OTHER MARKETING ACTIVITY

Other forms of marketing activity help you communicate with and interact with your customers. Fun events and activities can attract people who do not normally use your pub, and if they enjoy themselves, they can become regular customers. These events generate interest and build the loyalty of your existing clientele. Running them on less busy days of the week also helps to boost your sales.

Tasting nights

Tasting nights are used to promote specific drinks. They are a good way to launch new products and promote products with high profit margins. The aim of these nights is to persuade people to try the product and encourage them to purchase the drink in the future.

Events like wine tastings are increasing in popularity, and are best run by someone with a reasonable knowledge of the subject. These are a good way of ‘educating’ customers about wine and introducing them to better quality wines.

These nights are often supported by your brewery, pub company or other supplier, who may provide free stock, and promotion kits and point of sale material for the event.

Samples

Aside from organised tasting nights, providing a small free sample to a customer who has asked what a particular drink is like is preferable to trying to describe the product to them. This ‘try before you buy’ approach allows the customer to try the drink and ensure they like it before purchasing it. It is particularly good for draught beers and lagers and wine. You can obtain very small plastic ‘shot glasses’ from licensed trade suppliers to use for this.

Party nights

Party nights provide fun and entertainment for customers who will often talk about the night for weeks afterwards. They can be themed around annual events, for example, St Patrick’s Day and Hallowe’en or other themes like beach parties, hog roasts, and fancy dress. Party nights should be appropriate for the type of pub and clientele. Try to be creative and look for unusual events, people or places on which to base your party nights.

Festivals

Beer and food festivals can be run on a small scale, very successfully in your pub. These can be run over a day, or several days. For a beer festival, you will need to obtain a range of cask, and/or bottled beers. As a tenant or lessee, this will be dependent on the product range that you have available, or whether your brewery or pub company will make a special allowance for you to purchase products not normally supplied by them. If you are intending to run a cask beer festival, it is likely that you will need to have additional beer pumps fitted (on a temporary basis) and you should speak to your brewery or pub company representative well in advance to see if this can be arranged. Some companies hire temporary bars and beer dispense equipment, which can be used for setting up a bar area in an annex to the pub or marquee. (Make sure that you obtain any necessary permission from your licensing authority.)

Food festivals are a good way of promoting your pub as a food venue and building good relationships with local suppliers, if you involve them in the event. They can feature particular types of food for example: ‘curry festivals’ or ‘sausage festivals’, or can be used to generally showcase local produce. Food festivals can include free samples, cookery demonstrations, free recipes or cut-price meals, and can be linked to drinks that may compliment the food that is on offer. Try to make your festival a little bit different so your event stands out, and perhaps make it an annual event.