Implementing effective bar marketing ideas attracts new patrons and encourages brand loyalty over the long run. You can effectively market your bar in numerous ways, such as building a bar website, posting on social media, offering food and drink specials, and hosting special events—just to name a few bar promotion ideas. To keep you on the path to success, I’ve explored 10 bar marketing and pub promotion ideas to help you grow your business.
1. Build a Bar Website With Essential Information
One of the top marketing ideas for bars and restaurants is building a bar website for your establishment. Having a bar website will help you rank higher on Google and show up in more local online searches, especially in conjunction with a Google Business Profile. Potential patrons will rely on your website to decide whether to visit, and regulars will use it to discover events and promotions.
Making your bar’s website isn’t much different than making a restaurant website. It should include important information like location, hours, and events, and feature special offers such as your happy hour menu and any seasonal promotions or drinks. Your address, driving, parking directions, and other essential information should be prominently displayed on the homepage to make it easy for new customers to visit.
- Driving and parking directions: Include your bar’s address and instructions for driving to your bar and parking. Make the address interactive so that Google Maps or another navigation app opens when visitors click or tap it.
- Tap-to-call phone number: Add your phone number to the main navigation menu of your website and make it live so that someone can reach out to you by phone with a single tap.
- Hours: List your happy hours, normal business hours, and holiday or event-specific hours. If you are only open seasonally, include this information on your website.
- Menus: Provide a downloadable PDF of your bar’s food menu, beer list, and specialty cocktails, as well as menu pages that can be viewed online. Add professional photos of your food and drink to your menus, especially for your most popular and mouth-watering items.
- Event calendar: Keep an up-to-date calendar of live music, promotions, specials, league or club nights, theme nights, and other events.
- An “About Our Bar” page: Your “about” page can tell the story of your bar’s founding, explain its mission and vision, showcase community involvement, put the spotlight on your staff members, house your bar’s media kit, and more.
If you haven’t chosen a website platform yet, I recommend IONOS as our best overall cheap website builder since it includes a free custom domain and email address with a paid plan, which costs as little as $1 per month. IONOS offers great value for small businesses like bars that want an online presence and an easy-to-use website builder that can leverage AI and templates to serve up a great website quickly.
2. Create Google & Yelp Business Profiles
Online business profiles are key to getting discovered by potential patrons. While there are numerous business directories on the internet with which to register your business, Google Business Profiles and Yelp are arguably the two most critical to establishing your online presence.
Bar Marketing With a Google Business Profile
If you want to show up whenever someone Googles “bars near me,” then you must make a Google Business Profile. After making a profile, your business will show up in Google’s massive business directory and local map listings. Adding your bar on Google My Business is what lands you in the Google “local pack” and helps your business show up when people make geographic-based search queries.
A Google Business listing for your bar can help potential patrons know where you are located, when you’re open, what you serve, how to get in touch, and provide an overall user rating. (Source: Google)
Fill out your profile completely by adding pictures, identifying your establishment as a bar, and listing price ranges, bar hours, and your address. By including as much information as possible, you will create an appealing and interactive profile on Google. Encourage your customers to leave positive reviews on Google, since this will improve your search rankings.
Also, make it a point to post special offers and schedule changes, as this and other knowledge panel posts will be displayed when your bar’s profile appears in search results. Knowledge panel posts increase the space your profile takes up in search results, making it more eye-catching in online search results. Additional ways to get more attention through posts include posting special holiday hours or closures, major news about your bar, and details about events.
Bar Marketing With a Yelp Business Profile
Like Google, a Yelp Business Profile helps you get found and reviewed on Yelp. Both are important to create and maintain, but Yelp is especially important for hospitality businesses like restaurants and bars, as many potential patrons are looking for immediate recommendations on where to go when they pull up this app.
A Yelp listing for your bar helps potential patrons choose among similar businesses in a specific area with its user ratings, user-supplied photos, and business contact information. (Source: Yelp)
While Google is the most important for increasing your SEO and being found on Google Maps, Yelp is more about helping potential customers choose among similar businesses based on reviews and reputation. Since you’ll use much of the same information and content for both Google and Yelp profiles, it’s often most efficient to create and then update both of them at the same time.
You will want to encourage customers to leave reviews and post photos to both apps, and you can make it easier by putting signage by your cash wrap or on menus, as well as tent cards on your tables or the bar requesting positive reviews. You can add QR code links to both listings to make it really easy, and offering some kind of incentive (such as a discount coupon on a food or drink item) is also helpful.
3. Promote Your Bar on Social Media
Promoting your bar on social media is another essential bar advertising idea. A social media presence gets your bar in front of the community, helping old customers remember you and new customers discover you.
Your social media marketing strategy can include Facebook, Instagram, and other social channels your customers use. As you grow your social media presence, experiment with different platforms to see what works best for your community and target market. Just remember that it’s important to first focus on the outlets that give you the biggest return on investment.
Some bar advertising ideas for specific social media posts or campaigns include advertising events, sharing drink specials, and asking customers to vote for new menu items. Many of the other bar promotion ideas on this list, such as launching a loyalty program or participating in a local food festival, are also worthy of social media posts.
If posting often to multiple social media platforms sounds overwhelming, one of the best small business social media agencies can take over for you and rapidly grow your business’s social presence. I recommend LYFE Marketing because it can help your business with both organic and paid social media promotions, plus their pricing plans are pretty reasonable. It’s a one-stop solution for bars and pubs looking to enhance their social media strategies.
How to Promote a Bar on Facebook
Facebook pages are effective bar promotion ideas because they give you more local brand awareness, additional reviews, and social buzz. Plus, it’s free and easy to create a business page for your bar on Facebook and use it as part of your overall bar marketing strategy.
Create a Facebook Business Page for your bar to gain online exposure and share details about your location, hours, and promotions. Your bar’s Facebook page should include basic information about your bar. And it’s a great place to post event and promotion details and take advantage of paid advertising opportunities.
There are four specific actions to take once you create your free Facebook Business Page.
- Post regularly: Once-a-day updates are the minimum. Use a variety of videos, pictures, and text updates to keep your bar audience informed. Your Facebook posts will convey your bar culture.
- Respond to messages: Facebook allows people to communicate through Facebook Messenger. Be sure to respond to these messages as quickly as possible, since your response rate and time will be publicly displayed on your Facebook profile.
- Monitor reviews: Like Yelp and Google, Facebook is a major review site. Read each review and make any necessary changes to improve your products and services.
- Run ads and boost posts: Facebook advertising allows you to reach a highly targeted audience in your local area using standalone ads and boosted posts. The right ads can build bar brand awareness, entice new patrons to visit, and publicize events and promotions. Best of all, using Facebook ads is one of the most affordable and cost-effective paid social options for marketing your bar.
Need help building your Facebook page? Hibu offers several locally focused marketing services including social media marketing on Facebook, search marketing, as well as display ads. Hibu has the right skill sets to help your bar on customers’ radars—in your local area and beyond.
How to Do Bar Marketing on Instagram
Instagram allows you to advertise your bar’s drinks, events, and promotions through enticing photos and optimized hashtags. To keep engagement high, publish a post on Instagram at least once a day and post three to 10 Instagram stories each day. You should include geotags and popular hashtags in your posts and stories to increase your bar’s exposure.
Instagram is particularly important for your bar if you want to reach a Millennial or Gen Z audience. A whopping 62% of Instagram users are within the 18- to 34-year-old age group (31.7% from 18 to 24 and 30.6% from 25 to 34).
I recommend four specific promotion ideas for pubs you should take note of when promoting your bar on Instagram.
- Post attractive food and drink photos: The golden rule of Instagram is to show, not tell. Instead of posting the typical pitch ads of images with text inside, post high-quality and visually appealing photos of items from your menu.
- Use relevant hashtags: Hashtags can get your content in front of a larger audience, so make sure to use the right balance of trending hashtags (like #drinks or #foodie) and niche or local hashtags (like #manhattanbar or #rosemojito) that align with your brand.
- Use story highlights: Unlike stories (which disappear after 24 hours), story highlights remain on your profile until you remove them. Use this to post your menu or personal content like your staff’s favorite drinks to get more views.
- Feature your guests: Only showing pictures of your drinks and food items will get old after a while. To shake things up, snap candid photos of your customers and get their permission to post them on your Instagram feed.
If you want to improve your Instagram bar marketing quickly but lack the know-how, consider hiring freelance professionals on Fiverr. You’ll find low-cost experts providing user-generated content services, Instagram organic growth services, and even personalized Instagram video edits and reels for businesses for as low as $5.
4. Manage Your Bar’s Online Reviews
Like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Tripadvisor, and multiple social media platforms, countless places online allow customers to leave reviews of your bar. These online reviews are essential because they will either encourage or dissuade future customers from visiting your bar. You should read these reviews and make any necessary adaptations to your bar culture or promotions.
If you receive negative reviews, the best thing to do is respond promptly and politely. Make it clear that you understand the person’s concerns and share any actions you’re taking to improve in that area. If appropriate, extend an offer to make things right, and if your business is at fault, offer an apology.
If you receive positive reviews, it’s appropriate to thank the reviewer with a quick reply. Stay aware of all reviews to understand how your bar is being perceived by your customers, and respond to each one, whether negative or positive.
Since much of marketing for local bars is word-of-mouth-centric, reviews shape your bar’s reputation, which is a key factor in how people view your bar culture. I recommend staying on top of reviews, listings, and local rankings.
5. Send Out Email Newsletters
Sending out regular newsletters is another part of bar marketing basics 101. These emails can be used to promote special bar offers, an events calendar, nights when you’re having trivia, karaoke, or live music, and so on.
Include photos from recent events to showcase what a great time people have at your establishment. Promote any local community events or charitable give-backs you’re participating in to build brand affinity. Make sure to link your website and social media profiles in your email header or footer—maintaining these digital connections is one of many essential website marketing strategies.
If you haven’t decided on an email newsletter platform yet, I recommend Mailchimp. It offers a forever-free plan with basic features and several affordable pricing plans for mailing lists of up to 500 contacts. Mailchimp also offers an intuitive email builder and lots of templates to choose from so you don’t have to start from scratch.
6. Offer Regular Food and Drink Specials
Develop a calendar that includes regularly scheduled bar marketing promotions your customers can count on—and will keep them coming back. Examples include daily or weekly happy hours, discounted food or drink specials (e.g., “Taco Tuesday & Tequila”), and scheduled bar theme nights, such as trivia, karaoke, or darts competitions.
Offering one-time specials based on holidays is another bar promotion idea to consider. You can do this for more well-known holidays, such as Valentine’s Day and Labor Day. You might also want to take advantage of other bar-related holidays such as National Beer Day (April 7) and National Wine Day (May 25)
Not sure what kind of specials your bar should offer? Here’s a list of food and drink special ideas for the most common types of bars:
Sports Bars |
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Music Bars |
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Game-friendly Bars |
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Drink Specials |
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Food Specials |
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Concept Bars |
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Dive Bars |
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7. Sell or Give Away Bar Promotional Merchandise
Branded merchandise (or “merch”) can be used to promote your bar in several ways: give it away as prizes for promotions, reward loyal customers for repeat visits, or attract patrons to your in-store point-of-purchase for carry-out beer, wine, or spirits. Having your team members wear branded apparel (hats, T-shirts, aprons, and so on) also builds brand awareness and recognition with patrons.
Some examples of collectible bar merchandise include items like branded shot glasses, koozies, T-shirts, and hats. You can design and order branded merchandise to promote your bar in several places. I like VistaPrint because it offers low-cost printing and etching for T-shirts, hats, pint glasses, and more promotional items that are perfect for your bar marketing ideas.
8. Launch a Bar Loyalty Program
Creating a loyalty program is a bar advertising idea that can attract new patrons and keep regular patrons coming back. That’s because customer rewards or loyalty programs incentivize patrons to return—and bring friends along with them.
With most loyalty rewards platforms, you can design your program by customizing rewards that create incentives and align with your bar’s culture and branding. They can also support specific goals, like ordering a certain drink or food item, visiting the bar several times, sending referrals, or sharing your story online.
Once your incentives are in place, brand your loyalty program and prepare an acquisition strategy. This will ensure that people will sign up to join the program.
9. Host Special Events
Few people choose a bar simply because of its beer. Instead, people go for the experience, the culture, and the vibe. Implementing event marketing strategies places a greater emphasis on having a good time. Decorate your bar, create signature drinks, and schedule live music and promotions in a way that gives customers a unique experience they’ll return to again and again.
Not sure what kind of event your bar should host? I compiled some bar marketing event ideas that will work for almost any type of pub.
- Celebrate a totally random event: Pick a night to celebrate a random event—Hottest Day in May (with discounted margaritas), half off Samuel Adams beer on the anniversary of Samuel Adams’ death (October 2—who knew?), or pick a night for Zombie Appreciation Day (with some sort of zombie-related discount or drink special).
- Offer gift cards for game winners: Many bars offer games, such as darts or corn hole, so why not reward the winners with a gift card? Stage a tournament with a referee and sign up. Adding gift card rewards encourages healthy competition and heats up business by creating excitement around bar games.
- Flip-a-coin penny night: When customers order a beer on tap, they get to flip a penny. Heads, the drink costs a penny; tails, they pay full price. It’s really just half-price pint night (statistically speaking) but adds a creative element of fun.
- Sponsor music release parties: Sponsoring a local band or artist releasing a new album is a great way to bring in patrons who might not otherwise frequent your bar. The more buzz you and the band generate around the album release, the more visitors your bar can welcome.
- Run bar rallies for hometown teams: To generate team goodwill, offer free drinks if the hometown team wins by more than 10 points or if everyone’s favorite home team player sinks a three-pointer in the fourth quarter. Be sure to choose a promotion and reward that will keep patrons in your bar as long as possible. The longer they stay, the more they’re likely to spend.
- Purchase custom mugs for super customers: Once a customer purchases their one-hundredth drink, it’s time to celebrate. Use punch cards or another mechanism to track orders by patrons who’ve accepted the challenge. Order a custom engraved mug with the customer’s name on it. Whenever they show up at the bar, pull down their stein and give them their first drink half off.
- Host Bar Olympics: Encourage some friendly competition (and spending) with Bar Olympics, a full spread of bar games from beer pong to billiards. Host all your games during one big night of revelry and liberally distribute rewards like branded T-shirts and pint glasses to winners.
- Hold a mix-off: A mix-off or a bartender competition can bring in a lot of positive publicity. Pit bartenders against each other and offer the drinks they make under a special deal. Let your customers vote on the drink they like best and end the night with the grand announcement.
- Charity events: Teaming up with a local nonprofit and holding benefit events can bring a whole new crowd and increase your reputation as a generous and active member of your local community.
10. Partner With Local Businesses and Festivals
Sponsoring a local sports team can involve providing branded jerseys, T-shirts, and other swag to a local intramural team to advertise your bar. Build relationships with local universities and companies, or reach out to your city’s parks and recreation department to let them know you’re open to sponsoring a team.
If you have the equipment, consider participating in local food and drink festivals, which will help you reach patrons around the city. On a similar note, sponsoring community events and holding charitable give-back promotions and events can boost your bar’s image locally and also expose you to more potential customers.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Marketing a bar is best done with a mix of print and digital marketing materials and branded merchandise. Digital marketing materials include online flyers, social media posts, TikTok videos, email blast templates, and digital menus. Promotional materials include T-shirts, beer or shot glasses, event tickets, and other bar merchandise.
To attract more customers to your bar, post regularly to social media and keep your Google Business profile updated so people can easily discover you. You should also offer discounted specials such as happy hours and loyalty programs to reward loyal customers. Be sure to put sidewalk signs outside the bar to encourage foot traffic from passersby.
To boost sales in a bar, educate your bartenders and servers about the menu and encourage them to upsell additional items and premium drinks. Create a welcoming atmosphere with good lighting, decor, and music. Host events, run trivia nights, or offer games to encourage patrons to stay longer, which will result in more sales. It also doesn’t hurt to review your expenses to see if there’s any money you can save, which will boost your margins on sales.
Identify your customer personas, create your business goals, and set yourself apart from the competition. Then choose your marketing tactics, set a budget, and make a marketing calendar. Once you start executing, be sure to track your progress and adjust as necessary.
To bring more people into a bar, combine both digital and physical marketing tactics—such as social media posts and branded giveaways—to raise brand awareness. Meanwhile, signature drinks and/or food items and hosting special events can encourage people to visit your bar again and again. Finally, encouraging word of mouth and getting satisfied patrons to leave reviews is also important for attracting new patrons and promoting customer retention.
Bottom Line
These 10 bar marketing ideas will help you increase brand awareness for your bar and encourage both new and repeat customers. Bar marketing can get more people in the door and entice them to stay longer, leading to bigger and more frequent sales and boosting your bar’s profits. If this list seems overwhelming, pick just one or two bar advertising ideas that best align with your brand and resources to start, and then work your way up to implementing all 10 to see the best results.
