I see it all the time: venues spending marketing dollars on mass marketing efforts, blasting vague messages to a broad range of people who may or may not be their customers. All because they don’t know who their customers are, what their objectives are, or how to use the tools that are readily available to them.
Here are 5 tips to fix that and get a better handle on your marketing.
1. Know Your Audience
Before you an start any type of marketing, you first need to know who your audience is. Customer sare the number one component of a successful venue. Without customers, you don’t have a business. Discover who your customers are, what their idea of a good party is, the music they like to hear, the alcohol they like to drink, and the experience they expect. This information dictates your entire marketing strategy, including your promotions.
2. Segment Your Audience
Use a customer relationship management (CRM) system to collect as much information about your guests as possible, including their name, contact information, how many times they’ve been to your venue, whether they’re a VIP/guest list/event/general admission customer, how much money they’ve spent, and what their most popular drink purchases are. This allows you to truly understand who your audience is and segment them into specific targeted groups. Use filters to group like-minded guests together, such as age range, birthdays coming up, spending habits, etc. Then, use this information to send messages that are 100% relevant to each group or individual. This takes old-school mass marketing and strengthens it to be targeted micro-marketing.
3. Craft Personal Messages
With a CRM system and segmentation at your disposal, you have a complete buyer persona for all your target customer segments, including demographic, geographic, and psychographic information. Use this to your advantage when crafting your messages. As an example, let’s say you segmented your audience into a list of people who have birthdays this week. You can then send that specific group a message that says “Happy birthday! Celebrate in style with a VIP table and get a bottle of champagne on the house.” You can do this with nearly any type of segmented audience of your choosing. Just make sure that you stay consistent with your messaging across platforms and that you’re always tied in to your overall brand.
4. Use Your Tools
Never before have you had access to your customers on so many platforms. In the past, you could only have one-way conversations where you told your customers your message on print and broadcast media. And let’s be real, that’s not really a conversation at all. Today, you can actually engage in two-way conversations with your customers over email, text messages, and social media. Use this to your advantage! Use Facebook’s PowerEditor tool to target specific audiences on Facebook through ads. Use Twitter cards to send short messages to specific followers. Use email systems to send email campaigns to your targeted audience segments from step 2. Use text messaging systems to send texts to those same targeted audiences. And above all else, use these tools to track where your guests are coming from.
5. Measure and Repeat
As stated in the last step, always track your marketing efforts. This information allows you to get a true sense of what is and isn’t working so you can make the necessary changes. Is a certain promotion bringing in a ton of people? Keep doing it! Is a certain message not providing results? Fix it. That’s the true power of data. When you have absolute clarity around your efforts, you can do even more to increase your success. Without data, you’re simply just guessing.
Get more marketing tips and see the top digital tools in action at the 2016 Nightclub & Bar Convention and Trade Show. Whitney will be speaking on Monday at 3:00 pm about Marketing Tools to Drive ROI. See you there!
Whitney Larson is the president and director of marketing at Vēmos. Contact her at whitney.larson@vemos.io or fill out the form below.
