March Madness is right around the corner and now is the time to start prepping how you’re going to market and engage your guests and basketball fans for the tournament’s duration.
In this post, we look at six marketing ideas and tactics to get guests and fans into your sports bar to watch the tournament!
Run Your Own Bracket Challenge
The NCAA Basketball Tournament is synonymous with bracket challenges. It goes together like peanut butter and jelly (or peanut butter and fluff, for the Boston locals). Running your own bracket challenge is a great way to engage fans to interact with your brand.
Most mainstream bracket programs aren’t well suited for sports bars, though. For starters, you’re sending your guests to someone else’s website where they collect data about them (and not share it) and bombard them with ads for businesses not yours. It’s not branded to your business and you can’t drive traffic to your own website. Plus, any marketing around the effort has to be manually done by your or someone on your team.
That’s a lot of work. But there is a better, alternative option!
STVG HQ: Bracket Program is a bracket challenge marketing effort designed specifically for sports bars.
To start, the entire bracket is customized to your sports bar’s brand, including logo and colors. So it feels like it belongs to you (because it does!). There’s also a space for a singular (optional) banner ad that you control, so you can further market your business to guests and drive traffic back to your site.
Best part? It’s fully-automated. Every email sent is done automatically (from invitation to round updates to the final email), so you and your team can focus on the day-to-day tasks of running the business. All you have to do is choose what the round and grand prizes are. It’s a program that’ll excite and engage guests without adding a huge workload to your plate.
The program is available for both the Men’s and Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournaments.
Have a Gameday Menu
Basketball. Beer. Wings. A match made in sports heaven, but why stop there?
March Madness is a great time to have fun and get creative with your sports bar’s menu. Consider building a gameday menu specifically for the tournament. It’ll help streamline efforts in your kitchen while giving your guests a sense of grand production. Not only are they there just for the games; now they’re also getting an experience.
Figure out what your kitchen staff does well and can also do in bulk. Wings and nachos are always popular, but think outside of the box. What do your locals like? What sells the most? What’s easy to make on the fly? These things all matter when building a gameday menu.
Don’t forget about drinks, too! Consider offering pitchers of beer and build basketball-centric cocktails. Also make some non-alcoholic specialty drinks, too, for those that want something fun without the booze.
Looking for a place to start? You can download Building the Perfect Gameday Menu for Sports Bars for free!
Promote the Games & Offerings on Your Screens
Your guests are a captive audience, especially when the games are going on. Instead of letting other brands market their wares and services to your guests, why not market your own promotions to them instead?
You can do this with the SportsTV Guide for Digital Signage. Branded to your sports bar, you can let your guests know exactly what games you’re showing on your TVs. We have three base designs to choose from or you can go premium and get a custom design made that’ll match your restaurant’s personality.
Partnered with UPshow, you can also promote your own products and services on your screens. So instead of your TVs and screens working for other companies, they’re working for you the entire time.
Reach Out to Local College Basketball Fan Clubs
Few fanbases are more rabid and loyal than college sports, especially college basketball. Consider reaching out to local alumni groups and fan clubs to see if they’d be interested in partnering up to host watch parties at your sports bar. This is twice as good if the alumni fan club has a team playing in the tournament itself.
The fan club watch parties can be as formal or as informal as you and the club agrees upon. Offering the fan club special perks or offerings during the tournament can also go a long way to having their members choose your sports bar over your local competitors.
Run a Tournament Loyalty Program
A lot of sports and restaurants already have regular loyalty programs they run throughout the year. But consider running a smaller, specialized program just for the NCAA Basketball Tournaments.
For example: You can get cards printed where guests get a special discount or offering each time they visit. When they visit, their card gets stickered/stamped/punctured, so the next time they visit they get the next tier offering. You can build this so each tier has a more impressive offering – small discounts or prizes at the first tier and bigger discounts or prizes at the final tier.
Utilize Your Email List
None of this matters if your guests and locals don’t know about it. You (and still should) promote anything you do on your social media accounts. However, it getting in front of enough eyes is harder and harder thanks to algorithms built to suppress your content and make you pay to access your followers.
However, that’s not the case with email marketing. You own your list and can contact them at any time. You can also more easily promote multiple offerings to guests at once compared to social. So, make sure you’re leveraging the power of email marketing and telling guests what’s happening at your establishment and why they should visit you in March.
Need help? You can download The Email Marketing Playbook for Sports Bars & Restaurants for free!
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