3 Quick-Win Bar Promotions You Can Launch This Weekend

 Need a quick boost in your weekend revenue? 

Many bar owners struggle to create promotions that are both profitable and quick to implement, leaving money on the table every weekend. 

In today's episode: 

• Learn instant-implementation promotional strategies 
• Discover how to structure pricing for maximum profit 
• Master the art of creating urgency in weekend specials 

Listen now to transform your next weekend's revenue with these ready-to-launch promotions. 

Learn More:
Schedule a Strategy Session
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group
The Bar Business Podcast Website
Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'

Thank you to our show sponsors, SpotOn and Starfish. SpotOn's modern, cloud-based POS system allows bars to increase team productivity and provides the reporting you need to make smart financial decisions. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software using AI to help you make data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.
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A podcast for bar, pub, tavern, nightclub, and restaurant owners, managers, and hospitality professionals, covering essential topics like bar inventory, marketing strategies, restaurant financials, and hospitality profits to help increase bar profits and overall success in the hospitality industry.

Transcript

Chris Schneider (00:01.144)
Today, discover three proven promotions that require minimal setup, learn how to maximize profits with strategic pricing, and find out which promo styles resonate the most with guests. Today, we're diving into three promotions that you can implement basically immediately to boost your weekend sales. These are battle-tested promos that should work in most markets and don't require complex preparation or expensive marketing. These are just simple, easy things you can do to give you a quick win that you could implement.

this weekend. So one of the things that's true for most bar owners, we come up with promotions, we have these ideas, we play with them forever, we spend all this time lamenting on them before we actually execute them. And frequently, and I really mean this, I mean, obviously a terrible promotion is not going to help your brand. Something that isn't in line with your brand does not help your brand. A promotion that doesn't fit in with your concept doesn't help your brand.

And we know all those things, but quick implementation and promotions get you revenue quicker. The quicker you can implement a promotion, the quicker that you can increase your revenue. And so most bars, yes, you spend so much time thinking through, this on brand? Is this that you actually don't implement a solution that could help you bring in more revenue when you need more revenue?

And so if you take anything away from this and, I'm going to give you three ideas for what these promotions can be. But if you take anything away from this, simple promotions that you push out quickly.

are the best.

Chris Schneider (01:43.694)
Obviously, they have to make money. Obviously, we have to gather data. We have to understand, is this increasing my sales? Is this increasing my profits? Because it's possible with a promotion, yeah, I increase sales 500 bucks, but I increase my cost or decrease my margins in a way. I 500 bucks in extra sales only generating me an extra $5 in profit. And was it worth it? Right? That's a conversation you can have.

But you need to be willing to throw out things quickly. You need to be willing to gather data quickly. You need to be willing to try things, reiterate them and try again in order to make your promotions work best for you. Now, one of the reasons why the title of this episode is Promotions You Can Launch This Weekend. Weekends have advantages. And the biggest advantage you have on the weekend is you have built-in traffic. The weekend for most bars

and restaurants is the busiest time of the week. As a matter of fact, unless you're a lunch restaurant in a downtown area where no one lives.

Chris Schneider (02:48.44)
Friday and Saturday night are going to be your busiest nights. Period and end of story.

Chris Schneider (02:54.764)
And so we can take advantage of that business that we already know we are going to have. We can take advantage of the fact that we know people are coming in, spending money. They want to come in and spend money and give them ways.

to actually spend that money that are fun, that are enjoyable, and hopefully get a little bit more money out of their pocket. So like I said, I have three concepts for you that are simple promos that you can get out very quickly.

Now I will tell you. As always, when it comes to liquor promotions, this is going to be different whether or not it's legal varies obviously country to country, but it also within the United States, various state to state. It can vary town to town. What's legal for you to do and what's not legal for you to do? So make sure if you're going to roll out a promotion that involves alcohol or beer or anything that contains, you know, beverage alcohol in it. That you're within your local laws.

So maybe you have to tweak these ideas a little bit to work for your exact situation. Let's give them to you. So the first idea that I'm going to throw at you is create a two hour happy hour. But used tiered pricing. Now, this is not legal in every state, right? That's why I just gave you that disclaimer because some states say, OK, if it's happy hour, you have to charge the same for the entire period. But the idea here is that we use the first

hour, we use deeper discounts and we do that at an early time. So like four to five or five to six. Depending on if you do business dinner business when your guests come in all of that. But that hour that's a little slow before the first hour that gets busy on a Friday or Saturday night, that's when we put our deepest discounts. And the idea there is we're going to drive in traffic. An hour earlier than normal. And then the second hour of our special.

Chris Schneider (04:52.364)
So it's a two hour, two hours of special. So it could be four to six or three to five or whatever that looks like again for you. The second hour, we're going to have discounts, but discounts that aren't as good. So the first hour, deep discounts, pulling people in the door. The second hour, moderate discounts to maintain that traffic. And when you discount things, we're going to focus on this on high margin items. And it doesn't just have to be beverages. I think this works great with food as well.

You can basically give food away that hour that people aren't coming in, give them a good food deal the next hour, and then after that, they're paying for everything. And hopefully, they were drinking in the process, so you made some real money there. But you want to use high margin items so that you can give a 60%, 70 % discount, and you're not losing money on that first hour. So high margin items, huge discount the first hour, moderate discount the second hour. The first hour, we're trying to drive in that traffic on an hour that we wouldn't have it. The second hour, we're just trying to maintain that.

and have that stretch a little bit longer for us. Second concept I will throw at you for a weekend promotion. A weekend warriors challenge. Now this is all about groups. So we want to create a group based discount structure. Now what can that mean? Well, we can have discounts based on larger quantity items. Right?

Let's say we had a restaurant that served pizza. Okay, your first pizza is normal price, but if you order two pizzas, now you're you save 5 % and if you order three pizzas, you save 7.5 % and you order free four pizzas, you save 10 % and if you get five pizzas, you save 15 % and six pizzas, you save 20 % right? Something like that. So we're making people order more. And we're giving them an increasing discount the more they order. To try to incentivize larger groups to come in.

Now we can take those groups and involve social media. So how do we involve social media in this case? Well, first of all,

Chris Schneider (06:55.534)
Let's create a hashtag or something on our social media that we're using to say, hey, come in as a group, post this. We're to have all these great posts promoting this group event. Right? Don't tell this to your customers, but this is what you're trying to get them to do is by just saying, hey, come in. We have this great group special. Here's a hashtag for it. Boom. The social media should start working. Then we need to make sure whatever we're serving, whatever this discount is, whether it's food or cocktails or what have you.

that we're able to have this increasing group discount on. We need to make sure that whatever we're serving is Instagramable, that it's hot, that it looks really good in the presentation. So people snap pictures of it and post it. And then if we really want to double down on this whole concept, we can create competitive elements between groups. So what is a competitive element between groups that we could do?

Well, we could say, okay, if you the group that post something, come in, get this discount, post on social media with the hashtag the group that gets the most likes or the most whatever is appropriate for that platform. The group that gets the most likes will get a special coupon for the next time they're here or something like that. So make it competitive between the groups.

Make sure that they're posting it to social media and really get that to push that group business in. Now, the third idea I have for you, this is going not on the cheap end, we're going on the premium end and we're going to discount some premium stuff, but it's all about building a premium tasting flight.

So we're going to bundle up.

Chris Schneider (08:42.456)
three to five premium items and this could be appetizers. I mean, you could do this with like bites of appetizers, but more traditionally with flights, right? We're talking higher end craft beers or even cocktails. You can do cocktail flights with premium spirits or just premium spirits themselves. You know, if you're a bar that has a bunch of really good bourbon or a bunch of really good tequila or vodka, I don't care what you can do a flight of it.

Obviously, if you're going to do a flight with hard liquor, make sure that your pores are small. Make sure that you're not over serving people because you could run into a bit of a liability situation there. But if you set this up properly, that should not be an issue. But what you want to do is create a premium flight of things that don't usually move and then discount it just enough so that it moves. So what do mean by that? So say you had a bunch of high end whiskeys and bourbons at your bar and you picked four of them that

A normal shot in your bar would cost $30 to $60. Right? And let's say a normal whiskey neat at your bar was two ounces. So I'm going to give you a half ounce of each of these. So it's a normal pour and that normal pour would be say average $45 per or for each of those poured out as by itself. And so I'm going to sell you what would be a $45 average shot.

We're going to sell it to you for $35. You're saving essentially $10 over having any of those individually, but now you get a taste of each. Something along those lines, right? But make sure that you price it in a way that you have an articulable way to tell your guests they're getting a value that they normally wouldn't get. Then if we're going to go the premium tasting option, we want to make sure that we've trained our staff on tasting notes that they are aware of what's going on.

that they are set up to be able to sell this really well to our guests. And of course, again, we want to create an Instagram worthy presentation that the guests are going to now take pictures of post on social media, help compound this for you. And when we do anything premium, I like to do that on a limited availability in order to make sure that we're creating urgency and bringing people in the door because, hey, we got this really good deal on this premium tequila flight. It is good.

Chris Schneider (11:05.998)
because Cinco de Mayo is coming up, it's good from May 1st to May 10th or whatever. So to wrap us all up for today, remember the key to successful weekend promotions is making them easy to understand, simple to execute, and profitable to run. Start with one this weekend, measure the results, adjust as needed, and watch your profits increase.