The Magic of Understanding Why Your Guests Come In
Guests come to bars for all sorts of reasons. Almost counterintuitively the reason guests come into your establishment is not for food or drinks. If someone just wanted to eat chips and drink a few beers, they could do it a lot easier and cheaper sitting at home. So what drives your guests? Once you determine why they come in, you can create an avatar that combined with your culture will create marketing magic.
What is attracting guests to your bar?
It is important to understand the key reasons guests come to your bar. Whether you are a rural bar in the middle of a cornfield or a cocktail bar in the downtown of a major city, if you do not understand why your guests come in, you cannot serve them properly. Unlocking the secret of why they come in will focus your service, marketing, and everything else you do in your establishment.
The different types of bar customers
There are as many different types of bar customers as there are different types of bars. In many ways, your company culture and your concept help determine who comes in. You could own two bars, within close walking distance of each other, and if you have different concepts you will have different customers. So, your college-themed sports bar will not attract the same guests as your higher-end cocktail-focused venue aimed at Gen Z and Millenials.
This is one of the reasons why developing and maintaining a cohesive concept is essential in the bar business. You have to know who you are, so your guests can know where they belong. Yes, your concept needs to be based on the demographics of the area. Yes, your location matters. But, most importantly, your concept has to be the right fit for the crowd you are looking to bring in.
Your guests come in for all sorts of reasons and you will have different segments of guests that come in for different things. But, if you start to pay attention to who is coming in and who is interacting with you on social media you can gather data on the demographics and psychographics of the people you are serving.
One thing that separates bars even from restaurants, is that many neighborhood bars serve as community gathering places, so the diesel mechanic, the sheriff, and the businessman might all frequent the same bar. They may not have orbits that cross many other places, but many bars serve as a melting pot of the community around them.
What they are not coming in for?
When trying to figure out what is driving guests to your bar, it is normally easiest to start with what is not driving them. This is because our brains spot patterns and it is easier to see outliers to the norm than what ties the norm together. Think back to Sesame Street and singing “One of these things is not like the others”.
First things first, people are not coming in for something you don’t have, so list those things. If you don’t do live music, that isn’t attracting people to your bar. If you don’t have food, it isn’t food that is driving business. Just list the things you do not offer that other bars might.
Next, list your customer behavior and look at your product mix. What doesn’t sell well can tell you a lot about your clientele. Maybe you don’t sell a lot of wine, or you never sell tequila. Look at the demographics that consume those beverages, and know those are probably not your people.
By just answering those two questions, and listing out all of the things your guests are not coming in for, you created a list that details what differentiates your bar from other bars. Now you have a jumping-off point to determine why they do come in.
What are guests coming in for?
Determining why your guests come in, comes down to listing and brainstorming just like figuring out why they don’t come in. This time we are looking for strong motivators. The key reasons people frequent and enjoy your establishment.
To start, we can build from the lists we made of why people do not come in. First, what are the things your bar has amenity-wise or special things you offer that differentiate you from the competition? Second, what sells well? What is driving your business in your product mix, and what are the key demographics of that group? Answering those questions will get us close to determining who your guests are.
Next, we want to think about where are our guests coming from. Where do they live? For many neighborhood bars, dive bars, and pubs your guests are coming within a few miles. That could extend out to 10s of miles in a very rural area, or condense down to being a radius of just a few blocks in major urban areas. For other bars, they could be pulling people from miles or countries away depending on their market position. For example, there are bars and clubs in many major cities that people will travel for hours just to go to. What makes someone drive three minutes for a beer is a lot different than what motivates someone to drive four hours for a beer.
Finally, when considering why guests come in we need to think about what they are trying to get out of the experience. What is the goal of their visit? As we discussed, the least likely reason that someone is coming in is just for a drink or some food. In my experience, two motivations seem to drive a bar’s business more than anything else, loneliness and horniness. Most people who frequent bars want to get out and interact with other people. It is that simple. Depending on the time of day, maybe there are different motivators. Many bars serve different clientele at different times of the day.
Leverage your knowledge
Once you understand who your guests are and what is driving them in your door, now you have an opportunity to leverage that information and build guest avatars that you can use to guide your marketing, focus your social media, and drive your revenue.
Creating guest avatars
One of the most valuable exercises you can do once you understand why your guests are frequenting your bar is to build out guest avatars. An avatar is just a detailed profile of your ideal guests. You should develop an avatar around each of the major reasons that guests come into your bar. This will allow you to better understand guest behavior and to be able to forecast and predict what guests will do. It will also help you guide your marketing efforts so that you are speaking the right way, to the right target guest in all of your communications.
Building out a guest avatar can be both a fun and challenging activity. The thing to remember is that the more specific that you can get the more powerful of a tool you have created. Rather than taking the general business marketing approach of naming the avatars after demographic and psychographic criteria and describing them through a bunch of marketing jargon, I prefer to look at them as individual people. It makes it more personal, and when using the avatar to help train your team, guide your marketing, or anything else, you are dealing with a person, not jargon.
So, here is the step-by-step to creating a guest avatar.
Identify why your guests come in. What are the psychological drivers of their visit? Are they coming in to spend time with friends for happy hour? Are they industry employees coming in late night to drink off the workday and hookup? Are they couples coming in after dinner for a nightcap on the way home? Figure out the top four to six reasons people come in, and write those down.
For each of those four to six reasons, start to build the avatar of the representative guest. The easiest way to do this is to first pick a few regulars that come in for each of the reasons that you listed. Then look for the similarities among those guests so you can build an avatar that fits. Make your final avatar as specific as possible.
Make it a single fictional person who represents everyone with that reason for coming in. Get down to the level of considering every demographic and psychographic point you can predict based on the regulars you are using to create the avatar. Think about things like education level, job, age, income level, marital status, habits, or anything at all that will help you paint a more specific picture of that person.Once you have your avatars fleshed out and defined in detail based on the reasons people come into your business, then you just need to compare them to each other and make sure that a) you did not inadvertently create avatars with a large overlap; and b) make sure that you defined each avatar in equal detail so that you can apply them equally to your business efforts.
Understanding guest behavior
Once you have built your avatar, then you need to see if it works for understanding guest behavior. Watch the guests that come in and out of your establishment. Which avatar do they fit? Does it describe them fully? By doing this over and over for a week or two, you will refine your avatars to the point that they predict most of what most of your patrons do.
You need to associate different avatars with different dayparts. In most neighborhood bars, the type of guests can vary greatly throughout the day. If you have a more specific concept that is open in fewer dayparts, then you may not have different avatars at different times. But, for most bars, the guests that frequent for lunch, those that come in for happy hour, and those that come in late night have little in common. They are distinct groups with different behaviors and expectations.
Now you have the key to understanding guest behavior, motivation, and how to market to them. By understanding who they are, what they do, and why, you have created a tool that can drive your marketing and promotional efforts, increase your revenue, and focus your offerings in different dayparts.
Aim at the right target
With this understanding now we can figure out how to specifically target different avatars in different dayparts. Gear your promotions and activities to who is coming in at that time, and what speaks to them.
For example, if you are giving away free snacks during happy hour, and your avatar is retired and blue-collar men, who tend to drink beer and talk about sports, while also complaining about their wives (who they also wait on hand and foot), maybe a good choice for the free snack is pork rinds. Depending on where you are, they could be a hit. I served them during happy hour for years, and my happy hour crowd loved them. Pork rinds are not going to work at all late night though, when your avatar is a 23-year-old server from the chain restaurant down the street that is trying to have a few drinks and decompress from her crazy night. She thinks they are gross.
Whatever you are doing, whether it is determining free food to give away, what specials to offer, or anything else in your bar, by using the avatars you have created and focusing on specific dayparts you can laser focus what you are doing in your business that drives traffic. Good avatars can literally help with every, single thing that you do.
Your Culture Matters
In the Mindset-Concept-Culture Framework that I follow, marketing is culture. How you interact with, communicate with, and target your guests is the external expression of your culture. So, your avatar is only valuable with the proper cultural foundations alongside it. Your avatar unlocks what your guests want and how they behave, so you know who to target, but your culture has to drive the why and how behind your marketing.
Crafting Your Culture
For any bar to be successful, they need to set the foundation for their culture. These are the mission and vision statements and core values. Without those three crucial cultural components, you like the guardrails to keep your culture on track.
Mission and vision statements clarify what the long-term goals and purpose of your bar are. Your vision statement is the reflection of your bar’s goals and aspirations. Your mission statement is your bar’s primary object, the reason why your bar exists.
Your bar’s core values are four to seven values that you choose to inform how you, your managers, and your team behave. How you interact with each other and interact with your guests. Core values need to be more than just one word, they need to be a word with a definition. You want everyone on your team to know exactly what your core values stand for.
If you need to write your mission, vision, and core values for the first time, or if you want to refine them and make them better, make sure to get your copy of our free workbook, Foundations of Bar Culture. It will walk you through the exact steps you need to follow to create a mission and vision statement and core values that will drive your business forward.
Your Culture Plus Your Avatars Are Your Marketing
Once you know who your guests are, their avatars, and who you are as a business, your mission, vision, and values, all you need to do is put it all together. Your marketing will almost write itself. The correct path to take will become clear to you.
You have to focus on who you are serving and why. If you can communicate with your ideal guest avatar, why you are the only spot that is the right fit for them, based on commonalities between their personality and your culture, you are creating an internal drive within them to frequent your bar. You are not just marketing to them. You are creating a need that ties who they are to your bar.
There is nothing more powerful that you can do in your marketing strategy. It pairs the right guest with the right offer at the right time with the motivation to act. It gives you structure and guidance so you know how to differentiate different marketing for different day parts. It can even help guide where you market to different segments of your business.
Final Thoughts
Marketing is not an easy task. However, knowing who your customers are and why they come in is a critical step in building a marketing strategy that puts butts in seats every day. By combining why your guests come in with why you operate your bar and serve them, you can create compelling marketing that will drive revenue and guest satisfaction.
If you want help determining your guest avatars, or want to explore how we can assist you with your broader marketing strategy, schedule a free 1:1 strategy session with Chris Schneider, The Bar Business Coach, to learn how we can collaborate.