Mike Marcolin runs QB Sports, a bar and grill in Burlington, Ontario, and his marketing rule is simple: hook the promotion to something people already care about. When a big hockey game is on, he gives away a hockey jersey, because everyone in the room that night is a hockey fan and nearly all of them want it. He runs a promotion like that roughly once a month. Christmas is the same logic at full volume, and he has the Christmas dinner poster to go with it.
What makes it more than a free meal is what he collects. Entries go on printed forms handed over in person, because asking face to face works where a pop-up does not. By his count, 80 to 85 percent of people say yes when you ask them directly. Every order buys a second ballot, so the giveaway lifts food sales while it runs. The prizes sit around $50, which he treats as money well spent against what a single returning customer is worth over a year.
You can run yours the same way. Build the giveaway poster from Christmas templates and put the same design in the window, on social, and in the email. Then do the part most people skip: turn December’s entries into a list and keep it warm through the quiet months with email campaigns, two or three a month rather than a flood. Plan the run in the Content Planner before the season starts.
