Who is your advertising talking to?

My biggest bugbears are A-boards, banners and posters that don’t hit the mark. The worst examples are A-boards on the sides of busy roads, so crowded with content no motorist can read the message. I drive past so many that simply don’t work.

Less is more and the best A-board I have seen recently is on the A38 near Burton-upon-Trent outside an American diner that simply says ‘£6 Burger Wednesdays’. OK, I haven’t stopped off as yet, but I get the message and I bet the people they are targeting will have popped in.

The point with all types of PoS material is to know who you are talking to and to tailor the message depending on how you want them to react when they see it.

Relevance​

For external advertising think about how long people will have to read your message and what they are doing at the time. You might have the school run in the morning and business professionals at lunchtime. In this scenario, you should consider changing the message so it’s relevant to both groups.

Another frustration is where I see internal and external marketing not working together. External marketing should be driving existing and new customers into your pub through an enticing offer, while internal should be focused on increasing spend or visit frequency.

An example of this might be a footfall-driving external promotion of a meal deal, for example, curry and a beer for £X. However, once inside, your job should be to encourage them to spend as much as possible, so there is no need for the same promo. Give it, if asked, but at this point you want the customer to have looked at the menu and chosen a more expensive option.

More importantly, you don’t want the customer that wasn’t driven into the pub by the external meal deal offer to trade down at the point of order.

Wallpaper​

Lastly, I want to mention ineffectual internal PoS. On a recent visit to a newly refurbished pub I was walking around with the licensee and we walked past 12 poster frames, each one featuring the same poster showing a picture of a glass of red wine, with the caption ‘Fine Wines’. This type of message simply becomes ‘wallpaper’ that people just walk past and ignore.

So ask yourself:

• When did you last review the best advertising locations for your pub?
• Is your advertising talking to the people you want it to talk to?
• Does your external advertising drive people into your pub?
• Does internal advertising work to increase spend and visit frequency?

You can be sure the big branded operations are spending more on advertising than you can afford to, so make sure your advertising is relevant and personal to your customers.

Paul Pavli is operations director at Punch Taverns​