There is no marketing silver bullet, no one or two idea that are guarantee to pull the punters into you pub. As you know, your pub is unique, each and every pub has a different location and set of locals, that is if you have locals at all. The biggest pitfall that small businesses fall into is trying to market to everyone. It isn’t effective, it just feels vanilla and gets ignored alongside the other 352 marketing messages your customer will see that day. The best piece of advice I can offer to get your marketing right is turn the tables. Think about your customers, or even better, like your current and potential customers. What is it that they care about? Let’s share a couple of examples.
The number of people working remotely or from home has increased by more than 35% in the past decade, people like me are always looking for somewhere to escape the house or hide out between meetings. Make sure you’re set up well for this, serve good coffee, some bakery items perhaps and make sure you have a good number of power-points in the pub. Then target me, use your a-board weekdays to tell me about this, use social media to push out the messages & generally spread the word in the local area!
Lots of local informal and formal community groups hold regular meet-ups, rather than musty cold village halls reach out and offer free space at the pub. Often they’ll be out of peak times and get people through the door to see the venue, meaning they’re more likely to visit other times and creates goodwill which goes a long way.
Just two small examples, but it’s time to get creative by turning the tables and thinking like your potential customers!
First published by PUB18
