Pubs & inns
A pub marketing agency that understands wet-led trade
Pubs don't market like restaurants. Trade is split between drinkers, diners, functions and rooms; the competition is the sofa as much as the pub down the road. We build pub marketing around the sessions that actually need filling — and around the locals who never see an advert.
The problem
What makes pub marketing different
A pub is three or four businesses sharing a roof. Wet trade on a Friday, food trade on a Sunday, functions in the back room, and in many cases rooms upstairs. Each has a different guest, a different lead time and a different margin — and a single generic "come to the pub" campaign speaks to none of them.
Pubs also compete against staying in. Supermarket alcohol, streaming and delivery have made the default evening a night at home, so the marketing job isn't only choosing you over the pub down the road — it's giving someone a specific reason to leave the house on a specific night.
And the most valuable audience — locals within a mile — is the hardest to reach with conventional advertising and the easiest to reach with disciplined basics: an accurate Google listing, a legible events calendar, a WhatsApp or email list, and a food offer that shows up when someone searches for Sunday lunch nearby.
Built to answer
- “pub marketing agency”
- “how to get more customers in a pub”
- “gastropub marketing”
- “pub quiz and event promotion ideas”
- “marketing for country inns with rooms”
- “how to increase pub food sales”
If you searched one of these, this page is the answer — no generic agency deck, no minimum twelve-month lock-in.
What’s included
What we run for pubs
Session-by-session campaigns
Separate plans for quiet weeknights, Sunday lunch, live sport, quiz nights and seasonal peaks — each with its own audience, creative and target number.
Local search and the map pack
Business Profile with correct categories, attributes like dog friendly, beer garden and live sport, current menus, and a steady flow of recent reviews.
Events that actually sell tickets
An indexable events calendar, event schema, Facebook events and paid promotion timed to how far ahead people book each type of night.
Functions and private hire
A dedicated enquiry page for wakes, birthdays, christenings and Christmas parties, with a response process that gets a quote out the same day.
Rooms, where you have them
Direct booking work for inns with letting rooms so weekend stays don't arrive with 18% commission attached.
The local list
Building an email or WhatsApp list of regulars and using it weekly — the cheapest, highest-converting channel a pub owns and the one most pubs never build.
How it runs
The first 90 days
- 01
Audit and baseline
Week one is measurement: search visibility, booking and enquiry paths, commission exposure, review recency, and what a booking currently costs you by channel. Nothing gets changed until we know the starting number.
- 02
Fix the fundamentals
Weeks two to six clear the blockers — listings, tracking, page structure, booking friction — because paid spend on top of a broken path just buys expensive proof that the path is broken.
- 03
Scale what converts
From week six we push budget and content behind the segments that produce revenue, and cut the ones that don't. You get a monthly report in revenue terms, not impressions.
Illustrative outcomes
What pub marketing tends to move
Hospitality operators are pragmatic, so we lead with outcomes rather than adjectives: covers, room nights, direct revenue and commission saved.
+42%
online bookings in 3 months
Independent gastropub, Surrey
+31%
Sunday lunch covers
Village inn, Cotswolds
£45k
annual OTA commission moved back in-house
14-room country inn, Yorkshire
2.4x
function enquiries in party season
Town-centre pub, Nottingham
Illustrative examples for demonstration, not verified client results.
FAQs
Pub marketing questions we get asked
- We're wet-led, not food-led. Is this still relevant?
- Yes, though the plan changes. Wet-led pubs live on events, sport, atmosphere and locals, so the work weights towards the events calendar, the local list and social rather than menu pages and reservation funnels.
- Do you work with tenanted and leased pubs?
- Yes. We work within pubco constraints on branding and offers, and we're used to the reality that some decisions aren't yours to make.
- How do you market a pub with rooms?
- As two connected businesses. Rooms get direct-booking and destination work; the pub gets local trade and food work. Bundling them — dinner, bed and breakfast — is usually where the fastest revenue sits.
- What's the fastest thing we can fix?
- Almost always the Google Business Profile plus a proper events calendar. Both are quick, both are cheap, and between them they cover how most people decide where to go tonight.
- How much does it cost?
- From £650/mo, with most single-site pubs between £650 and £1,400 depending on whether we're running paid media and content capture. Three-month minimum, then rolling.
Next step
Get a free pub growth audit
We'll review your listings, events, food offer and function enquiries, and come back with the three changes most likely to lift trade on your quietest sessions.