Are you a new bar owner, looking to promote the new it-place to be? Or have you owned your bar for a while, but looking to expand your social media to reach more customers? Either way, creating an effective bar social media strategy is crucial for achieving your goal of having a popular place for people to have fun. Perhaps your new regulars are an Instagram post away from discovering what you have to offer! In this article, we’ll describe some marketing tips for bars, including how to best promote your bar and engage with your customers online.
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Marketing for Bars
For marketing your bar, think about what makes your bar unique. Is it your remodeling into an industrial-chic design? Your top-notch margaritas or mean selection of imported craft beers on tap? Whether your bar is a small-town tavern or a big-city lounge, it’s important to focus on using a wide variety of social media platforms to reach many new potential customers to discover your bar. However, it’s important to establish the basics of your marketing strategy before your social media revamp!
The Basics of Marketing Your Bar
To start, you must have a brand identity to make your bar stand out in your community. Creating a brand identity is the process of determining what your bar’s personality will be. This entails everything from what your logo looks like to what your brand voice will be on social media. Creating a brand identity for bars allows people to identify and remember your bar. You can choose the colors, typography, voice, and art direction. All of this will allow you to set the vibe of your bar so that customers can imagine what kind of experience to expect. For example, a sophisticated lounge frequented by professionals will require a different set of brand colors, fonts, and aesthetics than a club popular among 20-somethings wanting to dance to the latest pop hits. As a general marketing tip for bars, you will use your brand vibe to attract your target customer base.
The opposite is also true; you can use your target customer base to influence what your brand design and identity will be. In both cases, you will need market research to identify the popular and up-and-coming trends to effectively develop your bar identity and advertise your bar. Once you establish your brand identity, it’s time to apply your brand materials on social media! Finding the right social media platforms to reach your target customer base will depend on what your customer base uses since different age groups focus on different platforms, and the way you create marketing materials will depend on those platforms. Regardless, in this article detailing marketing tips for bars, we emphasize that utilizing different social media platforms will maximize your online reach for customers. Social media provides the perfect opportunity to connect customers with your bar and brand identity!
Why Social Media?
About 72% of American adults use some form of social media, so by using some of the most popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, you can instantly connect with potential customers online, whether they are local to your community or visiting your city and looking for a cool place to explore. Social media has simplified marketing for bars, by allowing the bar social media manager to use location-specific hashtags. Using local SEO, or search engine optimization, revolves around using important keywords as hashtags, such as your town name and state, as well as other words related to the theming of your bar, so that when social media users search those hashtags, your content will pop up in their search! We’ll explain in depth which of the popular social media platforms are good to use for certain types of posts.
Facebook has one of the largest user bases among popular social media platforms. So, you can’t go wrong using Facebook to advertise your bar. The platform makes marketing for bars simple, as you can create a business profile page, text, picture, and video posts, as well as event pages such as for theme nights or trivia nights! You can engage with your customers through comments on a post. Facebook can act as your “home base” social media platform since you can easily add your website, contact information, and mission to your profile so that potential customers can easily find out more about your bar.
Popular among millennial users, Instagram is known as the place to post aesthetic pictures and videos. Users expect artsy and curated content on Instagram. This makes it the perfect place to showcase your bar’s vibe by posting aesthetic pictures of your bar. On top of that, you can add hashtags to a post. You can also use SEO keywords such as your town, bar name, and words related to your brand identity. That way, when Instagram users search town name hashtags, they can find your bar. As a bonus, when customers visit your bar, they can tag your profile so that their followers can see what a good time they had at your bar!
Twitter is the social media platform used by many of all groups. You can post images and videos as well as text content. However, as a marketing tip for bars, you can best utilize Twitter by posting updates about your bar and promoting any events or menu changes!
TikTok
TikTok is the hottest social media platform, popular among all age groups! Because of TikTok’s algorithm, as long as you create a fun or aesthetic video showing off your bar and brand identity and incorporate your key hashtags, TikTok will organically show your videos to those that its algorithm deems interested in your hashtags. For example, when someone likes and comments on videos or follows accounts about nightlife in their city, they will see videos that use similar hashtags. The TikTok algorithm will show a video that illustrates what your bar is all about and will have the opportunity to reach a wide audience!
Bar Social Media Strategy
We’ve covered why you should use social media for marketing your bar and what each social media platform has to offer. Now, let’s dive into bar social media strategy which involves understanding marketing theory.
The 4 Ps of Marketing
The 4 Ps of marketing are product, price, place, and promotion. This is a tried-and-true marketing theory that you can incorporate into your bar social media strategy to effectively market your bar online. Once you establish your brand identity and social media presence, you can now advertise your product. This includes the atmosphere of your bar, specialty drinks, and what makes your bar unique, and promote why your customer needs to experience a thrilling night at your bar.
Based on your market research, you can price your drinks and food appropriately. As you advertise your products, you can use your bar’s brick-and-mortar, to market the atmosphere on social media. Lastly, you can run promotions on your social media profiles to draw in a crowd. For example, you could promote a happy hour special or a trivia night. Creating a promotion allows you to continue to engage with your existing customer base. You can also run themed trivia nights and use hashtags to connect with potential customers who are interested in the topics! As part of the marketing tips for bars, we emphasize that the 4 Ps of marketing form a sturdy framework of what to include in a social media post, regardless of platform.
Bar Digital Marketing
Social media is just one outlet that you can use for bar digital marketing. In these marketing tips for bars, we stress that you utilize other forms of digital marketing while you develop your advertising strategy. Another form of digital marketing includes instituting pay-per-click ads to reach an even larger audience online. You could also create an email newsletter weekly or monthly to keep connecting with customers. Effective SEO practices in your bar’s website will allow users to find your website when they search keywords online as well! All of these marketing tips for bars provide successful ways for advertising your bar, but how do we measure success in bar digital marketing?
Measuring Success
Now, we’re sure that you want to see a return on your investment! You might notice that your bar is generally busier, perhaps after running a special happy hour promotion. However, let’s rely on key performance indicators, or KPIs, which are quantifiable figures that indicate financial successes. In bar digital marketing, KPIs include an increase in profits and social media reach. Still, there are far more KPIs that can give an insight into how effective your bar digital marketing is! We emphasize the importance of examining these KPIs and keeping using the marketing strategy that fits your business the best.
These marketing tips for bars will set you on the right path. Reaching your target customer base involves hard work, but engaging with your customer base on social media and implementing a specific digital marketing strategy will show your customers, new and regular, that you care about connecting with them by creating a memorable experience, both on your social media profiles and in your bar!
FAQ:
- How do you promote a bar?
- Why should you use social media to promote a bar?
- What are the four ps of marketing?
- How can a bar use TikTok for marketing?
- What is included in digital marketing for bars?
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