Tapping into the Heart of Bar Patron Loyalty and Engagement

Ever wondered what truly draws a crowd to their local watering hole? It's not just the promise of a cold beer or a fancy cocktail. Today's episode serves up a refreshing take on the allure of bars, tapping into the human need for community, belonging, and yes, sometimes an antidote to loneliness. We're not just quenching thirsts; we're fostering connections, and I'm here to reveal how understanding these profound motivations can revolutionize your bar's marketing tactics. By sculpting guest avatars that mirror our bar's ethos, we're not just selling drinks – we're curating experiences that resonate on a deeper level.

The heart of any bar beats strongest in its patrons, and this episode guides you through the process of distilling your ideal customer from the diverse crowd. It might seem counterintuitive, but we'll start by listing everything our bar isn't, shedding light on the essence of our unique appeal. Whether it's darts over pool or craft brews over cocktails, recognizing our specialties and the psychological intricacies that attract our clientele is key. We'll dissect the magnetic draw of our location, the specialty events that keep our calendar full, and the sometimes overlooked desire for social engagement that our bars satisfy.

Together, we'll explore a free workbook to define your bar's mission, vision and core values and create marketing campaigns that speak directly to each segment of your audience, like crafting the perfect haven for the hardworking blue-collar crowd. Join me, and let's raise the bar on what it means to run a successful, guest-centric establishment.

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Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, the ultimate resource for bar owners looking to elevate their businesses to the next level. Our podcast is packed with valuable insights, expert advice, and inspiring stories from successful bar owners and industry professionals. Tune in to learn everything from how to craft the perfect cocktail menu to how to manage your staff effectively. Our mission is to help you thrive in the competitive bar industry and achieve your business goals.

Special thank you to our benchmarking data partner Starfish. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software by using AI to help you make smart data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.

For more information on how to spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar:
The Bar Business Podcast Website
Schedule a Strategy Session
Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group

Transcript

Announcer: 0:00

You're listening to the Bar Business Podcast where every week, your host, chris Schneider, brings you information, strategies and news on the bar industry, giving you the competitive edge you need to start working on your bar rather than in your bar.

Chris Schneider: 0:20

Welcome to this week's edition of the Bar Business Podcast, your ultimate resource for bar owners. I am your host, chris Schneider, and in today's episode we're going to be delving into understanding why guests come into your bar. And then how we can take that understanding of why guests come into your bar, match it with your bar's culture and use that as a targeted way to drive guests into the door, make your marketing speak to individual groups of people that you want to do business with and make your bar and business stronger. And here's the catch understanding why your guests come in is not normally as simple as it seems on the surface. When you ask people, why do people go to bars? If you just ask anyone that question, most people that answer that question will say that folks go to bars either to drink or to eat. But that's not why people go to bars.

Chris Schneider: 1:19

And let's think about this real quick. If I wanted to have some chips and some beers, I can go to the CVS on my way home, or the grocery store or the liquor store I can go. Stop it. Twenty different stores between work and my house where I can buy a six pack of beer and some chips for under $10. Easy, and that bag of chips and that six pack of beer is probably going to last me more than one day. If I go to a bar on my way home and I get similar chips and the same beer and say I have three of them, it's going to cost me $20, $15, maybe some places still in the middle of nowhere $10. But the bottom line is, even if I'm spending the same $10 bill, I'm getting twice as much when I'm deciding to stay at home, or more than twice as much maybe.

Chris Schneider: 2:25

So why do people go to bars? It's not food and drink. What it is depends on the person. It's community, it's sense of understanding, it's loneliness, it's a lot of different things. But you can't just think that your guests are coming in for food and drink. So we have to understand why they're coming in. And it's the whole purpose of today's episode is to really talk through this, because there's some magic that can happen Once we understand why our guests come in. We can use our knowledge of that why to build complex guest avatars that exemplify the type of people that come into our bar. Then we can take those avatars, leverage those and tie those in with our bar's culture, the mission, vision and values and target our marketing in a powerful way that combines when people come in with what we do in the bar, with what our messaging is specifically geared to speak exactly to the person that is coming in and enjoying that activity during that part of the day. And we'll walk through this all, but definitely stick around until the end because I promise you, if you can connect why your guests come in with why you exist as a bar so their why for coming in with your why for existing and leverage that into marketing, you can create something so powerful that it is like you are speaking to one person at a time in your marketing, in your strategy, and you can speak to multiple people throughout the course of a day if you have multiple types of people that come in. But you will connect with your guests in a whole new way. That produces crazy results for your bar.

Chris Schneider: 4:12

But before we can get to those crazy results, the first thing we have to do is actually determine why our guests coming into the bar, what is attracting them to our bar. And again, as I said in the intro, it's not your food and drink, so let's take that off the table for a second. We'll talk about a few times when it could be food and drink, but let's not focus there as we start to go through this at first. Now, obviously, one of the factors that's going to determine why your guests come in is where you're located. If you're out in the middle of a cornfield and you're the only bar around for 20 miles in any direction, you might have a different draw or different reason people come in than if you're a bar in the middle of a urban residential area, and in fact, those are totally different and there's all sorts of differences there, from how far around you people will drive to get there, to why they're there, to who you're attracting and that avatar of the guests that we're trying to build to. So why people come in will depend on your location and you need to think about that.

Chris Schneider: 5:23

The other thing you need to think about is that, depending on your concept, if you are a concept that say you are a nightclub type venue, everyone is coming there at the same time of day for pretty much the same reason. It's actually more simple than if you think about a neighborhood bar. In a neighborhood bar or in that rural bar in the middle of nowhere that I referenced a few seconds ago. You have different people coming in at different day parts for totally different reasons. The folks that come into lunch don't necessarily have that much to do with the folks that come in during happy hour, who have very little to do with the folks that come in late night. So you probably have in your bar different types of guests at different times of day, almost like you have different concepts, even though you only have one concept.

Chris Schneider: 6:19

And that's important to remember because when we get to the end of this and we start talking about combining avatars with culture and marketing and working all of this together to create real magic to promote your bar, it's important to remember that your concept needs to be cohesive, because that's what's guiding people into your door. We've talked about this a lot and we always will, because a cohesive concept is, quite frankly, one of the most important things in a bar. You need to be what you are, you need to know what you are. But even if you are what you are and you know what you are and you have a cohesive concept, you get different crowds at different times of day with different motivations, so you will have different people come in when we're thinking about why people come into your bar. One of the things we need to do is get very specific with who we're describing, and some of that is demographics. Things like age, income level, race, religion, all of those sort of normal demographic questions play into why people come in and how we can define these individuals. But more important than demographics is psychographic. These are less tangible but more impactful on people's lives, things like their lifestyles, their values, their beliefs, their personality, their attitudes, their activities. And, if you notice, they were talking about values and beliefs, and that's why, when we tie this avatar with our values and beliefs, we can make some real freaking marketing magic here.

Chris Schneider: 7:54

So, with everything we just talked about in mind, let's talk about the actual process to go through to figure out who your ideal customer is and why they're coming in. First thing, we have to determine the why they're coming in, and the easiest way to do that is to start with a list of why they're not coming in. So take out a piece of paper and list down everything. Your bar is not, and I really mean that. It's easier to determine what isn't and then what is, then what is, without first looking at what isn't.

Chris Schneider: 8:26

So think about your concept, think about the amenities, think about what you sell or don't sell. Think about how you do your service, the type of bar you are. All of those have certain meanings, but all of those definitely have things that you're not. If you don't have pool tables, people are not coming to your bar to play pool. If you are not open for lunch, no one's coming to your bar for lunch. If you are not fine dining, no one's coming to your bar for fine dining service.

Chris Schneider: 8:56

But actually take a piece of paper and list those things out. I know at some point that sounds silly. Because you know you don't have a pool table, you don't need to write down People are not coming here to play pool, but write it down. Because once we determine why people aren't coming in, our next step is to take another piece of paper, write down why they are coming in. And by having a piece of paper that's having that list of why they're not coming in, it can give us some ying and some yang, some balance, some ability to more easily brainstorm why they are coming in. Because if we know they're not coming in to play pool because we don't have pool tables but we do have a dart board, they are coming in to play darts. So we're focused on dart players, not pool players. That's why you start with the not list. So do your not list, then do your why they are coming in list. When we look at making that why folks are coming in list I would highly recommend looking at it holistically. Right, we wanna figure out everything we can about why they're coming in and again, different times of day, different things will create a different draw.

Chris Schneider: 10:05

One thing to always think about is how far are your guests coming from? So, generally speaking, guests are coming from within a few miles for most bars. I'm sure you guys have heard this, but there's that statistic that most people get in a car accident within two miles of their house. That is because most people rarely drive further than two miles from their house, which means most your guests are gonna be within two miles of their house. Where they live in, your bar are probably close together. Now, if you're in the middle of some cornfield in Nebraska, maybe they're driving 20 miles because there's no other option, and that's not that far when you live in the middle of cornfields. If you're in New York City, they're not coming from miles away. They're coming from maybe a couple blocks away. Maybe most your guests, all your guests, live on the same block where your bar is. So where you are is gonna determine that range. But think about that range, think about where they're coming from and then also think about when you have guests coming from outside of that area. So if you are a high-end bar, if you are a internationally known bar, maybe you have guests traveling from cities away, counties away, countries away, half the world away, just to visit your bar. Now I will tell you right now I have never gone on a trip solely to visit a bar. But you better bet, if I'm going to New York, or if I'm going to DC, or if I'm going to Florida, I'm going to Rome, I'm going wherever it is that I am traveling, I am looking up the coolest bars there and going there to get that experience. So people will come in from around the world sometimes if you have something that's going to draw them in and it doesn't necessarily have to be that you have the best cocktails or anything like that.

Chris Schneider: 11:51

I'll tell you guys a story when I had my bar. I'm sure you guys are aware of this Buzz Time Trivia it's the little blue boxes and it's the trivia on the TVs and you hit the, you make selections on the box that goes to the trivia and you're playing trivia against everyone, playing Buzz Time Trivia around the entire world. Well, for years my bar was the number one Buzz Time Trivia bar in the world. We won everything every day and it was five guys. There were about 10 overall, but there were five guys that were there every day sitting at the bar from like four to six playing Buzz Time Trivia, beating everyone else on the globe. I had people drive hundreds of miles just to play trivia with these guys and they're all great guys, but I don't know that I would have driven hundreds of miles to meet them. But they had, within this Buzz Time community, they had celebrity status. We have people come from other countries just to play trivia with these dudes.

Chris Schneider: 13:00

So you will get weird draws that bring people into your location. I've told the story before. We did a podcast for the Walking Dead that drew people in a live podcast in a bar weird thing. But it got people to drive from hours away to come in. So just because most of your guests are coming local, you may have that thing that draws people in from outside. Make sure you're looking at that as a factor of why some of your business comes in.

Chris Schneider: 13:28

But the big thing to focus on here, when we think back to the psychographics why people are coming in, what are they trying to get out of their experience? And I will tell you right now we all think about all these fun things that drive bar business and all these great reasons guests come in. We understate the amount of loneliness and horniness that drives bar guests, because most of your folks coming in alone during the day sitting at the bar having a couple of drinks, they're there just to be around people, because they probably are single, they live alone. They need human interaction. Your restaurant kids coming in at night yeah, they're coming in to blow off steam and to shake off that shift they just got out of, but they're also probably trying to hook up with each other. So don't underestimate the real psychological reasons that are often kind of depressing that people are coming into your bar. Because we need to get all that on paper when we're determining why guests are coming in, what's attracting them to come into our establishment, so that we can leverage that information and use that knowledge to build fantastic guest avatars.

Chris Schneider: 14:46

How to make a business partner with a bar owner. Hey there, bar owners, it's Chris Schneider, the bar business coach. Are you tired of the daily grind and ready to skyrocket your profits? I've got the solution. With my coaching and consulting services, we deep dive into menu management, team empowerment and business optimization. Instead of slogging away in your business day in and day out, washing dishes, covering for employees and working 60 plus hours a week, picture this A thriving business that runs like clockwork, whether you're there or not, letting you enjoy the successes that you've dreamed of. Let's make it happen. Visit barbusinesscoachcom to schedule your free 30 minute strategy session with me, or you can book a session just by clicking the link in the show notes below. Together, we will turn your business into a profit powerhouse, because at the Bar Business Coach, our only goal is to help you spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar.

Chris Schneider: 15:46

Now this is where the fun kicks in in building these guest avatars, and it is creative. It is enjoyable. It is something that you should probably try to involve some of your staff in, because they interact with your guests probably more than you do. They know about their personal lives more than you do and what we're really trying to build here is guess that exemplify those reasons that you say people come in. So what I like to do for most bars and again, if you have a very specific concept, that's drawing a very specific group of people and by that it could just be a nightclub you probably don't need this many avatars. But for most neighborhood bars, most community bars, I like to try to come up with six separate avatars. So we look at all the reasons why people come in and try to distill that down to six specific reasons, and then we use those six specific reasons to build six avatars.

Chris Schneider: 16:50

When I say avatar, what I mean is we're just building a fake customer that exemplifies everything about that group of customers that comes in for that reason. And when I say we're building a specific customer, we want to get detailed. I want to know what their name is, what they do for a living, what they do for hobbies, why are they coming into the bar. I want a freaking life story on this person, their biography, because we're going to use that for this marketing that's going to unlock this magic that's going to tie everything together and let us speak to our guests in whole new ways. So we want to get super detailed about these people. We want to know everything about them that we can. Now, while we're doing this, if you go and you look at information online about building avatars, they're going to talk a lot about marketing jargon, and the last thing I like to include when I go through this process is marketing jargon. I don't care about silly definitions of demographics, I don't care about stupid ways of labeling things. Ignore all of that. Make it a person, make it a life story, make it real.

Chris Schneider: 18:14

Now, once you have those six people defined, those six avatars fully fleshed out and built, we need to compare them against each other, because there are two things we want to make sure are true when it comes to our avatars. One, we want to make sure that they're not hugely overlapping. We didn't build two avatars of essentially the same person with the same reason for coming in and the same attributes, who's the same age and has the same job and has the same income and has the same personal beliefs. We want to make sure that these are six distinctive individuals with distinctive reasons for coming in, and we also want to make sure that we've defined each of them in the same amount of detail, like any creative process, one thing that is bound to happen here, especially if you're doing this with a team. There will be an avatar that you really like that some of your team will be right on. They'll know exactly who they're trying to describe and they'll smash these four customers together and it'll be great, and you'll end up with this long explanation of one person. And then one of your other avatars would be like this is Jim. Jim drinks Bud Light. He works at the sawmill. This is Jim, and so you'll have one that's fully fleshed out, and then we know jack shit about Jim. Make sure that all your avatars are equally well defined Because, remember, each of these is a group that we are targeting in a specific day part that we are expecting certain activities from that we can use to leverage that avatar in our marketing so that our guests feel like we're not speaking to the world, we're not speaking to a group, we're not speaking to a crowd, we are speaking to them one individual, and the power behind that is amazing.

Chris Schneider: 20:11

So make sure that each of these six avatars are as fleshed out as they can be. Now, with that, once we have those fleshed out, we have got to check and make sure that we've accurately captured the proper avatars for our bar. Just because we think this is what is going on, just because we think this is who our target customer is, just because we've gone through this process doesn't mean we've gotten it right. So take your six avatars and for a few weeks, compare them against your regulars. Check each avatar in all your day parts. Check it against who you see. If you realize that one of your avatars is a little off, tweak it. But you need to make sure that you are speaking to the right person, and the only way to make sure that you're speaking to the right person is to make sure that that avatar is correct and fits your regulars. Now, obviously not every regular will fit every aspect of every avatar. It's just not going to happen. To do that we'd have to build a specific avatar for every guest, but the average of a set of regulars so the average of your blue collar guys that come to the bar and drink a bucket of beer during happy hour Monday through Friday should fit the average of that group. You have to be specific enough to define that group of people and then you have to use your observation, once you have that avatar made, to make sure that it actually fits, to make sure that you've actually accomplished the goal of creating this avatar that works for this group.

Chris Schneider: 21:56

I want to take a moment to highlight a powerful resource that can be a game changer for your bar my book how to Make Top Shelf Profits in the Bar Business. It's not just a book. It's a comprehensive guide with 75 lessons covering crucial aspects like bar design, menu creation, team culture, marketing strategies and much more. Imagine having this wealth of wisdom at your fingertips. Whether you're a seasoned bar owner refining your craft or someone dreaming of stepping into the bar business, this book is your ultimate companion. You can grab a copy on Amazon and print e-book and audiobook formats. The link is in the show notes below. Join the league of successful bar owners who found their blueprint to working less in their bar and more on their bar.

Chris Schneider: 22:35

Now it's time to tie in our culture. In order to tie in our culture, the first thing is we have to make sure that we have a solid foundation behind our culture. We have talked about this before, but the cultural foundation of any bar, of any business, really is the mission, vision and core values. You need to have your mission, vision and core values defined. Just to remind you, if you haven't thought about this for a while, your mission is your business's purpose. We're talking about the mission of a person. It's what you wake up every day to do. We're talking about the mission of a business. It's that business's purpose, what it imparts upon the world just by existing, and how it makes the world a better place. The vision is the long-term aspirational goal for your business, and the core values are the most important of those three components. They're the litmus test you can use every day to gauge not only decisions in your business, but your employees' performance, your team management, your own attitude towards different things around your bar. Core values are literally one of the most impactful things on any business that you can ever have. So make sure you have your core values, your mission and your vision articulated well Now.

Chris Schneider: 23:58

If you have not had a chance to do that, or if you think they're weak and you want to work on refining your mission, vision and core values, you can check out a link I will put below in the show notes that will take you over to our website. Put in your name and email and we will give you a free workbook on determining your bar's mission, vision and core values. It is called Foundations of Bar Culture and again, there'll be a link in the show notes. But you can go to barbusinesspodcastcom, you can go to barbusinesscoachcom and on both of those you will see a place put in your name, put in your email. You get instant access to that workbook that will guide you step by step through determining and or refining if you already have them your bar's mission, vision and core values.

Chris Schneider: 24:49

Also in there is a great little worksheet that I love to see the responses you get when you give it to your employees. So before you craft any of those, there's a little worksheet to hand out to your employees that gives you an idea of what they currently see the culture as. And, mind you, in an ideal world your employees can write down your mission, vision and core values off the top of their head. They know them, it's in their body of knowledge, it's part of what they think about while they're at work. But if you haven't done the training to establish that, you might be really surprised at some of the answers you get when you just ask your employees hey, write this down. So there's that survey to give your employees. There's activities that walk you through this exactly. There are examples of mission, visions and core values is a great resource to either define those for the first time or refine them and really make it a powerful tool.

Chris Schneider: 25:46

Because we need these mission, vision and core values to tie into our avatars to build this marketing powerhouse. Because culture understanding why we exist plus understanding why our customers are coming in gives us the focus in our marketing. That again allows us not to speak to a group of people, but lets us speak to one individual and makes that person feel like we're speaking just to them. Even though we're speaking to a group of people, still it makes that individual think we are speaking just to them. Now let's walk through an example here of how you would actually work this to speak directly to a guest.

Chris Schneider: 26:27

So let's go back to our avatar where we were talking about blue collar guys at the bar at happy hour. They drink beer, they eat some chips, they talk amongst themselves, they go home. They're there for about an hour hour and a half. They drink each between three and five beers. Some of them split a bucket between two of them. Some of them order a bucket for themselves. We know that person, we know what speaks to them. They want to blow off steam after work, they want to relax, they want to drink their beer, they kind of want to be left alone, but they also want to socialize at the same time. There's a bit of a duality there in what they want between the socialization and being left alone. They really don't want to deal with people, but they really do. It's weird, but that is your blue collar after work guy almost always, so we have that avatar.

Chris Schneider: 27:17

Now maybe our mission part of our mission is to provide a community gathering place that allows people to connect and grow together to build a stronger world around us, or something like that. That was pretty good for just some bullshit off the top of my head, not gonna lie, but let's say that's what it was. So we want to connect these folks and we know these guys are coming in for beers. So maybe we come up with a marketing campaign that we're gonna just do some Facebook posts about happy hour and about how happy hour can be happy when you're with people, but it can also be happy when you're not with people, because we have these specials and you can just be greedy and keep it all to yourself or you can share with your friends. Maybe we're gonna do something like that Right. So we connected our value, our mission of bringing the community together, with what our guest avatar is looking for. We're speaking directly to what they like to drink. We're speaking directly to what that person wants.

Chris Schneider: 28:26

And the trick is, whether we're talking about a Facebook post or we're talking about just a flyer in the bar, or we're talking about a YouTube short or an Instagram reel that we're making real quick to throw out there, we need our call to action to be exactly what we'll bring that person in. So for that person, maybe, our call to action is hey, it's four o'clock, you know you don't want to go home right now, so come in, have a beer, relax and tell Jim at the end of the bar why he is wrong about who's gonna win the Super Bowl. Now, probably you want something more refined and polished than that, because I literally just came up with that off the top of my head, but it gives you an idea of how you can start to think about combining your avatar, your culture and coming up with this very directed marketing that speaks to an individual. Then you just have to figure out how to deploy it so that that individual will see it. So that's why an Instagram reel at four o'clock hey, it's four o'clock. We're speaking to people that are coming in during that happy hour space we're speaking directly to that person.

Chris Schneider: 29:36

Now you do have to be careful. You want to make sure that the way you market to one avatar is not going to turn off another avatar. So you don't want how you're trying to pull in your happy hour crowd to negatively impact the feeling about your bar from your late night crowd. The same way you don't want your late night crowd to negatively impact your happy hour crowd or your lunch crowd. So there is some balance here to keep in mind. But when you can connect why someone comes into your bar, the actual root cause of why they're coming in, with your bar's culture, your mission, what your purpose is there to do in life or in business as a bar, then you can build marketing that gives people these targeted calls to action that speak directly to them but still speak to a group, and it can be a game changer in understanding your guests, attracting your guests and bringing your guests in Because understanding your guests is one of the most powerful things you can ever do and taking that understanding to the level of creating avatars and then taking those avatars and combining those with your culture to make focused marketing will make you money.

Chris Schneider: 30:57

But you have to do it and you have to double check things and you have to make sure you're doing it right. But at the end of the day, this is not a difficult process. This is not a hard process. This is a great process to involve your team with, because they will have fun with this process. They will have a lot of input and a lot of great ideas and this is absolutely a process that, at the end of the day, will be impactful to your bottom line, will help you grow and will put more dollars in your pocket. And tell you what. That's pretty much going to wrap us up for today.

Chris Schneider: 31:28

So, if you like this, like I said, there's a link in the show notes to the foundations of Culture workbook that can walk you through the mission, vision and core values. If you don't already have that in place, there's also a link down there to get a one-on-one strategy session with me. If you're interested in coaching programs, if you want to talk about culture, how to find your customer avatar or any issues in your business, I am here to help you guys always and there's also a link down there for Bar Business Nation. That's our Facebook group where we are doing monthly workshops now to cover specific topics that are going to have slide decks and all sorts of information for you guys. So it's essentially free group coaching as part of joining the Facebook group. So definitely go there, click the link down below, sign up and with that I will let you guys go. I hope you all have a fantastic week and we will talk again later.