December is widely hailed as National Bingo Month.
So I’m going to tell you about how I use bingo as a December promotion in one of my bars to boost sales on a Tuesday night. (Yes, a restaurant can do this too, just need to make some tweaks depending on your atmosphere, for sure.)
As I’m writing this, we host a bar bingo night on Tuesday nights and it’s been running for about four weeks now and growing quickly. What we do is instead of calling out numbers, we call out names of drinks, adult slogans, and bar related terms.
If you’re a restaurant and have the room to do this, you could come up with any other theme that you wanted. Could be “movie” bingo or something like that.
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There are a thousand “create your own” bingo card companies online where all you need to do is type in all your phrases and technology spits out as many different cards as you need. Type in “create your own bingo card” on Google. You’ll see what I mean!
The way we run this is with three games of bingo and the winners receive a $10 gift card, but I wanted to do something different. I was thinking this: You can go to any bar or restaurant and eat, watch a game, have a beer, and sit at your bar stool or booth.
But how many places have fun, interactive, upbeat, competitive games going that you can be apart of? People WANT to be entertained more than anything!
So what I do is I have a DJ who plays music for the crowd, he calls out the numbers, and then we run mini-contests BETWEEN each game. It’s constant games, excitement, and energy. People love it. We call out five contestants to participate in “first to hit a bullseye,” flippy cup, and beer pong.
Here’s an important thing, though: We don’t use alcohol in these games and we keep them very short. The whole idea here is to make this fun, competitive, and give everyone else in the bar something to watch and look forward to.
I have to tell you, this has been a huge hit for us and it’s totally different then what any of my competitors are doing. I’m curious to see how fast one follows suit!
You might be wondering why I share these ideas if they work for me. Couldn’t my competitors be reading this and just copy my great ideas? I suppose so, but I love helping people and making their bars and restaurants successful.
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(Photo courtesy of Sara.)
