Bar Marketing Strategy: How to Avoid Slow Nights Before They Happen

Speaker A: Bar owners who never seem to have a slow night aren't lucky. They planned to avoid having a slow night. Now, a lot of this is marketing and most bar marketing is tactical. By default. You respond to what's happening now and that's both expensive and ineffective. The Anchor Rhythm Tactical marketing system covers your year, your week and tonight. And once you build it, most marketing decisions will make themselves. Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Schneider, the bar business coach. And if you're tired of figuring out every bar problem alone, well join Bar Business Nation, our free Facebook group for bar owners who want better ideas and real conversations. The links in the show notes. Today on the Bar Business Podcast we are talking about marketing and more specifically a system I like to use called Anchor Rhythm Market Tactical. And essentially what that means is we're going to look at different time frames. Now, if you're like most bar owners, your marketing is reactive and probably ineffective. You're doing it infrequently after you already need sales and there's no real global plan for what's going on. And so if you're just posting online when you remember or when things are slow, your marketing isn't working for you. It might be helping a little bit, but you're not maximizing the effect your marketing can have for your bottom line. And the Anchor Rhythm Tactical system we're going to cover today, it gives every marketing decision you make a home. Anchors are your big plan moments, Rhythms are your weekly habits that build loyalty. And Tactical is your short term response tool. When we put the three of those together, they cover your entire year without requiring you to reinvent marketing every month or every week. So I think the first thing here that's important is why does reactive marketing cost you more than you think? And when you're just posting a special because it's slow or running a promo because last week was bad, that might help solve the immediate problem, but it's not building anything. And even if you're helping to solve the immediate problem, it's less effective than if you had a long term strategy because, well, quite frankly, your marketing's not cohesive. Right? We talk about concepts being cohesive and how everything needs to be consistent. Visit to visit how that experience you give your guests needs to be the same regardless of who's behind the bar, who's working what time or day they come in. And that's true of your in person guest experience. That's also true of your marketing and most of the operators that they're consistently filling their seats. They have a plan for this and they're executing it well. When you plan your marketing in advance, you're going to put more thought into it, you're going to execute better, and you're going to have better results than the average bar in the market who just throw things out when they think about it. So the whole goal of this anchor rhythm tactical system is to make most your marketing decisions once in advance, and then execution becomes the only daily task. You're not thinking about what to do, you're just doing it. So let's go through this level by level. Level one is our anchors, and anchors are major plan marketing moments. Now, these can have the events, these can be holidays, these can be occasions, these can just be things I want to focus on this month. But a lot of time in every month, we're going to have something that makes a good tie in, right? Late July, early August, we're talking back to school. Can we tie in something there? Now, obviously we're not selling beer to kids, but is there some tie in that we can do that's going to speak to people? Because that's the messaging they're already receiving this time of year. But as we look throughout the year, New Year's eve, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Super Bowl, Memorial Day, Labor Day, the anniversary of your bar, local events, festivals, all of those are things you can leverage to help bring in more business. Now, anchors in general, when we're talking about these, uh, we're going to want at least 60 to 90 days of lead time. We want to develop the concept, build out what the promotions are going to be, make sure the staff is trained on what we're doing from a marketing end and what promotions we're running so they can execute them flawlessly. If we're doing specials or something different than we normally do, we might have to order inventory, make cocktail menus specific to this time period, of this frame that we're focused on. And we want to schedule our marketing well in advance. Now, for most bars, when we talk about these kind of anchor events, they're treating them as things that will happen to them. They're scrambling the week before, right? I tell everyone New Year's Eve should be planned in October, like done. It's three months ahead of time. Now, when we're talking about a big system like this, a lot of times, the way I like to look at it is spend Q1, planning marketing for Q3, spend Q2, planning marketing for Q4, right? We're working three to six months ahead of time. But that way we're never caught with our pants down. We're always on top of what needs to happen. And so for your specific bar, what these anchor events are exactly will be a little bit different. Right. New Year's Eve is probably true for everyone around the world. Memorial Day, Labor Day, very true. If you're in the United States, the giant summer festival your town every throws every year, well, that's just specific to your town. But come up with what these anchor events are. And really, you should have at least one a month that you can program around in order to drive your marketing that month. Then we go to the next level, which is rhythm. Rhythm is your reoccurring weekly or monthly habits that build loyalty and consistency and keep regulars coming back. So when we talk rhythm, that's things that you're doing all the time, whether that's trivia, karaoke, an industry night, live music. Every other week you hold a poker tournament, whatever that may be. That's what those rhythm events are. That's the consistent programming you're doing to bring guests in the door. And you need to constantly be promoting that activity. Right. If you have a great karaoke night, yeah, people are gonna tell their friends, yeah, they'll come in more. But you also need to go out there and market it. And the power of this whole rhythm piece, this level of the system, is that it's consistent. You need every guest to know that every Thursday you will do trivia so they can plan around it whether they enjoy trivia or not. Maybe they're saying, uh, I'm not going to be there because it's trivia, because that's not my thing. But maybe they're going, hey, I love trivia. I'm going to be there every Thursday. Now, when we talk about rhythm, it requires almost no marketing. What's established beyond posting it on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok, wherever you're using your socials to make sure people are aware. Now, uh, a lot of times I'll talk to people and they'll say, well, you know, trivia really isn't working. Well, if you haven't been pushing it marketing wise and you haven't been doing it for at least 90 days, maybe you're trying to bail before you get the actual results. You should. Now, in this weekly programming, we want to have two to four things a week for most bars, and we want to have this programmed out from a marketing perspective so that on our socials every week, we're hitting these different events One great thing to do is, uh, say every Monday, make a post to say, here's what's coming up this week. And then every night as things happen, post it. But you need to get people excited and you need to remind them, right? Just because I know you have trivia every Wednesday doesn't mean I'm gonna show up every Wednesday. But if you, if I get a reminder, like I'm looking at Facebook, it's Wednesday at five and it says, oh yeah, trivia is tonight at eight, I go, oh shit, I should go in there and do that now. The third level of our marketing system is tactical. Tactical is your short term marketing response. It's what you reach for when you need to bump revenue a little bit this week or when you're reacting to something in the moment. It could be a last minute event you put on. It could be a special that you're running this weekend or this day. It could be, oh, uh, I have inventory that's not moving, I need to move it. So I'm gonna go push this real quick. The thing to remember is this tactical marketing, right? We already have across all the socials and all of that, the big anchor marketing where we're hitting big events and trends in the year. We already have the rhythm marketing where we're hitting our weekly, bi weekly, monthly events and making sure those are pushed. So we already have very busy marketing channels. So tactical is a very small percentage of what we actually do. I mean maybe 20, 25%, if 80% of what you're doing is tactical, you're being too reactive, too forward, and quite frankly disjointed. And so your guests are going to notice that tactical works because it's tactical. We're, we're deploying it against a defined small problem. We need more people in here on X. I need to push this inventory. I want to run a special on Y. Right, Whatever that may be. Now, uh, for a lot of this though, even though we're doing it in the moment, even though this is coming out not in such a scheduled way, let's say, is our rhythm and our anchor marketing link, it's something that we can develop a toolbox for. And so find four or five, six post formats that work really well for you across different social media types. Have a go to promotion type, know what the style is, know what the verbiage sounds like. That way if you do have something where you need to get this out, like now, right now, you're not starting from scratch, you're working from a preset Playbook of how marketing works for your bar. Now, uh, the key to all of this, the real key to all of this is you have to be organized. And not just kind of organized, really organized. So start with anchors, map your entire year. And this is an exercise that I really am big on doing. Like December every year is mapping out the next year because I have most of the data from the prior year. So I can start to balance those two things. Once you have all your anchors mapped out and you've assigned when you're going to determine the marketing for that anchor and then a little bit about what that marketing looks like. Uh, all right, what frequency are we going to post? Where are we going to post? What materials will we need to be able to run this campaign? Then we're going to move on to rhythm. So you're two to four times a week that you're having events, whether those are weekly or monthly occurring. We want to get those on that calendar too, when the actual event is, but also when are we posting to push that event? Then we want to leave space for the tactical. We don't want to fill every week entirely. Now you can post three or four times a day. It's not going to bother most people because most people are not going to see your posts. That is the nature of modern social media marketing. However, having spots set aside where, you know, hey, this day I'm not pushing anything. This is perfect. I can drop in. Whatever's important is good in some way. We can schedule our technical, not that we know what we're going to talk about, but we can leave that space so we know we're going to talk about something. And if you do those, you've built out a calendar that is quite robust. You've actually written a marketing plan without writing a marketing plan. You know what you're going to do, when, where, and how. Then all you have to do is execute. It makes your life so much easier. It makes marketing not something that gets dropped, but something that gets executed in a repeated way and done very well. Now, if you're planning out a whole year, you should review this every quarter, right? Leave room so that you can look at the data that you've worked on, work at, uh, look at what's actually worked in m the last 90 days and tweak what you're doing in the future. Right? Nothing in this business is set a plan and forget it. If you have a plan, you need to tweak that plan on a reoccurring basis to improve it, to make it right and to make your business flourish. Now, if you do all of this, you're going to be less stressed, your customers are going to have a better idea of what's going on, your team is going to be aligned with what you're doing from a programming and marketing standpoint. And most importantly, your guests will know what to expect, when to expect it, and you will deliver, which builds the best marketing that you can ever have. Positive word of mouth that about wraps it up for today. If you enjoyed today's insights, make sure you like subscribe and leave a review. If you are ready to take your bar to the next level, schedule a strategy session with me by clicking the link in the show notes below. Until next time, have a great day and we will talk again later.