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[FB] Marketing a Bar/Lounge in 1 City? (24)

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2 Part question:

1. I'm wondering how some of you would go about marketing a bar/lounge in 1 specific city to start building up likes on a Facebook page.

I'm thinking there's 2 ways to do this, Have a page around the bar itself, or have a page around something alcohol related in the city (ex: Top Bars in San Fran).
Looking to use paid advertising for leverage, but have it be semi viral within the city.

2. Generic ideas to market a bar/lounge using our affiliate skillset on or off Facebook.

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Ahh good to see you're carrying through with this manngg!

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Really cool idea! Maybe you can tie the page in with specific demographics or interests in that city too... esp college campuses, like a fan page for Hottest NYU Bars (NYC) - easy bite for college students

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I'm not an internetmarketing guru, but I've been hanging out in quite a few nice bars/clubs
For a bar, the buzz you create is the best marketing in the long run.
So I would go for a branded page about the bar itself.

Some random stuff I've seen and think are nice:
- a membershipcard to collect 'air miles'. You only get miles when you order bottles. And can use them to get free entrance/goodies/free booze
- 'drink of the night': every guest that enters gets one free drink. And it's different everyday.
- a strict age limit (21+). Overhere in Belgium, some clubs are stacked with 16-years old. We don't like jailbait.
- special acts (ie: live violin on electronic music, free massages for the guests,..)
- trained cocktailshakers
- free shots and free snacks
- flaming cocktails

Launching a successful bar is all about 'the Purple Cow'.

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Hit up Amir he was at stmbkk, he just started his own bar too!

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I personally only rarely drink, so I wouldn't be able to give any personal advice, but one of these mates http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/...i-6776620.html lives in my building in London.

They do use social media/online marketing, but it is not really a major driver for them. These guys are targeting quite an upscale (or upscale wanna be) and slightly older clientele. I think they do get some mileage out of celebrities (P Diddy, Kate Moss, etc.) making reference to their venues in their tweets, but I don't think they pay for this. They have a pretty amazing Rolodex and circle of "friends" however. (The mate who lives in my building was best man at Guy Ritchie's and Madonna's wedding, for example.)

From what I understand, the really big spenders at these places are not the celebrities but rather hedge fund managers as well as people from either the Arab States or Russia (all with 100% clean money, of course). http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/...s-6378158.html

However, a lot would depends on the demographic that you are trying to target. I would imagine that if you are targeting a younger clientele, especially one that is more price-driven like students, you can push significantly on the internet/promotional angle. At the very least, you would want to be listed and rated in the various directories, city guides, Time Out, etc. in order to get first time/tourist traffic.

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One random idea - a lot of cities have city-specific mobile apps. For example, there are tons of London apps for the Tube, etc - I suspect Toronto is the same.

Running campaigns on those apps might not be high-volume, but I'd expect very high-quality traffic out of them.

The other obvious thing to suggest would be to build a list. FB is great, but email's still the way to go. Then you can promote specials, events, etc via that.

There's a coffee shop in my city that's owned by a digital marketing pro. I'll ask him if he has any more venue marketing tips.

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1 step backward - why do you care about building up likes to a bar's Facebook Page?

If it's for appearances sake, carry on.
If you're just trying to build brand awareness, a general in-line Facebook Feed promoted page to your geospecific targeted demographic is probably a good idea.

But if you're just advertising a Facebook page in the hopes that by generating a fanbase you will be able to advertise to a meaningful percentage of them with your posts - that's pretty untrue these days.

- The Filtered Feed Problem
- Facebook Brand Pages Suffer 44% Decline from Dec 1 - Dec 10 2013
- A Breakup Letter to Facebook

Across the 9 brand pages I manage the average of our owned fanbase we reach is < 10% with any given post since December. (Of course, if you have particularly compelling content that gets viral likes/ shares, you can increase reach - but not necessarily to your targeted demographic or owned fans. Another hurdle for local businesses).

But - for your consideration: Great ideas on how to use (what you would probably consider traditional) campaigns to build brand for a real, physical business on the web: http://blog.eat24hours.com/how-to-ad...-porn-website/

^ And that is your huge point of difference.

You can leverage the marketing skills you already have, use the creativity you've already honed, and absolutely destroy your local competition on the web by thinking out of the box like this. And I'm willing to bet with far greater ROI than just building a fanbase for a local business Facebook page.

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Eat24 is an amazing case study! I'm going to post that as a thread now.

Why i'm interested in creating a Facebook group + Instagram page, is because half of my city's most popular restaurants and some bars really know how to use social media, they build a prescience around the bar owners who do interesting things, and around the food/bar itself. They then post daily about promo's going on that day/weekend at the restaurant/bar. It brings in a very tight nit group of the city's authorities who go out a lot and who dictate where to go/bring friends etc..

Owning a targeted Facebook group with 10,000 of these people could take a bar in this city from 0 to full 5 days a week. The problem is getting the exact target, especially 10,000 of them. My approach is to get more of the general market, of bar go'ers and hope the authorities are mixed in. I see it done daily here, everyone is really interested (including myself) on what they promo because it's often interesting and brings me into their restaurants/bars.

Some examples of this one bar/restaurant:
- Have x band come in to play
- Show a photo of him catching oysters for 50c oysters while drinking night
- Give away free gourmet italian subs at 10pm to start off the night
- Have themed political parties
All facebooked to their 10,000 facebook fans and 7000 instagram followers. It works too well.

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An approach for ANY local business to get some exposure is to rank / outrank (in a perfect case) your competition for their keywords. Means there is 'bar 123' in the town, you try to outrank them for their name. Several approaches can be taken, even fake reviewing on web2 sites / blogs in which your bar comes out as the winner.

Going further, yelp & local directories are something I'd look at. Not exactly 'paid' traffic, but don't underestimate the volume yelp can send to a business and the total volume of popular locations in a city on the SERPs.

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It's awesome that it works that well where you are. Instagram is really key, it has much greater reach / efficacy than a Facebook page alone will. Super tight demographically targeted Facebook ad campaigns are usually very inexpensive. I've managed a lot of client pages and Facebook ad spend over the years and for a 25 mi radius you should be able to nail it to $0.08/ fan or less. ($0.05 or less if you're good).

So the acquisition of fans isn't really the question you have here, but how to keep them engaged and consistently produce content they'll love / want to share that ultimately brings customers in the door to your bar?

If that's the case - no, don't build a page around "Top Bars in San Fran" or somesuch thing. But yes, definitely leverage angles. Does your bar have a theme (For lack of better way to put it)?

General notes from experience:
- Sharing 2-3 posts a day on Facebook is optimal (or was, anyway)
- Experiment with ways to increase engagement and use your Facebook page as a conversation platform. This will help "beat" the algorithm shift as best you can.
- Instagram doesn't drive meaningful traffic - but it's great for brand and awareness.

Quick example of a local company leveraging a random social media platform for gain:

Milkmade.... a monthly delivery service in NYC that sends you handmade ice cream.
- Their Tumblr just shows the "adventures of ice cream making".
- An absurd amount of people follow this
- All of their sign ups come from this. Really. Tumblr drives their business.
- It’s so simple - but they found a place to interact with exactly the demographic that matters to their business.

If you ever need general Facebook Page tips, I highly recommend talking to Luke from PeerFly. He's the man at Facebook pages.

Instagram accounts - there are so many good ones that show you what works. But demographically speaking (if you're trying to capture 20-30 something guys) you can take a lot of cues about what gets shared a lot (and how to manage a personal brand) from the Instragram Playboy

And if I can make one more rec, this is a great overview / brief read on Brand Strategy http://www.amazon.com/60-Minute-Bran.../dp/1118625161

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I would promote photos of the hottest girls having a good time at your bar and any other funny/interesting potentially viral-worthy photos using page post engagement. Bound to be cost-effective with a very high CTR and would help create buzz.

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Stackman I have worked on similar offline clients. I will send you more info on skype. Wouldn't be able to type everything here as I am on mobile.

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Is it for an actual bar? If not, I'm about to waste a bunch of time.

I've been a club promoter for 10+ years, I throw shows at clubs, and am a promotional manager of a pretty sizable electronica festival and manage a a couple clubs in my cities FB pages - so I do a lot of this.

It's honestly 10x easier than affiliate marketing. You want to make a page for the actual bar. You want content on there - pictures staff bartenders dressed up and having fun, obviously the schedule etc.
Hire a 'club photographer' to take pics of guests on big nights and post it in albums, makes people want to go to the club fb and tag themselves/share photos.

If it's a new club, most cities are going to be just be stoked there's a new club in town (my city is half million so new clubs always cause a stir).
So just promoting with the angle that there's a new club opening is usually enough to garner interest and cheap likes.

Usually they couple opening night with a decent size act (10k for a top tier DJ is a small cost in the long term) - so you can co-promote the show with the club.
I typically do DJ/electronica shows - pictures just behind the dj of crowds tend to perform best (unless the dj is very recognizable like Skrillex/deadmau5 or someone then just use their pic, real straight forward "Deadmau5 in Seattle!" etc

If it's for an existing bar, it's just a matter of tapping into their customer base, hopefully the bar has a good and recognize logo - and co-promoting it with large shows is still a good option.

Basically most people want to be associated with clubs on FB, so it makes your job a lot easier.

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Awesome, appreciate the tips!

When it comes to getting likes for 0.05c roughly, any main angles/tactics you use? I have a ton of facebook marketing experience, and i know some outlandish ideas can work best, but i'm also looking to target the people who will actually come to the bar itself.




It's for a bar
More of a funky downtempo lounge specifically (won't be booking dj's for the most part)

Most of this can be applied though so thanks. A big thing in my city is for bars to get bands to play and have bands promote the bar. Which is same concept as djs/clubs co-promoting.

Make the place as cool as possible, strong logo, cross promote with artists, and tons of quality viral/pretty/interesting facebook content, all sounds good.

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Nice, out of all of those, the biggest take way is when you know it's going to be a busy/crazy night or a theme night or something, hire a club photographer to take pics of people and let everyone know pics will be on the FB page later.

Usually only costs $200 or less and it gets you a shit tonne of super relevant organic hits/traffic - nothing interests people more than pictures of themselves - plus it shows up all their friends feeds and just makes your club seem like a good time.

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To build the fan page nothing is more effective than social proof. The more fans you acquire the less it will cost you to acquire other fans. And yes, all the usual tricks from affiliate marketing carry over for brand-centric Facebook page advertising (colored boxes, offset boxes, breasty women, eye-catching images).

It's more expensive but you'll find better quality fans by advertising a post in line. (Never click on that "promote post" option native to a page - I don't know why but that's always much more expensive than just setting up an ad to a post as you usually would through the Facebook Ad planner). These are also ads that show up on mobile devices, which is probably where you want to be during the time of day people are most likely to be in "buy mode" for what they're doing tonight anyway.

Appeal to the user. Ask them what they're doing tonight? (in a more fun and engaging way). Then fill in the blank and suggest to them that they come by. Spoonfeeding works wonders. It always disappoints me but it's true - no one wants to think for themselves. They act after being told what to do.

It would be super cool if you could develop a native app within that Facebook page that allows the user to 'create an event' and send the event out to other Facebook friends to meet up at your bar. (You can get really creative here).

Lounge - definitely go for "cool." Create content that people can own or share that relates how your brand feels even if they're not there. And your "cool" content (whether ads, photographs or events) - the whole purpose is to build familiarity and likeability. To achieve that you want your content to be exceptional, unique, fun, and/ or beneficial to share (including incentivizing with special offers).

And if your content goal is local virality - remember people only share stuff that makes them look funny, smart or cool (for having shared it). Keep that in mind as you post or think about what to post and you're golden.

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Stackman's opening a bar in TO !! Bad ass

Can my band play it ?? Played the mod club, elmo, horseshoe many times, lee's etc etc haha. We are kinda chill, indie, shoe gaze type stuff.

let me know if your looking for acts I'm sure the rest of the band won't mind getting paid by me getting a 1hr coaching session! haha jk

but really, congrats you're too smart for this not to kill. and if you are looking for acts PM me

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We'll even tape STM on our bass drum lol

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All awesome stuff!

"remember people only share stuff that makes them look funny, smart or cool (for having shared it)" Is beyond key, and this statement came in handy for many camapigns.


Definitely, i'll let you know months down the road! Whats the band name? I go to horseshoe and mod club pretty often

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OK, I quizzed folk that I know who recently launched a very successful coffee shop off the back of some excellent digital marketing.

Their top recommendations were:

• Twitter and Facebook, but also Instagram, and interestingly BLOGGING too. Old-school!
• Reddit worked very well for them - I'm guessing there's an /r/toronto ?
• They blogged, Instagrammed, etc, the process of setting up their coffee shop - everything from floorplans to in-progress shots of the new espresso machine.
• They also used software and smart searching to find people on Twitter talking about "coffee" in their city, and followed them. You could potentially do the same for people talking about clubbing in Toronto, etc - or use a tool or an outsourcer to do the same.

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We're called the sea chords. played mostly in t.o in my old band this new one is starting up only played 3-4 gigs so far. but its really tight !

def let me know, would love to play there when its going.

cheers!

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SO SO handy man, thanks. Reddit/r/toronto is huge, i completely forgot about that. Bar setup is ideal too for social media. I've started on Instagram and that Twitter method is the next plan of attack.

Nice nice, will do. I just saw 'Fat as Fuck' recently, not sure if i mentioned that already but they we're rad. Local 7 part band in TO, all instrumental.

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Haha trippy, im checking them now. Good stuff.

I was at the opera house to check out real estate a couple weeks back and saw the national on the Thursday at massey. damnnn good show.

oh shit these guys just kicked in hahaha , wasn't expecting that. cool dynamics.

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