How Your Bar Staff Can Help with Marketing Your Venue
Whether you own a bar alongside a restaurant or a standalone outlet, all that matters is your customer experience.
You may stock the best quality wines in a sizzling ambiance, yet there’s one key factor that could make or break it!
Yes, you hit it straight – your bar staff!
The smiling faces and absolute professionalism of your bar staff coupled with their extraordinary ability to service, could turn them into the most sought-after marketing mascots for you!
Read on to delve into the secrets of how your bar staff could play a pivotal role in offering a highly enriching customer experience and marketing your venue.
How your bar staff can help with marketing your venue
1. Inculcate a positive internal work culture
2. Include your bar staff in the promotions
3. Focus on your bar staff recognition
4. Seek suggestions from staff
5. Train the new trainees on process and culture
6. Build a unique and “reliable” brand
7. Build up your reviews
8. Empower your bar staff to be brand ambassadors
1. Inculcate a positive internal work culture
Work culture showcases your brand philosophy as a whole.
Brands usually focus on external promotion through customer experience. However, the internal work culture is what underpins the entire idea of branding.
All the bar staff must be aware of your bar’s culture and values and operate in line with them.
For example, dealing with customers, serving drinks, taking orders, and their overall demeanor needs to be aligned with the work culture.
To ensure all your bar staff follows the company culture, first, make sure you interact with them regularly and have an idea of what they perceive.
You could clarify their concerns or queries, if any.
Over time, you will see that everyone is adhering to the work culture and helping create a stellar customer experience.
2. Include your bar staff in the promotions
Branding is the key pillar of marketing.
Bar staff are the pillars of your brand.
Make sure to include your staff images, photos, or videos in the social media marketing and promotions as well as possible.
Upload pictures and videos of events, staff recognition, and other employee-related happenings on your Facebook or Instagram handles.
This would serve multiple purposes.
Your bar staff would feel motivated and valued with such personalization. Besides, your bar patrons would perceive you as an employee-friendly, generous, and admirable employer, which in turn boosts your brand image.
3. Focus on your bar staff recognition
Bar staff – bartenders, bar managers, or anyone- needs to feel self-motivated.
With bar jobs being somewhat monotonous yet stressful, the staff must be constantly propelled to stay tuned to customer needs and preferences so that they create a rewarding customer experience.
While there are multiple ways to keep your bar staff stimulated, a great practice would be to conduct monthly contests like “Employee of the Month” or “This quarter’s best performer” and such to keep the momentum going.
Besides, you could appropriately reward the best performers with great messages, discounts, free coupons, or some attractive gifts.
Most importantly, never miss a chance to praise them verbally, as instant recognition and a pat on the back could do wonders!
In addition, do seek the staff’s reviews and feedback on how they feel about their job, what could be done better, any other ideas, and more.
Remember, a happy employee is an asset to the company! While a disgruntled one could render it in shambles!
4. Seek suggestions from staff
Your bar staff plays a crucial role in marketing your brand.
That said, don’t undermine their potential in sprucing up your marketing ideas smartly!
You could elicit their suggestions or opinions on what ways they think the branding could be boosted, changing the bar decor, for example.
A lot of bars and eateries provide dedicated sections on their websites wherein the staff can leave their innovative ideas or suggestions and also comments on what they hear from customers.
These are highly effective tools as they offer an honest insight into the views of your patrons on your bar – its service, drinks, and more.
You may be the leading bar in your area; nevertheless, there’s always scope for improvement.
Besides, in any business – “Customer is king”; it becomes important to stay aligned with their expectations.
Use these tools and tap your bar staff’s potential in turning your bar into one of the finest outlets there!
5. Train the new trainees on process and culture
Quite often, inexperienced bar staff may not be familiar with bar etiquette or culture. Instead of letting them face the customers from Day 1, you could plan a brief training session wherein the senior staff could educate them on not just the tasks but your culture as well.
This would work well, even if you are a small or medium-sized upcoming bar outlet.
Training need not be extensive; however, a basic understanding of “what,” “how,” and “where” would instill confidence in them and not cause any botheration to the customers.
6. Build a unique and “reliable” brand
Regardless of the service we look for, most of us prefer “brands”.
To build a top bar brand, the integral aspects are to gain the trust and credibility of customers by imparting a wonderful experience.
It takes years of consistent hard work and effort to make an impression.
Among other factors, the way your bar staff presents themselves, their deportment, and harmony in their mannerisms can go a long way in helping your patrons form opinions on your brand.
Well-dressed bar staff in company uniforms, which reads your brand’s tagline and logo, garners confidence and authenticity from your patrons.
Besides, if you are a medium-sized brand, when you think of the road ahead, this consistency in attire, behaviors, etc., is a vital ingredient in marketing and promotion.
So, it makes sense to get started that way!
7. Build up your reviews
Fortunately or unfortunately we do live in a review society, where consumers use reviews to make informed decisions.
They’re the devil for most venues as one 1 star review requires five 5 stars reviews to balance out.
And it’s almost impossible to be 5/5 all-the-time – it’s just not realistic.
Reviews and ratings also hold a lot of weight when it comes to listings e.g. on Google’s map, Google considers the reviews and ratings a lot when deciding what order to rank venues.
Reviews aren’t going anywhere, so the only thing you can do is utilise them to your advantage, and this is where you staff come in.
If you look at most bars reviews, the user will almost 9 times out of 10 mention the staff, usually negatively.
This is why it’s so important to train your staff in terms of customer service. If they are great, your 5 star reviews will likely increase.
A neat little trick is to incentivise your staff with 10/10 service by offering them a gift if they are personally mentioned in any new review.
This will a) make sure their customer service is great and b) encourage them to ask the customer for feedback, thus increasing your reviews.
8. Empower your bar staff to be brand ambassadors
One of the most powerful marketing tools you have at your disposal is your bar staff.
By empowering them to be brand ambassadors, you can significantly amplify your venue’s reach and reputation.
This involves more than just wearing branded apparel; it’s about cultivating a genuine passion for your brand within your team.
Encourage your staff to share their experiences on social media, tagging your venue and using relevant hashtags.
You can even create branded content that your staff can share.
For example, a short video of a bartender crafting a signature cocktail or a photo of the team enjoying a staff meal.
By sharing these personal moments, your staff can humanize your brand, making it more relatable to your target audience.
Moreover, when your staff is genuinely excited about your venue, they’ll naturally spread positive word-of-mouth, attracting new customers and building loyalty among existing ones.
Summing up
Branding and marketing go hand-in-hand.
That said, your bar staff, who are the customer-facing resources hold the vast potential to market your venue.
Treat them well, recognize their small yet key milestones, include them in your promotion, and acknowledge their ideas and suggestions.
Trust us, you will be successful in not just promoting but building a one-of-its-kind brand!
