Marketing your bar or restaurant used to mean buying cool neon signage, making great drinks, crossing your fingers, and hoping that word would get around.
Marketing your venue in 2022 looks a little different. You need to have a whole personality that can translate to every customer touchpoint, from your website to your menus. That personality represents your brand.
A brand uses the five senses to tell your story and values. Every concept has one, but few operators curate theirs. Your brand works if your target audience keeps coming back for more. That’s called brand loyalty, and it’s the stuff every marketer dreams about.
You don’t need to spend a dime to learn how to freshen up your branding strategy. Start by honing in on your values. These values will help you build your brand core, the essence of your brand. Once you have your brand core, you can then choose brand identity elements, or artistic elements that match up with your values and tell your story (colors, lighting, fonts, music, etc.).
Ready? Let’s get started.
Step 1: What Matters?
When customers enter your concept, they enter a world with its own unique atmosphere. Add great food and drinks, and you give customers incentive to come back again.
Try to summarize that atmosphere in a few words to zero-in on your brand core.
How was your place started? Jot down key players, major events, and anything else you deem as important to the creation of your bar or restaurant.
Now ask why would you (or the founder) do all that? What was the driving force that made your place a reality? What makes doing the hard work worth it?
Dig up some emotional elements that you can point to and say, “That’s why we’re here.” Customers want to know and support these values.
Tip: If you dig up historical pictures, visuals, or other documents while exploring your bar or restaurant’s past, save them for the next step.
Boil your stories down to two or three core values that you feel you can stand by for years to come. Now you have a brand core! Congratulations. It’s time to turn those ideas into physical traits for your brand.
Step 2: Brand Elements
This step might get a little messy. You’re going to need a board, like a foam board, bulletin board, or a digital Pinterest board to lay out your visual elements. If you have imagery such as old photos or logos, you’ll want to start by laying them out here or scanning them into your digital board.
From there, you’re going to look for inspiration and add elements to your board. These can include logos, photos of interiors, signage, flyers, or menus. Only add elements that play up and echo your brand values.
You also want to pick five colors that align with your values using this guide. Try to keep half of your colors neutral to ground the palette (brown, black white, grey, beige, etc).
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Finally, you want to choose a font that fits your brand. Serif fonts are more upscale and timeless while Sans serif fonts are more modern and casual. Whatever fonts you choose, make sure that you can use them consistently across your various marketing materials.
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When you’ve chosen your five colors, fonts, logos, and other elements, you want to compile them in a single document titled, “Brand Guidelines”. This is in case you hire freelancers or need to use someone else to create marketing elements for your bar.
This document will help your brand stay consistent over time, should marketing responsibilities at your venue change hands.
Step 3: Incorporate your Brand into Your Experience
Now it’s time to add your new branding to major customer touch points like:
- Your website
- Menus
- Sandwich boards
- Social media
Consider hiring a freelance graphic designer to refine your brand or apply it to touchpoints you may need assistance rebranding. When you’re satisfied with your branding and it looks consistent across your venue, you’re all set!
Consider hosting a launch party to generate excitement for your new brand! You can sit back and watch while customers begin to notice your new branding and flock from near and far to experience it themselves.
Wrap-up
Your brand is how you tell your story using the five senses. These help customers connect with your business on a deeper level. When customers come back over and over because they can’t get enough of your “vibe,” that’s called brand loyalty.
You dug deep and uncovered the values that make your bar or restaurant unique. You then translated these values into colors, images, and fonts that you can now apply to customer touchpoints. Start by updating your website, signage, and menus.
From there, your only job is to keep your brand consistent. Use your brand guidelines to communicate your brand to other employees or freelancers who might need the information.
Congratulations, and good luck!
Sydney is a restaurant writer and digital marketer whose work has been featured in Restobiz and FSR. She currently works at MustHaveMenus, which provides small businesses with an all-in-one management solution for creating menus, QR codes, landing pages and more. Find out more here.
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