Bar Social Media Marketing – 5 Do’s and Don’ts
Implementing effective bar social media marketing for your venue can be instrumental for your success in this century.
As bars and restaurants around the world get thronged, their popularity is only rising every day.
That said, you need to carve a niche to stay competitive.
One of the crucial tools that can open the gateways to your success in this space is focused marketing and advertising efforts.
While there are countless ways to market your brand, the one successfully proven and that makes you stand out is bar social media marketing.
Read on to delve into what measures you must follow to be successful in your bar social media marketing attempts.
Effective bar social media marketing:
1. Create a detailed marketing plan
2. Post relevant and quality posts
3. Throw contests and competitions
4. Focus on location-based advertising
5. Gather customer reviews and testimonials
6. Don’t be non-responsive to customer queries
7. Avoid being impersonal
8. Don’t spam
9. Don’t ignore negative comments
10. Don’t buy fake followers
1. Create a detailed marketing plan
Quite often, strategies fail due to a lack of proper planning.
That said, before you get into action with your bar social media marketing, ensure you have a plan in place.
While a marketing plan could be as comprehensive as possible, there are some key pointers to consider.
Decide on what social media channels you need and why.
Blindly creating accounts for the sake of it doesn’t yield any results.
For example, you may plan to use Instagram to upload your bar’s events pictures or other fun activities. Alternatively,
Facebook may help in posting ideas, eliciting the opinions of customers, and increasing your brand awareness.
You also need to choose the appropriate social media channel depending on the target audience you wish to attract. An example of a channel apt for young customers is TikTok.
2. Post relevant and quality posts
Whether you post on Facebook or any other channel, ensure your content is par excellence.
Posting some average stuff would not only impact your branding but also result in you losing the focus of customers.
Besides, chalk out a content calendar by first zeroing in on the frequency of posts.
You could hire an agency or a freelancer who could plan your content and craft them so that you aren’t lagging in schedule.
Include posts that are engaging, conversational and thought-provoking.
This would make your customers come up with ideas and suggestions, some of which may benefit you in the long run.
In addition, well-drafted, informative, and authentic posts would let you stand out and increase traffic.
These could be utilized to turn into customers for your brand.
3. Throw contests and competitions
It’s an amazing idea to conduct contests like “Best Caption for the picture”, “Give the best title” and more.
Contests keep customers, and viewers engaged in your brand and are a powerful tool in bar social media marketing.
Your bar may be hosting various events and parties, and clicking pictures and uploading them to conduct caption contests would result in awesome outcomes.
4. Focus on location-based advertising
Bar social media marketing finds its potential truly tapped only when you target local customers.
The greatest advantage of social media is its ability to help you reach your target audience based on demography.
It doesn’t make sense to have a business listing of your bar on a national daily, which hardly someone would notice.
On the contrary, social media marketing would bring in more people from nearby, local areas who would want to visit your bar sporadically, if not regularly.
This poses greater possibilities of deriving benefit out of your marketing efforts than simply advertising on a newspaper.
5. Gather customer reviews and testimonials
As online media booms, people place greater trust and reliance on digital reviews and testimonials rather than word-of-mouth.
Focus on building user-generated content, such as gathering feedback and testimonials from active customers.
These reviews, often termed social proofing, could go a long way in establishing your brand while increasing your customer base.
6. Don’t be non-responsive to customer queries
Regardless of the social media channels you use, make sure to take your customers’ queries seriously.
Respond to them in a professional yet polite manner and seek their suggestions for improvement, if any.
Sometimes, you may find negative comments about your service or such posted by some customers on channels like Twitter.
Make it a point to immediately reach out to them and resolve their concerns to keep the impact minimal.
7. Avoid being impersonal
Some businesses use chatbots to answer customer queries which may seem insensitive to customers.
As far as possible, make an effort to respond personally or at least use some bots with a human touch.
These could make your customers feel valued and increase retention and loyalty.
8. Don’t spam
Avoid the practice of posting and reposting the same stuff, ending up spamming your customers!
Quite often, customers feel disgusted seeing the same ads or posts, say for an offer that ends this month.
Such gimmicks disrupt the marketing strategy, leaving you nowhere.
It is a wrongful ideology that customers become more curious to know about the offer when they keep seeing the same ad reposted again and again.
Make sure you don’t lose your valued customers by this eccentric behavior.
9. Don’t ignore negative comments
When your customers visit the bar, make sure you seek their suggestions and feedback while they leave.
One of the principal pillars of bar social media marketing is to accept constructive criticism and work towards improvement.
Alternatively, you could send out feedback forms to your long-standing or even relatively recent customers asking about their concerns or areas they feel need some changes.
This serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it enhances your relationship with customers, making it stronger.
Second and most importantly, you get to know your shortcomings through their suggestions and can improve to gain an edge over your competitors.
10. Don’t buy fake followers
Some businesses, to bolster their bar social media marketing, use fake followers to show higher counts.
Never do that.
Buying fake accounts or followers to showcase greater numbers could seriously hamper your authenticity, impacting your brand reputation adversely.
Refrain from such options and stay honest.
Wrapping up
Bar social media marketing is becoming a norm as the frenzy for bars shows no signs of slowing down.
That said, it is important to adhere to certain practices and refrain from some to achieve success.
Adopt the measures and guidelines outlined in the article to derive the desired business outcomes.
