Digital beer menus are attention-grabbing and easy for customers to read. This makes life easier for your bartenders and makes the entire ordering process more efficient, which drives a significant increase in beverage sales.
But questions abound: how do I even create a digital beer menu? How can I actually get it onto a TV? And how can I avoid going through a whole updating rigmarole every time I kick a keg?
TV Menus from BeerMenus make it extremely easy.
Last week we picked Rob Austin's brain about the proven goal and process he uses for social media at Leader Bar, a neighborhood pub in Irving Park, CHI. High level stuff.
This week I intended to zoom out even more by talking with Rob about which channels bars and restaurants should focus on. There's social media, but what about print? Radio ads? Email marketing? And so on.
His answer came quickly: you can't be using too many channels; use as many as you can.
That short answer is also paralyzing: "OK, so then what should I do now? How do I decide where to start if I'm supposed to be doing everything?"
Sensing that hesitation, Rob quickly turned the conversation to tactics and examples, and proceeded to reel off a list of marketing irons he's currently got in the fire at Leader Bar, and they're things almost anyone can do in just a few simple steps:
This week's topic is a bit of a quick hitter (the interview clip is only like 3 mins long), but it's a bigger concept: being comfortable in the uncomfortable.
The broader idea has come up in a lot of the interviews we've done. Sometimes folks say it's key to have a "pivot" mentality. Others said "you just do what you need to do."
But no matter how it's framed, it seems every person we talk to stresses how important it is—especially post-pandemic—to be able to functionally deal with stuff just not going the way you expect or the way you'd prefer.
Especially in our industry.
You know the scene well. A keg kicks and your heart drops: you have to update your beer menu.
What comes next goes something like this: you go to the office computer and head to Google to find the new beer's description. You search and search, finally find a description you like, then copy and paste it into your menu document. You're done...except now the formatting is screwed up. You fiddle with it until it's finally ready. You push print and take a deep breath.
You're done.
Until you have to do the exact same thing the next day.
It doesn't have to be that way! Read on to learn how to create a professional beer menu template that automatically includes beer descriptions.
This year we've helped bars, restaurants, and breweries from Alaska to New York showcase their craft beer tap list in just about every way possible, from modern to sleek to chalkboard-inspired.
In this article we highlight the 10 best digital menu board designs we made this year. Enjoy!
👉 Update Spring 2023: Untappd for business now has two tiers: Essential ($899/year) and Premium ($1199/year).
Just over a year ago they increased their price from $599 to $899 (a 50% increase). The limitations built into this new two tier system appear designed to once again charge existing and previous customers more for their services.
BeerMenus, a popular Untappd alternative with most of the same features, costs just $599 per year.
Staff training is in Beth Hussey's bones. She started figuring it out at her family's restaurant in the 80s, and it became a professional focus as she moved up the service industry ladder from busser (where her brother stuck her when she first started) to owner. All in all she's opened 17 full service restaurants in her career and has trained up the staff at each of them.
In next week's post Beth will walk us through the unique training approach she's honed over her career (and also talk about Shifty, the staff training app she created), but this week we went over what most—we're talking at least 90%—of bars and restaurants get wrong when training their staff.
Here's the typical staff training Beth sees bars and restaurants using:
Doing social media for a bar or restaurant can feel daunting, especially if you've got a million other things going on. Many folks just don't really commit to it.
It's easy to see why because questions abound: What should you post? When should you post? How often should you post? And on which platforms? And what if you're not a talented photographer?
We'll dive into all those things in detail over the summer. But today we're sharing high level advice from marketing expert Rob Austin, who runs marketing for Leader Bar in Chicago. His advice is this: your only goal with social media—and any visual marketing—is to show prospective guests what they can do at your bar, restaurant, or brewery.
The last couple weeks Beth Hussey, staff training expert and founder of staff training app Shifty, walked us through both the mistakes most bars and restaurants make when doing training and also the proven staff training process she's used for decades with thousands of servers and bartenders.
This week Beth just offers some quick, general words of wisdom about how to treat staff—a simple turn of phrase that will make staff training easier and will make staff retention a reality for your business: treat your staff like you would your customers.
Check out the short interview clip to learn more about what Beth means:
Last week we talked with staff training expert Beth Hussey about what most bar/restaurant staff training looks like and why it doesn't work. This week we're talking about what does work.