Finding a local voice inside a national franchise and turning it into a measurable revenue engine.
Nearly 2 Years · Instagram · Facebook · TikTok
THE BRASS TAP BALTIMORE · May 2024 - March 2026
The Brass Tap Baltimore
The Brass Tap is a national craft beer franchise with locations across the country. Corporate provides a steady stream of content to help franchisees show up consistently online, which is genuinely valuable. Most small bar and restaurant owners don't have the bandwidth or background to build a content strategy from scratch, and having that infrastructure in place gives them a real head start.
But infrastructure has its limits. When content is shared across dozens of locations, captions become broad, visuals become interchangeable, and nothing feels rooted in the specific neighborhood, crowd, or culture of any individual location. The Brass Tap Baltimore had truly untapped by this model: a genuine local personality, a deeply loyal community, and stories worth telling. The challenge was making the world see that.
Building an Independent Voice Inside a National Brand
The question I came in asking wasn't "how do we post more?" It was: how do we make this place feel like it belongs to Baltimore?
The strategy that followed was actually more refined than most expect. We posted less. Rather than inundating the audience with a steady stream of events and promotions, the goal was to find the heart and story within The Brass Tap Baltimore and share quality posts that would capture people's curiosity as much as their attention.
A few realities shaped that work from the start:
Social media had been functioning as a promotional megaphone rather than a genuine community-building tool
There was no analytics tracking in place, so no way to know what was working, what wasn't, or why
The accounts were active but unfocused, without a consistent point of view to build on
Starting Point - May 2024
Instagram: ~1,928 followers · 1.14% engagement
Facebook: active but minimal traction
TikTok: no established presence, no established formula
The Goal - build a strategy from the ground up that would differentiate this location from every other Brass Tap: giving it its own voice, its own community following, and its own measurable business results. All managed entirely off-site.
Establishing a content identity, proving what works, and building the infrastructure that everything else would compound on.
The first months were about listening. I built an analytics tracking system from scratch and began testing content types, formats, and timing, paying close attention to how the audience actually responded rather than how we assumed they would. The patterns that emerged were specific, sometimes counterintuitive, and ultimately the backbone of everything that followed.
Early on, a simple language change produced measurable results: framing sporting events as "Watch Parties" rather than just highlighting that it was "Game Day" consistently outperformed the original phrasing. The difference wasn't cosmetic: "Watch Party" signals a social gathering, a communal experience, something worth going out for. That kind of precision in language became a through-line for everything we wrote.
Within five weeks, Instagram engagement had grown 157% from 1.14% to a peak of 3.57%. But more importantly, a content framework had taken shape that didn't depend on luck or a single viral moment. The Weekend Preview format became a reliable weekly anchor. Tapping into Barry's expertise in craft beer - his genuine, encyclopedic knowledge of every tap - emerged as the bar's most authentic and repeatable content asset. Video content, still early, was already outpacing static posts in reach.
By the end of 2024, the numbers told the full story of what a foundation year can do: over 4.4 million total impressions across platforms, a 156% increase over the prior year, and video views that grew by more than 14,000%. The audience was still relatively small. But the infrastructure was in place, the voice was established, and the data was pointing clearly toward what would come next.
Year one: 2024 Final Performance
4,493,662 total impressions across all platforms
Up 156% from 2023
14,622 video views · Up 14,669%
Sent messages up 178.8%
Received messages up 532.1%
The foundation does its job when the strategy built on top of it starts producing results that aren't possible without it.
The second year is where the prior investment paid off. The content pillars were established. The analytics system provided consistent, clear numbers to build from. The audience, though still growing, had been trained to expect a certain quality and consistency of voice. What changed was the scale of what became possible.
The content pillars that moved the needle
The most successful series of this phase centered on Jonathan, the host of the Brass Tap Baltimore’s weekly trivia night, who competed on Jeopardy! Rather than a single post, I built a multi-week narrative around his journey: the anticipation, the matches, the community rallying behind one of their own, the results. It generated 10.83% Instagram engagement and drove documented corporate sales increases of 52.8% and 19.6% on back-to-back event nights. I didn’t make the narrative the venue; it was centered around Jonathan.
Equally powerful was the weekly jazz brunch series built around the Ed Hybryk Trio, the live act that performs every Sunday. What started as event coverage evolved into one of the strongest recurring content pillars across all three platforms, consistently ranking among the highest-performing posts and becoming the primary growth driver on TikTok. The format naturally evolved over time: early posts focused on event promotion, but the most effective content shifted toward atmosphere and experience, giving audiences a feeling, not just information.
Barry's Brews: building authority through content
The Barry's Brews series fully came into its own in year two. By consistently positioning Barry as a genuine local authority on craft beer, the series created a feedback loop between social credibility and media credibility. When Barry was invited to appear on WJZ-TV (Baltimore’s local CBS affiliate) as a local craft beer expert, those segments reinforced a reputation that had already been built post by post over months. Each platform's appearance made the social content more believable. Each social post made the media appearances feel earned.
Partnerships and community-first moments
Throughout this phase, the highest-performing content almost always involved some form of collaboration: a fundraiser for the employees of a beloved local brewery that had closed, which earned TV news coverage and became the single most-shared piece of content in the account's history; a giveaway run with a nearby Baltimore entertainment venue that drove some of the highest comment counts of the engagement; content creators who organically featured the bar and introduced it to an entirely new audience. None of these were scheduled months in advance. The strategy was to stay attuned to the community and move quickly when the right opportunities appeared.
This engagement started with a franchise content library, a craft beer bar & restaurant with no independent social voice, and a blank analytics slate. It ended with a documented marketing system built over two years, a community that genuinely shows up, and a clear proof of concept: the right strategy, applied with consistency and patience, wins over fast, one-time viral content.
The strategies here aren't specific to craft beer. They apply to any food and beverage business with a neighborhood presence, a loyal customer base, and stories that haven't been told yet.
Photography Credit: Justin Tsucalas, nikslife, WJZ-TV Baltimore