You pull the pints, run the kitchen, book the quiz, and somehow market the place too. Compass helps you fill the quiet nights, builds the locals who come back, and teaches you the marketing craft your pub can lean on next year. Try Compass today with a free 90 day growth plan.
It's a wet Wednesday and the bar is quiet while the weekend heaves. The food trade is growing but the midweek covers are thin, the events you run fill sometimes and flop other times, and your social posts reach the same regulars who already come. A new place has opened nearby, the cost of everything is up, and the marketing that would steady the quiet nights competes with the cellar, the kitchen, and last orders. You know the welcome is the best in the area, but turning that into a busy week takes time the shifts swallow. What do you do?
Most pub marketing advice is generic hospitality content or it is built for managed houses with brewery marketing support, and neither fits a tenant or freeholder doing it all. You have run the offers and watched them bring bargain-hunters rather than regulars, and the quiet midweek nights are the ones that worry you. The advice online assumes a marketing budget and time off the bar you do not have. It ends in discounting the margin, relying on the regulars you already have, and watching the new place take the trade.
Most AI tools would run your marketing and push the offers that train people to wait for a deal. Compass works the other way. It pairs the speed of AI with coaching and a feel for how a local pub fills its week, so your judgement grows and you learn the marketing as you go.
Compass starts with the quiet nights and the locals who fill them, because a pub lives on regulars and word of mouth before anything else. It surfaces the local-search, review, social, and events actions that lift your pub against what your category typically does, and it names the reason behind each one so the craft stays with you. It sets your channel mix to fit a single pub, calibrated to your catchment and the local surfaces your trade uses. It teaches you to fill the midweek without discounting the margin away, to grow the food and events trade that steadies takings, and to turn a first-timer into a local.
You stay the one behind the bar, you learn why each one fills the room, and you have a senior marketing executive's judgement beside you.
Twenty minutes to get started. You answer a handful of quick questions: what you offer, who your locals are, your catchment, where you already appear online. While you answer, Compass researches your local market and surfaces what it finds for you to confirm or correct. Then a short guided conversation captures the rest: your best night, what success looks like for the next quarter, what marketing you have tried, and how much time you can put behind it.
The free 90 Day Growth Plan lands first: a single on-screen plan personalised to your pub, with the truth about your local market, the customer profiles most worth pursuing, the moments that turn a search or a passer-by into a regular, and a 90 day roadmap of the actions that matter most. Your Pro subscription turns that into a full 12 month marketing strategy with deeper research, five profiles instead of two, and a monthly cadence that follows your trading week and the seasons.
A short daily task list, sized to the time you have, anything from one task to a few, organised by profile and channel. Some tasks Compass handles in the background, such as Google Business Profile monitoring and review tracking. The rest are short and clear, designed to fit around the shifts, with the marketing science behind each explained in plain English so you learn the craft as you go.
Pub marketing has its own canon of science: how locals choose on welcome, reputation, and what is on before price, the midweek-covers maths that decides whether the quiet nights pay, the events and food economics that steady takings, and the word-of-mouth and review mechanics that bring the next regular in. Compass applies the science to your pub and names the reason behind every task in plain English, so you learn your marketing craft every day until one day you won't need Compass anymore.
Pro Plan subscription £19 per month for as long as you stay.