Choosing the Right Sports & Fan Clubs for Your Sports Bar

By Nathan Hirsch & Symon Perriman So, you want to host a fan club for a popular sports team at your bar? In this six-part series we are enlisting the help of our friends at FanWide.com to walk you through how to put on the best game viewing party for a sports fan club at your establishment. FanWide’s Guide to Starting and Growing a Fan Club in your Sports Bar will give a 360-degree view on all the best practices that result in a thriving watch party revenue stream. Some of the topics we will cover include, knowing the sports seasons & schedules, picking the best fan club for your restaurant, how to convince fan clubs to choose your bar as their new home base, best practices for promoting your new fan club, hosting great gameday events, and how to [...]

The Major Audience Sports Bars are Missing

Part One: Introduction By Nick Vener and Andrew Jaffee Our mission at the SportsTV Guide is to help you stay in front of trends in our industry and facilitate you leveraging those trends for your business. That is why we are embarking on a comprehensive review of where the future of sports is heading with a series focused on eSports. This series is focused on the why, how, what and when of eSports for restaurants and bars. This post will focus specifically on why you need to take eSports seriously and the implications for your operation, especially for sports-themed operators. Why are eSports Essential to Have in Your Restaurant? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf3gfuGIn1w Great question! Let’s start with who makes up the eSports gaming community (i.e., players and fans) who you want to attract by embracing eSports in your sports marketing efforts. The [...]

4 Stats for Creating the Perfect Gameday Menu

Sponsored by RO*TEL With your gameday menu in full swing, you’ll want to stay on top of emerging trends and customer preferences in order to adapt to changing tastes. Conversations with your guests are vital in this regard, but only as a microcosm. To get ahead of the curve, you’ll want to take a look at things on a larger scale. Analyzing statistics from outside your doors can clue you into the next big thing in the industry before it even hits your area. Consider it a way to buy in on the ground floor. If you could hop in a time machine and go back to 2005 to be the first restaurant in your city to put sriracha on your menu, you’d take that kind of buzz in a heartbeat. Sadly, you can’t do that, but with market research [...]

How to Successfully Execute Your Gamday Menu

Sponsored by Conagra RO*TEL Gameday has finally come. You’ve visualized, created, tested, and perfected your menu, in theory. Now comes the execution. Just like the teams playing on your flat-screens on gameday, your staff must play their roles, cooperate smoothly, and remember the common goal they’re all working for. Gameday Starts with the Front of House Staff Your hosts and hostesses need to control the pace of operations and ensure the guests are being seated with the proper menus. It may seem like it can go without saying, but no shortcuts today. Make sure your hosts team know to only gives guests the gameday menus during the right times. Dropping your full menu when your kitchen is set up for fewer offerings can be a disaster. Even one table ordering rogue when you’re not properly prepped sets your kitchen behind [...]

How to Market Your Gameday Menu

Sponsored by Conagra RO*TEL Your new gameday menu will be a vital spoke on your marketing wheel when it comes time to promoting your overhauled gameday experience. Determining the strengths of the menu and presenting them front and center will help sell guests both new and old on why your establishment deserves the marathon sessions of patronage that come with a full day of sports indulgence. In-House Marketing Your Gameday Menu First, let’s discuss the in-house marketing and how to turn your visitors into repeat customers. Whether you’re using time-tested staples like posters, table stands, and other print materials, or are using digital displays such as tabletop tablets, the goal is the same: get your guests thinking about their next visit before they’ve even paid tonight’s bill. Intrigue and exclusivity can be incredibly valuable cards in your deck. When your [...]

Building & Testing Your Gameday Menu

Sponsored by Conagra RO*TEL Composing and perfecting your gameday menu should begin long before the season does. When considering all aspects of the menu -- from ordering to execution -- balance should be at the front of your brain. Just like your full menu, you never want your special offerings to come off as one-note or repetitive. Varying proteins, textures, temperatures, flavors, cooking methods, and price points ensures that every guest can find something to entice them. This same attention to parity on the line will keep any one station from getting bogged down during the gameday rush. Your kitchen cannot operate at maximum efficiency if your grill cook has a half-full rail while your sauté station has printer tickets about to hit the floor. Spreading the load is vital. Ideally, your grill and sauté cooks should be the strongest [...]

Can a Specialized Gameday Menu Help Your Efficiency?

Sponsored by Conagra RO*TEL You have a dinner menu. You have a lunch menu. You have a brunch menu, a function menu, a cocktail list, a wine list, a beer list, and about 20 more slates of options. Creating another specialized menu probably gives you a little apprehension but rest assured that a properly planned and executed gameday menu will relieve far more headaches than it causes. Picture your sports nights. Whether it be football, college basketball, or the Olympics, there should be throngs of hungry and thirsty guests packing your building. You need quick food, but not “fast food.” The difference always boils down to quality. Anyone can take frozen, prepackaged, ready-to-eat dishes and heat them up in the blink of an eye. You’d be hard-pressed, however, to find a group of people excited to spend a Sunday afternoon [...]

Do Sports Bars Show Women’s Sports?

According to a recent Nielsen report, 84% of sports fans are interested in watching women's sports. But are sports bars taking advantage of that fandom pharmacieinde.com? That's what we're hoping to find out in this short, few-questions survey. Once we get the results, we'll publish them in an infographic juxtaposed to the Nielsen results. We'll also provide some tips for how sports bar operators and managers can identify and maximize the opportunities showing women's sports on TV can bring them.   powered by Typeform

How to Prep Your Sports Bar for NCAA Spring Football

It’s March and spring doesn’t feel very close, but we’ve got an idea about how to warm it up. Why not promote some NCAA Football? What? NCAA Football? It’s not August. Actually, the spring is one of the most entertaining peculiarities of NCAA Football -- the Spring Games. There’s a bunch of fun rituals that surround the games and if you are a fan club location, this game is essential for driving some cheap traffic in April or May. There are a total of 130 NCAA FBS teams and each of them has a spring game featured on their calendars. Unfortunately, they aren’t all televised, but the bigger programs do air on their various conference based networks. Think the SEC Network, where you will see South Carolina, Arkansas and Florida’s spring game live, including on campus programming. The middle-tiered teams [...]

Creating the Perfect College Basketball Menu Experience

Sponsored by the maker of Tyson Red Label® Wings Since its expansion to the field of 64 in 1985, the Men’s College Basketball Tournament has become one of the most popular and successful sporting events in the nation. Now with four additional play-in games, the 68 teams play a total of 67 games over the course of three weeks. The hype and fever surrounding the tournament is infectious, spreading to office pools, friendly wagers, and campus rallies throughout the country. For bars and restaurants, this can represent a steady stream of revenue in an otherwise slow time of year. Professional football has recently wrapped its season up, while professional basketball and hockey are playing out their final regular weeks before the playoffs begin. The excitement around the basketball tournament fills this gap and can bring in a slew of new [...]

Beat the Slow Season with an Influencer Marketing Campaign

By Joseph Brady, Senior Director of Digital Marketing, Reliant Funding While the professionals all have an off-season, sports-themed restaurants and bars don’t have that same luxury. Bringing in cash flow year-round is not an easy task, but influencer marketing could be the key ingredient to help sports bar operators and owners beat event the slowest nights. At its core, successful sports bar marketing is all about reaching your audience through the right medium and creating a curiosity or awe factor. Influencer marketing is the new age amalgamation of celebrity endorsement with a content-driven marketing strategy which works best for the Millennial audience. It grabbed the spotlight in 2018 and we expect it to become more central to marketing efforts over the next few years. Here are a few tips in the influencer marketing front that can boost the popularity and [...]

How to Keep Business Booming on Off-Nights

Every sports bar experiences lulls, slow seasons, and dead nights. When your business model depends on basketball fans packing your bar, naturally your sales will be leaner on basketball-free nights. How do you occupy the building from July to October? How do football bars fill the till from Tuesday to Friday? While live sports will always dominate the Nielsen ratings, there are a few other programs that can hang with them. Reality television and many premium dramas have proven to be DVR-proof in an age where streaming and watching on one’s own time dominate viewing habits. The best part about these shows, as it pertains to us in the restaurant industry, is how well they lend themselves to communal watching. There are people out there who take their favorite shows as seriously as sports fans take their games. Take a [...]

Go to Top