8 things that decide brewery and taproom marketing

What to take away

1. The staffed-hours gap

In a taproom, capacity is the number of seats you have staff to serve. Staff are scheduled days in advance against a guess, so the number moves before demand is known. Most advice on filling a room assumes more people is always better. Here a crowd you cannot serve is a slow night with a long wait.

So start by drawing the gap. Take four weeks of sales by hour from your point-of-sale system. Toast and Square for Restaurants both report sales by hour, which is the raw material. Lay your scheduled labor hours over the top.

The shape of that picture is your marketing plan, and it will not look like anyone else's. Scheduling tools such as 7shifts and Homebase put scheduled hours next to labor cost, so the overlay takes minutes.

A campaign that packs a Saturday you would have filled moved nothing. The goal is to close the gap between hours you pay for and hours that sell.

Typical numbers for a quiet Wednesday: two bartenders at $18 an hour on a four-hour shift is about $144 of labor owed whether or not anyone walks in. At about $7 of contribution per guest, that night needs roughly 20 guests to cover those two people. That is the break-even staffing threshold for the night.

2. The four-bucket demand calendar

Sort your week and your year into four buckets and treat each one differently.

The four buckets are:

The soft but staffed bucket is where nearly all the available return is, and it is the least glamorous. It is also where you already know the cost, because you are paying it now.

Event driven demand is the trickiest. A release or a festival weekend changes both sides at once: you need more beer and more people, and you need them on a date fixed by somebody else.

For an event weekend, book the beer and the staff on the day you set the date, then work backwards from it. If those weekends are part of your plan, they belong in the wider startup and market picture rather than being handled as they arrive.

3. The cost of the shift you staffed for a rush that did not come

Three extra staff on a promotion that underperforms leaves a bill with a number on it: the labor hours you bought that produced no revenue.

Those hours cost the same as the hours that do sell. Most operations never record it. The promotion goes into memory as roughly break even, not as a loss with a number attached.

The fix is procedural rather than clever:

The third step is the one that gets skipped because it feels unkind. It is far less unkind than discovering three months later that midweek promotions are why the payroll line grew.

4. What advertising and state alcohol rules let you say

Alcohol marketing carries two layers of rules. The advertising layer applies to everyone, and the alcohol layer is added by your state.

On the general layer, the Federal Trade Commission: Advertising FAQs: A Guide for Small Business sets out the basics: claims have to be truthful and substantiated, and material connections behind an endorsement have to be disclosed. That applies to a chalkboard, a social post and a printed menu equally.

Reviews and paid endorsements have their own guidance. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission: Soliciting and Paying for Online Reviews: A Guide for Marketers explains what crosses the line when a business asks for or rewards reviews.

The short version for a taproom: asking every guest is fine, asking only the happy ones is not. Giving something in exchange without disclosure is a problem, regardless of how small the something is.

Your state alcohol beverage control board may restrict alcohol promotion. It can limit what you advertise, which price promotions are allowed, what may be given away, and how you work with another licensee.

Ask the board directly before any discount or giveaway. Boards such as California's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission and the New York State Liquor Authority publish their rules and accept questions. These restrictions are license conditions, so they sit with everything else in what your license actually permits.

5. The five things that bring people back

Marketing in this trade depends on the room itself. Most of your audience lives near it, and most of your revenue is repeat.

Four of those five are operational rather than promotional. Budget for the four before you buy a campaign.

6. Pricing, promotion and the line between them

A promotion that works by cutting price is borrowing from margin to buy traffic. That can be correct, but only if you know what the margin was and only if the traffic is genuinely incremental.

Before any discount, work out what it does to the contribution on a pour using the same method as the way your prices are built. Then ask whether the same money spent on a different thing, a better glass, a food partnership, an earlier opening, would have moved more.

Beware promotions that shift demand rather than create it. A Thursday special that pulls your Friday regulars into Thursday has cost you margin on both nights and gained nothing. The test is whether the promoted night grew without the neighboring nights shrinking.

Which products you push matters as much as the price. Some of your lineup carries much more labor per dollar than the rest, so read the draft and packaged lineup as a list of things with different costs to serve, and promote accordingly.

7. The circle around your address

Draw a circle around your address and be honest about what sits inside it. Foot traffic, parking and transit count. So do nearby employers, other places people visit before or after you, and the hours the area is alive.

That picture is largely fixed by the building, which is why the site you chose sets the ceiling on what marketing can achieve. A taproom in an industrial park with no evening traffic can market its way to a strong weekend and will struggle for a strong Tuesday no matter what it spends.

Work with the circle you have. Partner with the businesses inside it whose busy hours are the opposite of yours. Understand which nearby event fills your room and which one empties it. Local knowledge outperforms general tactics here by a wide margin, and it costs nothing but attention.

8. A promotion review that takes fifteen minutes

Run this after every promotion, in writing, and keep the file.

Five answers, kept in one place, will teach you more about your market in a year than any general guidance can. The value is in the file, not in any single entry.

Common questions

How much should a taproom spend on marketing?

There is no defensible percentage. Any figure offered without knowing your rent, your capacity and your local competition is decoration. Start from the gap between staffed hours and selling hours, and spend against the biggest gap first.

Do I need to be on every social platform?

No. You need your hours, address and current tap list to be correct wherever a person is likely to look, and one channel you actually maintain. Google Business Profile, Yelp, Untappd and your own site are the places people check. An abandoned account does more harm than an absent one.

Should I run a loyalty program?

Only if somebody owns it. A loyalty program is an ongoing operational task at the bar during the busiest moments. Cost it in bartender seconds per transaction before you cost it in discounts. Also ask your state board whether the mechanic you have in mind is permitted for an alcohol licensee.

How do I get more reviews without breaking a rule?

Ask everyone, in the same way, without conditioning anything on the content. Read the federal guidance on soliciting reviews before you design the ask. Do not offer anything in exchange unless you are prepared to disclose it clearly.

Is a beer release worth the effort?

Sometimes the way to find out is to cost the whole thing: extra brew, labor for the day, setup and teardown, and beer not sold afterward because the release cannibalized it.

Releases that work usually do because they bring first-time visitors who come back. The measure that matters shows up weeks later.