St. Patrick’s day is always a pretty busy day for bars, even the non-Irish bars. This special day gives everyone an “excuse” to go out and drink as much green beer and Jameson as they want while soaking it up with some Ruben’s and corn beef dinners.
Today I’m going to give you a promotion I ran at one of my bars 2 years back. It’s called the “Pot Of Gold” Promotion and this can work for any bar and could work for some restaurants depending on the layout and atmosphere.
Pot Of Gold St. Patrick’s Day Promotion
What I did was I reached out to a company called Interactive Promotions and they have this game that they will insure for any amount of money you want, where you get 3 different games, and each game consists of 20 envelopes. (If you decide to do this, e-mail Alicia Milillo at milillo@interactivepromotions.com and tell her Nick from Bar Restaurant Success sent you!)
Inside of each group of 20 is 3 winners. If you pick ONLY the 3 winners, you would win the $10,000 (or any amount you choose) that is insured by Odds On Promotion.
How To Run The Promotion
Since there were 3 games to play and to prolong this as much as possible, we did one game per hour. For every drink or food item we served, people would get one raffle ticket. We would then pull a raffle ticket and that person would get to participate.
We had 20 big envelopes made with a black pot of gold on the outside of them and we stuck each of the security envelopes from the insurance company in the festive envelopes. To make sure everyone could see, we posted those envelopes up on our wall.
Again, to win the $10,000 they had to pick the exact 3 winners. Of course, the odds are in their favor so to make sure everyone is a winner, Interactive Promotions printed up other prizes for us to put in those envelopes such as a free meal, gift cards, t-shirt, etc. This way if they open a non-winner from the very start, they still have some hope to win some cool prizes.
The Cost To Run This Promotion
The insurance alone was around $550-$600 for the $10,000 insurance but we had two of our distributors take care of $500 of the investment. So this really only cost us $50 to $100 bucks!
Take This To
The Next Level!
What I decided to do this year is to take this a step further. This year we’re building out a lead capture page and had some hot actresses create a video for us in green gear that we will use on Facebook to promote the event.
Right now we pay about .01 to .03 per video view on Facebook which is EXTREMELY cheap, highly targeted views! If I’m looking to get the most exposure to the right people for the least amount of marketing dollars, it’s Facebook video ads!
What Happens With Online Sign Ups?
If people sign up online, they will increase their chances of getting picked to win $10,000. This also gives me a chance to make everyone a winner who signs up online by giving them $5 off their tab during another slow time of the week before or after St. Patties Day.
Of course, this also gives me a chance to get new customers into my marketing follow-up system which is the key to creating big pay days in your business.
Retarget Em!
For all the traffic we get to our lead capture page, I’ll have retargeting set up which means I can follow all the people that hit the site around with banner ads, all over the internet to remind them about our big promotion (Or any other promotion in the future!) I’ll also set up Facebook retargeting as well where we will hit everyone on Facebook with ads a few days before the event to remind them as well.
Retargeting will give you the highest ROI on your marketing dollars over anything else because you’re only targeting people who have expressed interest in your business or promotion before. You don’t hit what I call “cold” traffic, the masses of people who don’t know you.
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