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Marketing by definition is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services. In terms of developing effective bar marketing, you have to create a unique atmosphere and offer promotions that are going to attract loyal patrons long-term.

I have complied a list of the top 4 things you have to consider when marketing your bar.

Check. It. Out.

1. Hone In On Your Target Market

This one is arguably the most important thing to consider when marketing your bar, because it is the groundwork that determines whose even going to walk in your door. Your bar’s target market is the ideal group of customers that are most likely to buy into your bar concept. To identify your prospective customer, consider the characteristics of the local population, foot traffic in the vicinity of your location, and your preferred clientele. I want to note preferred as what you want in a customer, isn’t always what you get, and it might not be the most optimal profile to drive real business.

You then have to go deeper when looking at these factors, with considering demographics and psychographics to ultimately shape your bar’s marketing strategy around the preferences of your ideal prospective customer.

2. Creating Your Culture

Your bar culture is the type of experience you create at your bar and should be based on the customers you’re targeting. Bar promotions are often methods used to attract those customers, like events and specials. It is important to keep in mind that the promotions you offer gotta jive with your bar’s atmosphere and entice new customers to come in for a beer… Or three.

3. Establishing an Online Presence

Your bar’s online presence is the primary way people will discover and review your bar in 2018. You can’t simply reply on just word-of-mouth anymore. Creating profiles on Facebook, Instagram, and Yelp are a must. These will be avenues for you to announce bar events and promotions and encourage the right kind of prospective patron to visit and review your bar.

4. Encourage Word-of-Mouth Marketing

I briefly mentioned it in the last section, but word-of-mouth marketing involves encouraging people to recommend your bar to their friends and various acquaintances. It really is still the gold standard of bar marketing. Word-of-mouth can be your number one source of customers, but its only as effective as your bar and service is appealing. Harness your bar’s culture and promotions to establish your identity as the cigar bar, the go-to sports bar in town, or the best karaoke bar in your area, and word-of-mouth will spread quickly and crazily.

Studies have shown that 9 in 10 customers place the highest level of trust in recommendations from their friends, and it only makes sense.

Bottom line…

Bar marketing begins with identifying your target market and developing a strong bar culture to match. Create promotions that appeal to your regulars and a strong online presence and marketing strategy will grow your clientele.

This was only a little appetizer, to obtain the full write-up on my top topics that go into further detail, shoot me a message below with your contact info and what particular areas I covered in this blog post interest you the most. I would love to help out your marketing efforts and get seats filled at your bar!

Branding. Most small businesses know they need it, but few understand branding’s true role in business or what goes into developing a truly memorable one for that matter.

A brand by definition is a business’s unique and deliberate identifier or mark.  It is often developed from some combination of a logo, tag line, colors, and overall design style.  A brand is also the ultimate impression a customer has of a business, rooted from marketing, first-hand encounters, and the business’s reputation.  In both cases, a brand evokes emotion, creates a reaction, incites conversation and what businesses ultimately want: Creates action.

Now, how do you develop a brand that inspires customer loyalty, evoke emotion, and uniquely identifies your business?  It starts with market research gathered while creating a marketing strategy. Primarily, research centered around your business’s given industry, that industry’s trends, your target audience, your business’s goals, your company history, and ultimately your competition.  All of this information determines the following:

Brand Positioning: The starting point in developing a brand is to evaluate your business’s culture, values and your current product and or service offerings.

Is your business serious or is it more playful?

Is your business local, online, national, or some combination of all three?

Are you service oriented or do focus more on being a price leader?

Do you care about the environment and your community?

A well-developed brand takes all of this into consideration and channels it into its business’s positioning through messaging, design, and an encompassing marketing mix.

Business Claim: Next, it is important for a brand to refine its business’s claim. A brand should give prospective customers an understanding of WHY a business exists and how its products or services solve a prospective customer’s wants and more importantly, needs uniquely when compared to its competitors.

Credibility:  Credibility or a lack thereof, makes or breaks brands. In marketing, this is where logos, color scheme, packaging, and a digital presence impact a brand’s credibility and work as subliminal influencers to customers and followers alike.  For example, the color black is associated with elegance and the color blue being a representation of faith and stability.  In-person encounters also impact a brand’s credibility. Some examples of this can be found at a store’s physical location, that location’s décor and layout, and even customer service.

Connects to an Audience:  One of the last steps in developing an impactful brand is to evaluate your business’s buyers while keeping trends in mind. Through market research, your business ought to have a customer profile, which would include an understanding of your ideal customer’s likes and dislikes.  Your brand should take these customer preferences into account and “speak” directly to that customer.  For example, an aggressively progressive approach won’t likely work when trying to identify with an conservative Christian audience.

Maintenance: Now, once you address these ideas, your job isn’t done. You have to maintain your brand presence and augment it as needed as your customer preferences change and your competitor’s marketing tactics pivot. Change is what will keep you, your brand and business relevant as it is a natural occurrence in nature as well as in the world of business.

Interested in building a brand? Feel free to shoot me a message!

Without marketing, most businesses would fail. Yet, many small businesses and brands don’t take the time to create comprehensive marketing plans.

What often ends up happening is these businesses will try different marketing tactics with only minor to moderate success. Or they’ll score a big win by chance but find themselves unable to properly scale their tactics, goals and overall strategy. It’s more than just posting on social media or offering coupons to your customers.

That’s where a marketing plan is so useful. Creating a marketing plan forces you to think through the important steps that lead to an effective marketing strategy. A plan will also help keep you focused on your high-level goals.

I like to think of formulating a marketing strategy as if you were formulating a restaurant menu.

Think about what goes into planning a restaurant menu. A menu, properly planned and curated, is an experience with dishes that compliment the overall intention of said menu or strategy.

Strategy is knowing what dishes work together, perhaps even more importantly; what dishes do not belong on the menu. Strategy is being able to focus on the absolute essential, and to effectively maximize what one’s customers would want to experience more than anything else.

When was the last time you got fried chicken at a Hibachi restaurant? As ridiculous as that may sound, not all marketing tactics are created equal, and often businesses are putting marketing techniques into practice that do not necessarily compel or really fit their target audience. And what’s worse is most marketers and agencies try to sell as many groceries as possible to their clients, without really even caring or understanding the intent of their respective “menu”.

This is where I best my competitors as I strive to understand your brand, your customers and your vision completely within the scope of my work.

These past few weeks for me have been very busy as I have been preparing to launch a new service that specializes in building complete marketing plans for small businesses and brands.

A few highlights of a designed marketing strategy includes:

• Providing an analysis of your business’s current situation.
• Introducing and defining your target audience.
• Offering an overview of your marketing goals.
• Outlining any marketing communication strategies your business ought to use.
• Work with you to set a marketing budget that is relevant to said goals.

Interested in working with me to build a marketing strategy for your business? Feel free to shoot me a message below!

Experiential Marketing is when your brand interacts with your consumer, quite literally. This type of marketing is most often live and in-person. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade is the best example of experiential marketing, in my humble opinion, as the viewer is invited to experience floats and entertainment tied to specific brands (and Macy’s itself).

On the flipside, experiential marketing can also be digital if it provokes a one-on-one interaction. At my time at Noir Gallery, we made it an initiative to develop experiential moments for our customers. An example was our Exhibit Your Story campaign that coincided with our VOGUE product features (Pretty chic right?). The campaign engaged our Instagram followers to show us places that held special significance in their life. Sharing pictures, typing out personal stories, you name it. As a brand, we believed that brilliant landscapes existed wherever home was for someone. This sentiment was evident as our wall decor collections encompassed imagery from all around the world, and not just the shots you see in your local IKEA. I’m talking about scenic neighborhood shots that you would only know if you were a local yourself. With dozens of #exhibityourstory entries made during the campaign, we felt as if our brand became more relevant. Over time, we saw a direct measure of this. Over 50% of our customer base across all sales channels during my time at Noir bought a selection from the gallery that was originally captured within 50 miles of their shipping address. This percentage dramatically went up when you would consider a 100-mile radius. The proof was in the pudding.

An entry from Noir Gallery’s #exhibityourstory campaign.

The point: We asked our followers to participate and engage with us. The co-creation of this participant marketing plan allowed us to 1. Build better customer relationships with our brand and 2. We saw direct ROI from it.

My final word to all my social media managers and marketers out there: Create experiences for your client’s customers. Increasing engagement, social media impressions and the number of users who follow are three important benchmarks to help you measure your experiential marketing efforts. If you have the opportunity to develop physical and interactive experiences, they have to be compelling and able to touch the customer’s senses and capture his/her loyalty.

Interested in learning more about Experiential Marketing? Hit me up!

Local pizzeria, Sons of Sicily, benefitted greatly from our social media management services as evident by a post engagement increase of 175% over the course of the first monthly Facebook campaign we managed for them. As we continued to develop a marketing partnership with the eatery, we re-accessed developed marketing initiatives, as well as adapted content to expand the business’s presence online.

For small businesses, it is vital to capitalize and adapt social trends to highlight an authentic brand voice. Sons of Sicily is a prime example of this as we collaborated with the pizzeria to produce and release their own version of the viral trend, the Mannequin Challenge. Utilizing a videographer, we created a fun and family oriented version of the Mannequin Challenge that coincided with the pizzeria’s branding. The video was widely received, generating 20,000 post engagement and 7,500 video views across the business’s 4 social media pages in 4 hours.

Interested in having an authentic brand voice for your business developed? Feel we free to to contact us.