Top 4 seasonal promotions to take your bar to the next level

Seasonal events are the best way to advertise your bar and win the hearts of many people within and beyond your local neighborhood. It’s all about how you do it. This blog post will discuss the top 5 seasonal events you can promote your bar and how.

Running a bar is no easy feat. You have to make sure it’s looking prim and proper and your staff members are serving your customers in the best manner possible. However, running a bar is one thing, and promoting it is another. You must carefully observe whether your existing customers are still coming to you regularly. If not, why? You must also try to understand the major obstacles that stand in your way of expanding your bar’s customer base.

After doing some backbreaking research, you’ll realize there might some flaws in how you’re running the bar. Your bar’s goodwill is only as good as your customer service. Alternatively, your menu might not be good enough as your competitor’s. Whatever the case, you have to fix your business operations before you move on to promoting it. Once you have, here are some seasonal bar promotion ideas that will get customers through your door.

Bar trivia night is a good start

Hosting a trivia night is an awesome way to get the much-needed attention from potential customers. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it’s a pub quiz comprising multiple rounds of questions posed to the audience. The questions can be anything — general knowledge, pop culture, sports, history, and much more.

If you think that would be too boring, you can make things more interesting by gelling the quiz with a drinking competition. For instance, for every wrong answer, a person in the audience has to drink a shot of their preferred drink. That would certainly make it much spicier. Just make sure you have everything you’d need for hosting it. This would mainly include score sheets, an answer sheet for every team, pen and paper, sound equipment (mic and speakers), and multiple questions written on small pieces of cardboard.

It would help if you add a little email marketing into the mix. You can email your subscribers list about the upcoming event and tell them that it would mean the world to you if they show up. Don’t have experience with email marketing? Use these email templates and the PosterMyWall Email Maker to craft stunning personalized emails that will catch your customers’ attention.

Speed dating on Valentine’s Day

When love is in the air every year in February, you can help all the singles feel less jealous by hosting a speed dating event at your bar. Speed dating is one of the most popular ideas among bar-goers, as it helps them meet new people and possibly develop a romantic interest. That’s why so many people show up at speed dating events.

The idea behind speed dating is that people rotate from seat to seat every 5 to 10 minutes, chatting with a potential partner every time they switch. This can be socially awkward for some people, so why not help them out by providing some sample questions and drinks to break the ice?

Charity night on Easter

A Charity night is one of the best ways to attract crowds of people to your bar. People like being a part of something bigger than themselves. But that doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy themselves in the process, right? There are many ways to host a charity night. 

One of the most popular ones is to hold a raffle, where people buy lottery tickets in the hopes of winning prize money more than the ticket’s cost. Just make sure the participants know you’re doing this for charity, so they’re much likelier to buy your tickets. Even if they lose, they’ll go home satisfied that they helped someone in need.

Another way is to bring a sponsor on board with a special drink for the night. People can buy this drink and the proceeds go to charity. Again, make it known that you’re doing this for charity. Ask your sponsor to deliver a small speech before the event begins and post it on your social media channels so that people know you’re active in the community. This will bring in many more customers through your door.

There’s nothing better than karaoke night on Oktoberfest

What’s a better occasion to promote your bar than a day dedicated to drinking beer? Oktoberfest started in Germany and became an international sensation. It’s a 2-week party period where people come to a funfair and enjoy themselves to the brim. Now, that doesn’t mean you ought to throw a 2-week long festival, but how about an all-night-long party?

However, you’ll need to advertise it well beforehand, and we suggest using Oktoberfest posters and posting them in high-traffic areas near your bar. You don’t have to hire a graphic designer for that when you can use an online graphic design tool like PosterMyWall to craft stunning, eye-catching posters in just a few clicks.

Make sure you also post this banner to all your social media channels and website. With social media, you can reach out to a larger number of people and possibly receive greater traction. However, you’d need to have up-and-running social media channels on Instagram and Facebook for it to be more fruitful.

Some parting thoughts

The aforementioned seasonal events are the best times of the year to run your promotions. However, not every bar is created equal and so you might want to experiment with several strategies and tweak them to your business model and target audience to see what works for you. 

But before you do that, consider researching what your competitors are doing and whether it’s working out for them or not. This will give you a headstart and you won’t waste time experimenting with the wrong strategies. Lastly, always track your results for each strategy. If you’re promoting your event on social media, you can check out the analytics of how many people saw your poster versus how many signed up for the event. This would give you valuable insight into how you can increase the turnover rate.


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