By Sergey Solonenko, Contributor
Creating an actionable inbound marketing strategy is never easy. Despite having the best modern tools at your disposal, it's still hard to create a converting marketing funnel and increase brand awareness in an ideal customer. This is why we use blogs and social media posts to lure people to our place!
Content is the backbone of just about any inbound marketing strategy and digital marketing as a whole. By telling a story about your restaurant, you can create an emotional connection with the target audience. You can give them a more personal insight into your brand, showing them that your restaurant is made from living people and not just some faceless corporate suits.
Content is especially important for bars and similar service establishments. People visit these places when they want to take their minds off daily obligations, so it's vital that you provide them with a memorable experience. Not only should they be entertained by what you have to say online and other marketing efforts, but they should also be inclined to visit your establishment because of it.
In this article, we talk about a few content promotion tricks that will put your bar on a local map!
What Are the Best Channels for Promoting Your Bar?
The fantastic thing about content is that it can serve any inbound marketing and outbound marketing strategy. In other words, you can use it to reach people via Google ad campaigns and influencer marketing, and you can use it for a potential customers who find you organically via Google search and social media.
Creating engaging, valuable content will give you enough flexibility to dominate just about any marketing approach. So, if you're creative enough, things such as articles and social media posts can be a powerful weapon in your arsenal.
While you can use any content marketing approach, we suggest you always rely on software-as-a-service (SaaS) content marketing and marketing automation. This specific growth marketing strategy is popular among top-tier service providers who understand the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics for their search engine optimization, social media marketing, and other efforts.
A B2B SaaS company provides much more predictable results, as they're able to track the performance of your bar content across different changes. With the right tools, such as Google Analytics, you can also perform effective keyword research for your SEO strategy, discover the optimal buyer persona, and measure the success of a campaign.
3 Best Content Marketing Strategies for Your Bar
Without further ado, here are a few digital and traditional inbound marketing strategies that can propel your venue to new heights:
Crazy Email Events
Email marketing is often a neglected promotional method. Many companies perceive it as a stiff method of communication that only serves for pompous corporative gatherings. Strangely enough, when used the right way, emails can also be fantastic for bar customer acquisition and retention.
Here's the deal. You create funky events at the end of the work week, but not necessarily on Fridays. So, let's say on Wednesdays and Thursdays when you don't get as many visitors.
As people are already fatigued by work, you can offer them an exotic bar experience, which they can't find anywhere else (who does anything on Wednesdays?). By sharing it throughout the office, the recipient can organize a cool event for the entire staff, and it all stems from a single email.
Keep in mind that your message needs to be enticing enough for the person to click on, so you might as well put your sales proposition in the subject line ("Visit Moe's for Vampire Beer Bonanza!"). As most people are already fatigued by work by the end of the week, your message needs to resonate enough to wake them from their job-related slumber.
The reason why this is such an effective inbound marketing strategy is that it fills the hole in the market. Unless a person is already a standard, existing customer, they probably have a regular watering hole they frequent on weekends. So, with this inbound strategy, you not only generate profits but also pluck away customers from other venues.
Direct Business Pitch
Funny enough, many owners perceive the bar game as an exclusively B2C approach. But what if I tell you that it's possible to make big bucks by focusing on B2B inbound marketing?
A SaaS marketer can make a breakdown of all companies in the radius around the bar by using public data, Google Maps, and directories. After that, the marketing professional can pitch all these brands via email or social media, offering discounted after-work happy hours for their employees.
For the most part, this SaaS inbound marketing strategy is similar to traditional account based marketing, where you pursue managers and ask them to visit your establishment. As a part of the pitch, you can tell them that the evening is reserved for company teams. That way, the event could be excellent for blowing steam but also for networking with other local entrepreneurs.
As for the content format, you need to focus on images that have an office feel to them and are a bit yuppie. A strong punchline can also work. Make sure that your offer/discount is shown prominently on the image to help customer success.
Keep in mind that this method only works for venues located downtown. In the end, no one wants to drive to a faraway suburb just to grab a beer after work.
Social Media Group Pitches
Similar to businesses, you can target specific client groups on social media. For example, a SaaS market expert can use the platform to browse all relevant communities in your home city. After finding their URLs, they can ask a moderator if they can pitch a community meeting at the bar.
Of course, a bar owner should do a few things to sweeten the deal. The best method is giving major discounts or having a theme night in accordance with the group's main activity/focus. That way, the members will get to drink cheap cocktails while simultaneously enjoying their favorite pastime.
This particular approach can be a bit tricky, and it requires a major inbound marketing effort. It's a bit different from your standard content outreach, as you'll have to customize the message before every pitch. Our suggestion is to create a modifiable text template that can easily be modified for a different recipient.
Always remember that this activity is mostly for building brand awareness. In other words, even if you don't make much money, it can be perceived as effective if you lure enough people.
About the Author
Sergey Solonenko is the founder of Algocentric Digital Consultancy, an active digital strategist and a fractional CMO for many B2B SaaS brands embracing digital transformation. At Algocentric Digital Sergey’s focus is on empowering every B2B SaaS brand who is looking to scale their demand generation program. Sergey’s digital marketing experience over the last 10 years has allowed him to become a digital evangelist focused on improving SaaS demand generation programs and consulting on best practices around account based marketing, sales and marketing team alignment, setting up better lead qualification systems and improving user experience through personalization by aligning martech with key marketing KPIs that ladder up to faster MRR for B2B SaaS brands.
