Make your QR Menus a top marketing channel

What started as a menu necessity during Covid has sneakily become one of the best marketing channels available to bars and restaurants. That's right: I'm talking about QR Menus, those little black-and-white squares you saw basically nowhere in the US prior to spring/summer 2020.

Here's how Rob Austin, a marketing expert who runs marketing for Leader Bar in Chicago, explains the marketing opportunity offered by a robust QR Code Menu system:

• The basics: customers need to see your menu to order. If your menu is QR-based, then you basically have a captive digital audience. Take advantage of that.
• Have your QR code point to a page on your website. This is the key—getting more people to your website, where you're in control of the experience. There are 2 related reasons this is so important.
• First, you'll increase your website traffic in a meaningful way. Each month thousands of people will visit your website—and thus interact with you digitally—who otherwise wouldn't.
• Second, you can show QR Menu visitors exactly what you want to show them. For Rob & Leader Bar, he of course provides the menu when someone scans the Leader Bar QR Code. But he shows them a bunch of stuff above the menu, stuff he wants them to see: upcoming events, the fact that they do online ordering, how to book a private party, the bar's story, introduce that they have brunch, show them their social media handles, etc. And changing what's there is as simple as updating your website.
• How else are you going to get this much content in front of such an ideal audience? It's more effective, cheaper, and just plain better than doing social media advertising, and certainly more time-effective than typical social media posts.
• And once you're ready, you can take this a step further too: install a newsletter signup, where folks can input their email addresses and you can send out a weekly/monthly newsletter straight to their inbox. Now you've turned the QR Menu into an outbound marketing channel.

Check out the interview clip for more from Rob on QR Code Menus:

And if you want to hear more great marketing advice from Rob, check out this playlist on the Brave New Bar Youtube channel.

Why?

For a beer drinker there isn’t much worse than getting excited about a beer you’re going to order, ordering it, then being told it’s no longer available.

You’re disappointed, and instead of straight-up joy, you’re starting the night off with a bad experience.

(The experience isn’t much better for the bartender—I know from experience.)

Depending on how out-of-date your menu is and how many folks come in, you could be providing dozens of folks a bad start to their visit.

You should avoid this experience, even if updating a menu is a pain in the ass (though it doesn’t have to be—more on that below).

How?

You can do this manually. How you implement it depends on what works for your team, but it could look like this:

• Create an editable menu doc in Google Docs, Word, Powerpoint, or whatever
• Make sure everyone has access to the doc and knows how to update it
• Make updating the menu part of the opening checklist and/or shift change checklist

It certainly takes some time, but if you avoid just a few bad customer experiences, that time is well worth it.

• The Modelo train just keeps on chugging—for the first time, its sales pulled ahead of Bud Light's on a year-to-date basis. In other words, though Modelo has beaten Bud Light every month since April, Bud Light was still running in first place if you counted all of 2023. No longer.
• Reddit users complained, Costco refunded. Costco is issuing refunds to people who purchased certain lots of its Kirkland Signature vodka after customers complained it tasted like diesel and a urinal cake. Sounds gross, but cool move on Costco's part to proactively issue refunds like this. Reminds me of when Goose Island refunded purchases of its Bourbon County series a few years back.
• And in the heartwarming department, NPR featured an interview about Tokyo's Restaurant of Forgotten Orders, where all servers have dementia. "It was founded as a way to raise awareness and celebrate the quirks of living with dementia," NPR said.