Interactive Promotions Group recently had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Nick Fosberg who is known as one of the highest paid, marketing and promotional consultants in the bar & restaurant industry. Nick conversed with our co-owner Greg Esterhai, on Interactive Promotions success in creating a variety of new bar & restaurant promotions that help our clients out-beat their competitors. Many ideas and information was shared and will be vital to hear if you want to learn the following:

-How to give money away to your customers without it coming from your own pocket.
-How to get sponsors to pay for promotions so no money is coming out of your pocket.
-How to drive traffic into your bar or restaurant.

To condense some of the key points that were stated, let’s first realize that the bar & restaurant industry has it made when it comes to supplying customers unspoken needs and wants. Simply put, people need to eat and want to drink. But the problem lies in the duration. You may notice your most busiest nights are Friday, Saturday, Sunday and you can’t forget “Thirsty Thursdays.” But what happens to your profits during the other three days? During the podcast, Greg mentions a possible solution for bars that may be experiencing slow nights during the week:

“…we really want to push our sales on Tuesday nights, so we’re going to do a 99 bottles of beer on the wall promotion… we do that a lot with bars and restaurants where you have 99 bottles that are lined up on a shelf somewhere, and each Tuesday night you allow one patron to come up and pick a bottle off the wall. And if they’re bottle matches the predetermined winning bottle, they win the prize.”

Giving your customers something to get excited about will definitely drive traffic into your bar or restaurant. Your customers won’t just come on weekends, but now have a reason to come during the week. And don’t forget, that your customers win won’t cost you a dime! Interactive Promotions will insure your prize so that the money won, won’t come out of your pocket but ours!

Another concern many bar and restaurant owners face (as stated in the podcast), is sponsorship. Bar and restaurants usually don’t have products of their own, but products from other large businesses. For example, if you run a weekly special promoting a specific beer company, shouldn’t they cover some or all of the costs? Nick suggests different methods for reaching out to these company and even local insurance business to have them possibly cover the costs:

“Tell them you’ll do an email blast for them. You’ll let everybody know at the promotion, “Hey, this is sponsored by this company.” But in order for them to see some kind of results, hand something out that’s going to direct business to them where they can track and measure that to see if it was worth doing this or not, but not just branding their logo out there, because that does nothing for you to see and track results.”

To summarize all of the many insights and ideas that were shared during this podcast, we think Nick stated it perfectly:

“So many bars and restaurants are just doing the same shit over and over and over, and people are getting sick and tired and bored with the stuff. It’s like if you’re not innovating yourself, your brand, the next guy who is, that’s where people are going to go.”

We are sure that you will want to learn more about our promotions for the Bar and Restaurant industry. So to speak to a representative, contact us at 888-882-5440 or email us at info@interactivepromotions.com. To listen to the full podcast, click here.