How do you get customers into remote pubs?

It can be a particularly difficult trade for pubs in rural areas. We have many tourists, but how can they find us? Throughout the area, we have very limited internet, our mobiles are lucky to get one bar of signal (usually there’s none) and most of the tweets I get come from pigeons, pheasants and ducks. 

Our pub, the Wrygarth Inn, is very remote; we’re five miles from Hornsea, 10 miles from Beverley and Hull and if you drew a four mile radius round the pub, you would perhaps cover 500 people. Two years ago, a man walked into the pub and told us he didn’t know we were here. Despite owning a caravan six miles away, he’d had no idea my pub and several others in the area existed. He’d only stumbled across us when he bought a new car with a new SatNav.

I had a ping of inspiration. How about getting all the local pubs to work together to create an Ale Trail? I visited all the pubs and with five others created the Holderness Ale Trail. Yes, I would like the other pubs’ trade and they would love mine, but we needed to work together and target the customers none us of are getting.

We produced 10,000 leaflets, delivering them to nearby caravan parks, and got the local tourist board, BBC radio station and MP involved. We’re now in year three and we all work together. If I run out of mixed gas on a Saturday night, I can phone a neighbour and borrow some, and it works the other way.

A couple of weeks ago on the other side of Hull on a sunny afternoon I saw one tenancy in the town centre offering Carlsberg for £1.65 a pint. When there were six people sat outside and the licensee is making 30p per pint but all the town’s cafes were full, we have to ask if this approach to marketing is working.

Infighting between pubs on price makes no sense. Publicans need to work together, improve their offers and give people a reason to leave their homes and come to you. Price wars don’t work for the customers most of us wish to attract and for us, that extra 10p on a pint is the difference between a week in Blackpool or a fortnight in Benidorm.

By working together, we not only managed to win a major marketing award for an investment of just £50 each, we increased our target market, improved the visitor experience and made our Ale Trail into a viable proposition.

Ray Thompson is licensee at the Wrygarth Inn, Great Hatfield, Hornsea​​