His approach to teaching bar and restaurant owners the best way to market their business. Years in the industry have equipped Erik with a unique insight as to what works and what doesn’t.

”There’s a lot of BS out there.”

Digital Hospitality podcast guest Erik Shellenberger uses his extensive knowledge of the bar and restaurant industry and no nonsense marketing approach to buck trends and teach his clients the tools to create measurable and effective marketing campaigns.

WATCH ON YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/8V05b2IjLFg

• Bar Marketing Basics: https://barmarketingbasics.com/
  
• Erik Shellenberger on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erik-shellenberger-7b583634/
  
• Keywords Everywhere Tool: https://keywordseverywhere.com/
  

Marketers Ruin Everything:

Marketing is budgeted into every business, and is vital to the success of each business. But beware. According to Erik Shellenberger, it is being done wrong by many “professionals”.

[WATCH]

Marketing is NOT Advertising:

Marketing and advertising are often used in tandem, or worse, interchangeably. They are not the same thing, and it is a grave mistake to not recognize this.

[WATCH]

Be The Show, Not The Commercial:

Content floods our brains at every turn. What converts casual scrollers into customers? What will be the hoo that causes them to stop and want to see more? Whatever it is, do that. Be that.

[WATCH]

As one who is a habitual truth teller, results have always been the name of the game for Erik Shellenberger. The third installment of his “Marketing & Bar Marketing” series, available on Amazon, is subtitled “Marketers Ruin Everything”. He believes that many of the accepted marketing practices are simply wrong. They don’t work, which causes restaurant owners to be a “little bit pessimistic” when he speaks of the services his company offers.

”Ok, well let’s stop doing that. Let’s start doing something that we can measure. Start doing something with a call to action. Something that we can actually, quantifiably say, yes it worked or no it didn’t work.”

Erik Shellenberger’s ideology derives from his time in the traditional marketing space. He spent significant time as the marketing director in the extremely competitive nightlife and bar scene in Scottsdale, Arizona. While working with those companies, Shellenberger experienced firsthand the fallacies of traditional marketing overlapping into the social media platforms. Likes began to take precedence over metrics. Much to his chagrin, measurable practices were not consistently put in place. Even more alarming, once the numbers were run, they were — in Shellenberger’s words — “awful”.

”If I care more about your wallet than you do, I’m out of here!”

Unfortunately, his efforts to analyze the numbers and adjust strategy according to what worked best fell on deaf ears. That was a turning point for Shellenberger. He knew it was time for him to branch out on his own, and he did just that with the launch of Bar Marketing Basics.

Focused on SEO and “reputation management”, Bar Marketing Basics takes the simple, yet neglected, action of saying Thank You. Shellenberger says, “Nobody seems to do it”. That seemingly obvious, mundane action is the starting point of what Shellenberger labels as Step One.

“How do you disregard step one? And how do you not optimize step one?”

You may be asking yourself what Step One actually is? Erik Shellenberger deems Step One as being accessible and able to be found. Period.

In his teachings, he hopes to drive home the importance of reaching the ocean of potential customers that are outside of any business’ proverbial “fishbowl”. As he puts it, “the more you’re everywhere, all over the internet, that’s when the magic happens”.

Erik Shellenberger and his Bar Marketing Basics provide a wealth of information to help bar and restaurant owners and businesses get the most out of their marketing efforts by uncovering the nuances of how to be self-reliant. He advocates, “Nobody is going to be more passionate about your business than you are.”

His messaging also pushes readers to weave through the unnecessary and focus on creative aspects that will allow others to do your marketing for you. Because the best return on investment comes from the most tried-and-true marketing technique known to man: word of mouth.

-Feature Article by Cali BBQ Media Writer TJ Void. Get in touch with TJ at tjvoid@calibbq.media.

Erik Shellenberger has been in the restaurant and bar industry since he was 13 years old working for his mother in the food and beverage department at a local ski resort in Park City UT where he grew up. He has held every position from dishwasher to bartender to marketing director and everything in between.

With a decade of corporate marketing experience, he has gone from student to teacher and runs Bar Marketing Basics and has quickly grown his client base from his home town of Scottsdale, AZ to not only the entire US but around the globe.

Erik Shellenberger became frustrated with stale restaurant marketing approaches of the past and was tired of restaurant marketing strategies that just plain don’t work. So he decided to blow the roof off of traditional Restaurant Marketing techniques and show you what actually works.

• Visit https://barmarketingbasics.com/ to learn more

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