You can have great promotions without knocking dollars off the price of your food and drink items. But what tools are the best to use to get your promotions in front of the right customer? Just because you build it, doesn’t meant they will come. For any marketing efforts, start by knowing your audience, getting a good grip on your brand, outlining a strategy, and set out with goals in mind. From there, use the following tools at your disposal to hit the right people at the right time to drive up your ROI.
1. Digital Presence
In today’s digital landscape, it’s more imperative than ever to have an online presence that matches the style of our offline presence. This means that whatever you publish online should be the same as what you do offline. Create a website that has the same vibe as your venue. Use SEO on this website to generate inbound leads, such as guests filling out your reservation form, guest list form, or purchasing a ticket. Build your social media pages, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, to connect with your guests in their own environment. Create content on relevant blogs, post in group discussions or forums, or even create your own digital content for your guests to read and become more enticed about your promotions. There are endless opportunities in the digital environment. You just have to start by creating your presence and tying it all back to your customers and your brand guidelines.
2. Marketing Segmentation
Chances are you have different audiences for different promotions. Perhaps you want to target your highest spending clientele one night, and ladies who have birthdays coming up for another night. This is both possible when using marketing segmentation tools. When you use a customer relationship management (CRM) system, you’re able to track all guest history, data and trends. This helps you understand your different audience segments and also allows you to play with the data to get the right segment for your message. Sort your customers into the segments that you want, and use that information to send more targeted, personal and relevant messages to individual guests.
3. Social Media Ads
There are billions of monthly active users across social media networks. In fact, on Facebook alone there’s 1.49 billion monthly active users. That’s a lot of people you can capture by sending the right message to the right people. Facebook’s advertising algorithms have changed and improved tenfold since it first came out. Now, you’re able to create various specified targeted segments and save them in your ad manager page for later use. As we discussed in the marketing segmentation section above, you’re able to use these specific segments to target different audiences for different promotions. You can even run multiple promotions at the same time, targeting different audiences, and capturing a return for your different promotions at once.
4. Email/Text Message Marketing
Once you have your audience nailed down as a whole or into segments, you’re able to reach out to them directly to get immediate feedback. The two most popular ways are through email marketing and text message marketing. For email marketing, you can schedule ongoing emails to go out to your whole database, or target a specific audience with a specific message and call to action. Same goes for text messages. The better call to action you have in your message (ex: buy your ticket now with a link to your ticket page), the bigger results you’ll see. And the more targeted you are, the more relevant you message will be to that guest, and the more likely they are to take that call to action.
5. Street Marketing/Grassroots Efforts
It’s easy to get sucked into the sexiness of digital marketing, but there’s still a time and place for traditional marketing. I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time in this area, but supplementing your digital marketing efforts with traditional can help boost your results. Use your promoters to sell tickets or get guests on the guest list or VIP reservation list. The best way to do this is through a mobile system that ties back to your venue management system. Know where your audience is hanging out and get in front of them in a more organic and face-to-face way.
To learn more about how you can use marketing tools to blast your promotions, and to see the above tools in action, attend Whitney Johnson’s session during the 2016 Nightclub & Bar Tradeshow.
