can continue to market to your most profitable prospects all year long.
Lets say you use direct mail postcards and your offer has something to do with present this card and get “x”. What ever your offer is. You want to make sure you keep each of those postcards that has their information on it and have the severs staple it to the receipt. If you see these people are spending very little money and just after your offer, then don’t waste money marketing to them again. If they are big spenders, you want to put them into a “football” database and continue to market to them all season long.
These are the types of people you need to pack your bar with to make your football season more profitable then last year!
Here’s another type of promotion to get new customers in the bar. Lets say you joint ventured with a few sponsors and you went out and bought a 52 in flat screen tv. Your offer to get new guys in the bar is to come in and win the TV. The list building strategy here is where everyone in the bar during the game fills in their contact information on a small sign up sheet and you pick the winner at the end of the game. You take all those people’s personal contact information and put them into your “football” database.
Your ultimate goal when you are trying to generate new customers is to create a list of the customers that take you up on your football offer because these are going to be highly profitable people to market to about future football specials. When you combine this list building strategy with existing customers you could easily have a list of a thousand people who you know likes to go to the bar to watch football.
Instead of doing what most owners do and use mass media marketing such as tv, radio, newspaper, and hope they get a good response and pray that the right people see or hear their ad, now you are ONLY marketing to people who like to go to the bar to watch football. Doesn’t it make sense to ONLY market to the people who desire what you are offering?
If you want to pack your bar for any NFL game, even if it’s not your home team, you need to build yourself a list of prospects who like to go to bars and watch the games.
In the next episode I’m going to talk about how you can use simple one page websites to build a list of 500-1,000 raving football fans by using direct mail, social media, and your employee’s. Be on the look out for this next week because this strategy here will outperform anything else your competition is doing.
Please leave any questions or comments below and I’ll do my best to get back to you within a few days.
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