Everybody invests in having an online presence, but most leave their Facebook page rather bland and vanilla flavoured!
Today, Facebook Pages look quite alike for the most part. That might be because people don’t have time to invest in them, nor have the qualifications to create an immersive page, or maybe they simply don’t care. But if you own a brand, you should care.
Making a page by yourself is not that hard, but it involves some basic HTML/FMBL familiarity, and many people don’t want to be hassled with any of that.
We think it’s time for all this to change though!
Oh and before we get started, if you are still wondering what the difference between having a Facebook Group vs Facebook Page is, please read this to go for (*cough* Facebook Page) the right one.
So how do we spice up our standard run of the mill Facebook page?
There are 4 different options you can take at the moment.
1) Befriend a geek with some knowledge on FBML (Facebook Markup Language). This is Facebook’s own flavour of HTML and is used within their walled garden for application development and design. This option will grant you the most flexibility, yet is also the toughest to get going. Especially if you aren’t familiar with anybody who can help you out.
2) Our second option is Pagemodo.
This is a service that allows you to create a “Welcome” or “About” tab without any static FBML knowledge, or too much work. You simply log in and use their editor to create styles and panels of your choice. The idea is that you customise this “landing page” that your visitors see for the first time with brand colours, logo and the most important message you want them to immediately see in an aim to attract new visitors as well as provide an instant sharp message to those who see it for the first time. Check it out.
3) Third, comes tabsite. Similar in style, has a comprehensive content manager and packs in a bit more under the hood, but also comes with a basic pricing structure depending on what you would like to use.
4) The last option, is asking us for a custom build. We build Facebook apps upon signup for users and can design something based on more specific requirements if need be. Contact us for more info on pricing.
Until Facebook implement tools of their own, we need to resort to 3rd party services such as these or beefen up our tech knowledge on HTML/FBML, to add to our social media campaigns.
On signing off, check out some great implementations from well known brands that have taken the approach of dressing up their Facebook pages:
NHL
Adidas
Victoria’s Secret
Wheat Thins
WWE Mexico
We often get asked how to modify the background of an email.
There really is no easy way of doing it considering the environment we are working with. So, we thought we would share some quick tips to help you with setting the background of your newsletter.
The problem is that there are so many email clients (programs which you use to view your email like hotmail, gmail, Outlook etc) and each of them renders the contents of the email differently. This means that the way something looks in Outlook could be very different to how it looks in Hotmail.
Many browser based email clients (such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc…) remove the <BODY> and <HEAD> tags of your document. So this pretty much rules out CSS for setting such things.
The best way to do it?
Many web developers are about to cringe at this, but the answer is Tables. That’s right! Tables are back in fashion and it is pretty much the only way to get the desired effect that will work on all the email clients.
Now, how to do this?
Simply, create a table wrapped around your whole document (set the width to 100%). Then set the background colour of the table to the desired colour or set it to an image. We recommend doing it old school with the “background=” and “bgcolor=“ tags.
Once your table has been created just insert your newsletter code inside.
CSS in Emails?
CSS is allowed. But try to keep it short and sweet. If there is something you want to do in CSS that can be done in HTML; it’s probably better if you do it in HTML.
Any CSS code needs to be in-line or embedded. That means no linking to external content.
We prefer in-line CSS. Might make you feel dirty but it does work.
Your code may look like spaghetti but it will do the job
Unfortunetly, HTML (especially CSS) isn’t as reliable on emails as it is on web pages.
Until there is a unified standard and consistancy between the different email applications, you are going to have to get used to shortcuts like this.
And naturally, you can always chat to us for help and assistance with any of the above.
We were recently given the pleasure of capturing a few minutes of time from Bodie Czeladka, director of one of Melbourne’s most prestigious promotional companies, Secret Society.
Here is what he had to say:
Q: Secret Society is a well-developed brand with much success under its belt in the Melbourne scene. Can you summarise what few points you think helped you achieve the success in exposing your brand?
BC: We injected a lot of cash and time into the branding early with a lot of support and loyalty from our venues. We still do to this day, to show gratitude by showing a lot of loyalty to them for that initial support and faith in our business. We also realise the value in building brand strength and using strong branding on all appropriate mediums.
Q: What do you think is the most effective way that bars, clubs and restaurants can communicate and involve their target market?
BC: I think it’s a triangle of interaction. If you lose one corner your branding and business will suffer. We find that it is a combination of:
1) Supplying your patrons with a good product when they come to the venue (and value for money).
2) Create and maintain a good online following, somewhere that patrons can easily source content, enter competition and be eligible for giveaways.
3) The most important is old school marketing techniques, not just online. Human interaction and word of mouth creates the best branding for any business.
Q:What is the one or two most important pieces of advice you would give to anybody thinking of running a venue or promoting it?
BC:Don’t try to do too much. I have seen so many promoters over the years build up a great following and then blow it all by watering down their product and trying to put their fingers in too many pies. Try not to be a jack of all trades master of none. Constantly try to reinvent your self and your branding, and keeping things fresh, is the best way to stay on top.
Q:What is one “No-No” of the hospitality industry that always cringes you and you wish could be fixed or not done any more?
BC: Bulk text messages and spamming with no valuable content to the consumer and no opt outs in emails and texts.
Q:Naturally everybody promotes on well known public holidays and days in the year, but is there a secret little part of the year that you think works wonders and perhaps one that venues or promotional crew don’t particular take too much notice of?
BC: Unfortunately no I don’t, but if I did this wouldn’t be the forum I would be sharing it in as then it wouldn’t be a secret 
Q: Do you think Online Social Media is a must for all hospitality venues and what do you think is the best way to use it?
BC: Definitely but it has to be complimented with a solid product. You can have the best marketing campaign in the world but if your product is rubbish it won’t give you a client base. It is dependant on the particular product, for us it has always been as a portal to direct people back to our website.
We think of social media like we do dating or a night club it is a place to meet new people and after interacting with them for a bit you invite them back to you place (Website). THAT is where true relationships, trust and loyalty is built and a product can be sold.
Q:Do you feel like Facebook may be getting a little overrun by promoters and venues all pushing their brand out to people. How can this be combated?
BC:It can’t be, all we can do as a promotions company is lead by example and upcoming promoters follow suit. Our rule is in regards to events or club nights if you don’t have anything to say, a point to make or something to give patrons don’t say anything at all.
Q:Have you used MyGuestlist and if so, what kind of positive help (if any) has it contributed to your marketing campaigns or admin procedures?
BC: Our main goal over the past 3 years has been to focus on building a strong database, and since joining Myguestlist we have never felt in more control our our database. We have gained knowledge about what our subscribers like and don’t like through the use of myguestlist back end statistics and gained new concepts and ideas for extra ways to increase our subscribe rate and reduce our opt out. We never would have been able to if not for this fantastic product.
Not to mention the 7 days a week 24 hr support we receive from this ever so helpful team.
Q:How do you see the relationship between the Internet, patrons and the hospitality industry evolving over the next decade or so?
We can only speak in the short term as a decade from now, anything could be possible. But..
I believe newspapers and a lot of other forms of non-targeted advertising and marketing will become null and void. There are a number of high traffic bloggers that will be probably be identified and recognized for doing better research with better reporting and less bias than the traditional media. So blogging will increase and be a place where reviews and opinions on venue’s and nightclubs will really hold weight so it isn’t just about advertising online, it’s about maintaining credibility and helping promote the goodwill of your product/brand/venue.
Whilst Facebook and it’s successor will grow and no doubt surpass google, unless google join the race with a solid product.. and dependence on services like google ad words and analytics will increase and become an integral part of ALL businesses, rather than primarily web focussed businesses like it is currently.
I believe Facebook and other social mediums will find away to counter the overuse and spamming problem and true business with true content will survive and continue to grow whilst time wasting content will hopefully fade into the background.
Q:Any regrets? Do anything different?
BC: No regrets, but obviously there will always be things we could or can do better but the key is not to dwell, just keep your eye on the prize and keep moving forward.
Q:What’s upcoming in the world of Secret Society?
BC:A lot more fun and a continual improvement in our product and service. We hope we to get into a lot more one off events this year which will give us a chance to branch out of not only our comfort zones but our venues.
Our business is people so we will be making it our number one goal to find not necessarily a large number of people , but the RIGHT people to join the team, working for Secret Society has a lot of perks but we are also very selective with our team, people who work for Secret Society don’t see it as a job, but as a lifestyle.
What are you waiting for http://secretsociety.tv
So it’s no secret that we’re crazy about data here at MyGuestlist.
Ahhh…not stealing it that is, but rather creating models, metrics and generating some useful information from that data to use as leverage for critical decision making in our development and a sales sectors.
So it should come as no surprise then, that many of the world’s tech companies (including us) are utilising what is known as the viral coefficient to deduce whether a certain action/application/entity is technically considered viral or not.
Up to now, this information has not been really interpreted for all us other bar, restaurant and club folk, but let us do that for you.
So, how do you find out if your latest video is going viral? How do you know whether that last competition you just created in MyGuestlist is working its magic? Is your Facebook promotion actually making some sort of impact? Is word of mouth spreading online? We finally have a way of measuring it all.
Let’s explore a little.
So the idea behind the concept of something being viral, is that new members or new activity is introduced to the parent (or original) concept in a perpetuating fashion. So instead of you finding members for your mailing list, they find you. Instead of you finding patrons to enter competitions, they find your competition and spread the word on to their friends. Those friends to friends of their own and so on. This is all well and good but there are two questions that need to be answered.
How do I create viral content?
How do I measure viral activity?
This post is focusing on the latter.
There is a variable in our formula called the viral coefficient. What this is, is a measure of the number of additional members, each new member brings with them.
So based on this information, if the viral coefficient is 1 (i.e each new member brings only one other new member in), the activity/content/distribution will grow, but only at a linear rate and eventually topping out.
So the scenario may be as follows:
10 people become members
10 invites sent per person
10% of those people convert to new members
End Point: 10 new member to the site
So therefore, 10 new members / 10 original = 1 (which is our viral coefficient)
Above 1 however, it achieves our desired and classic hockey stick on the graph scenario of exponential growth.
10 people become members
15 invites per person
10% of those people convert to new members
End point: 15 new members to the site
15 new members / 10 original = 1.5 viral coefficient
The following table is created by Jeremy Liew, a venture capitalist in San Fransisco’s Silicon Valley. Study it carefully as it illustrates the difference between a tiny increase in the viral coefficient of 0.6, 0.9 and 1.2. In the example, Liew starts with a base of only 10 members and a viral coefficient of 0.6 and defined time as the period it takes for a member to invite others, which he estimated could be anywhere from 2-8 weeks for this specific experiment.
Viral Coefficient Stats
So the idea was that starting with a base of 10 members and a viral coefficient of 0.6, you flatten out at 25 people, a gain of 15 members. At 0.9, you end up with 75 new members and growth slows dramatically.
With a viral coefficient of 1.2 however, those same 10 members, yield an amazing 1,271 additional members.
We come up with the following formula:
Viral Coefficient = Invitations x Conversion x Infection
where Invitations = average number of users invited by each active user
Conversion = proportion of invited users who activate
Infection = proportion of new active users who invite additional new users
For some more info on how to calculate growth and population forecasting, read this blog entry by Robert Zubek.
So, what to do about increasing this viral coefficient?
Identified, are 5 solid ways to increase the viral coefficient. To first understand these 5, we need to understand what we are trying to do. This is:
- Trying to get our members to send more invites or share our content more to other non-members.
- Try to get our members to return more often to our site/content/venue/party so that they are able to invite more often.
- Find more channels and mediums for the recipient to receive the invites.
With the above in mind, we can now explore the techniques for increasing our viral coefficient so that this can be achieved.
1) Invitations/Sharing integrated as a part of the core
To increase the average number of members that each of your active members invites, you must ensure that new member invitations are a core process in your marketing, action or content.
Examples:
- Hotmail has a small invitation at the bottom of every email which helped with early adoption.
- PayPal allows members to send money to non-members and provides a referral bonus if they join.
2) Immediate utility or usage without external needs
In order to achieve traction with initial members, you must provide some immediate action/task/utility for them to look at, play around with even when none of the member’s personal contacts have joined.
Examples:
- Twitter allows you to micro blog, before you’ve started following or getting followers
- Linked in allows you to setup resumes and connections prior to any invites going out
This step is quite important as most users will not invite other friends until they’re familiar with what is being presented to them. If you don’t provide them with something to do before they’re ready to invite others, you will probably lose them before they reach that stage.
3) Persistence. Keep pulling people back into your world over and over.
There are heaps of examples of this. From Facebook pulling you back in to update your status, to Facebook apps like Mob Wars reminding users of new features that are unlocked. You should always remain in touch and keep sending useful communication that will encourage people to come back to your event, or website.
In addition, once you do one of these pull-ins, remind these active members that they can invite more people and what the benefits are of doing so. Just be careful to not fall into the trap of becoming a spam machine and sending reminders or newsletters all the time without a good reason.
4) No Artificial barriers
According to the CyWorld Behavioural Distribution from “Do friends influence purchases in a social network?”, Raghuram Iyengar, Sangman Han and Sunil Gupta, there is a following approximate distribution:
47% of people are not well connected, have limited interaction with others and are unaffected by social pressure.
43% of people are moderately connected and “Keep up with the Joneses”
10% of people are highly connected and can also be negatively influenced by others
So the fact of the matter is:
- Most people will not invite anybody
- A few people will want to invite lots of people
- Ask yourself how you will make it easy for those few to invite as many as they want: 5, 10, 20, 40 people at a time
5) Influencer targeting
It isn’t important that your content or word of mouth is just spreading, but it is equally as important to make sure they are spreading from the right person. The connectors.
You should select those people to receive viral content based on the number of friends they have, the size of their network (online and off) as well as the probability of instigating action.
If you have anything to add which you may think increases the viral coefficient of your promotions and content in the hospitality industry, please share it in the comments.
It’s often said in the web design world that people don’t read on their computers, they scan.
That is why when confronted with large amounts of information, people tend not to read and read. Instead, they take a glimpse and unless something pops out at them, they move on .
Consider the patrons in your database. They get your messages in their inboxes along with lots of personal mail and junk, maybe while at work, or possibly with screaming kids in the background. If they signed up for your campaign, then surely they are interested in what you have to say. But in order to build on their interest, how you say it is just as important.
Keeping your messages short and to the point has two important benefits:
- Catering to the short attention span of your readers. Give your patrons something interesting and engaging to see so that they can digest it quickly rather than a feast that seems bloated. If you are selling tickets then take them to your website for more information with an aim to make them purchase them. Or alternatively, you can use One-Click-Guestlist-Bookings to allow your patrons to reserve/book/allocate their time with you on a given night from their emails. This feature is now live. Stay tuned for a blog post about it.
- Less is less. The smaller the amount of content you have in your messages, the fewer words or phrases the SPAM filters ISP’s use will have to find issue with. You really don’t want to say “Buy now!” fifteen times in an e-mail. Less is more too, since your messages mean nothing to your patrons if they can’t even get them.
We’ve all heard it before. The Keep It Simple Stupid rule. But when it comes to promotions, it is more important than ever.
Segment, refine, and keep things short, sharp, clear and targeted. Do this, and you will be guaranteed to have an increase in open rates in your email campaigns.
So you’ve probably opened an account and not known how to make Twitter work its magic as you’ve heard it has for some others.
The varying ways in which you can use it alter based on whether you will be tweeting as an individual or a company and there is a ridiculous amount of help and assistance on what the best way to utilise Twitter and social media in general, but most of it might not be applicable to the way which you do business.
For example, many large companies such as Starbucks, CNN and Ford utilise Twitter to listen to their customers and respond to any problems, rectify any public mistakes or speak up when there is negative chatter about their brands in general.
This sounds good in theory, but as somebody involved with a club/bar/restaurant/venue, this doesn’t hold much strength for you.
Let’s have a look at what you should be tweeting about as somebody within the hospitality game if you want to provide direct value to your followers:
1. Announcement of specials and discounts on drinks, food or tickets
2. Welcome a new staff member and explain their upcoming role
3. Promote a new product in your bar, a new dish in your menu or a new act which will be playing
4. Run competitions and giveaways to gain participation from your followers. Do NOT make prize a gimmick or unworthy of participation (this is a double benefit because you will also be able to grow your database)
5. Recruit new staff by listing job vacancies
6. Post media releases on your venue or night, as well as any other media articles related to your business.
7. Promote happy hours
8. Retweet messages from friends within the industry
9. Thank everybody for coming to your night, event, the weekend
10. Promote your next event with a direct link for your patron to book/enquire
11. Get customer feedback (if you don’t have a large following this can be tough, but keep it in mind for when your follower base grows)
12. Comment on current affairs in relation to the hospitality industry
13. Share useful websites for your business and the industry
14. Link to your new blog posts (yes it’s time to get a blog as well if you don’t have one)
15. Broadcast updates made to your website
16. Promote your other social media networks eg. Facebook, LinkedIn
17. Conduct customer surveys
18. Notify customers to changes in upcoming events or nights.
19. Showcase your new radio or print ads
20. Tell your customers about great service you have received from another business within the industry
21. Get feedback on any new systems, software or equipment you plan to purchase
22. Search for new suppliers
23. Promote associations and organisations your venue/business belongs to
24. Booking/Enquiry/Guestlist availabilities caused by last minute cancellations
25. Give tips and free advice on drinks, meals, coffee etc. (e.g Mention a cocktail that one of your bar staff has created and list the ingredients. You can offer to give a free one to all who come this friday night
26. Broadcast news in relation to the hospitality industry.
27. Highlight your Twitter/Facebook milestones, eg. 1,000 Followers / Fans
28. Profile your staff members with some cool fun facts.
29. Post changes to schedules, timetables or opening hours
30. Discounts for mentioning your Twitter posts
31. Any appearances you are making, eg. trade shows, workshops, seminars
32. Seasonal greeting to customers, eg. Merry Christmas, Happy International Left Handlers Day
33. New address and phone numbers if you have moved
34. Any unfortunate outages or delays that will affect a day or night of trade
35. Highlight any community involvement or charity associations
36. Send reminders to your customers, eg. Melbourne Cup Weekend coming, NYE etc.
37. Give your venue/business a personality – share a joke or two
38. Link to photos from your latest event or night.
39. Promote a business award nomination or achievement
40. Link to forums you regularly participate in (yes, you should be doing that as well as Twitter updates)
41. Share cost savings for buying a “birthday” or “hens night” package from your venue
42. Use Twitter as a customer service/help desk for your business (will probably only work if you have many followers.)
43. Celebrate venue milestones, eg. 25 years in service
44. Encourage people to follow some of your favourite Twitters
45. Promote birthday packages
Viral videos are one of the great mysteries of the universe.
Every “marketing expert” is pitching them as the best way to expose your brand/business without actually advertising.
But how do you know what’s right and wrong? How do you know what will be the next numa numa, star wars kid or chk chk boom girl?
Short and truthful answer is, you can’t. And you probably won’t be able to. There will never be a formula for what makes a successful viral video. However, we can look at one company that has taken somewhat of a structured approach.
Blendtec is a company in the U.S. that makes blenders, has made a series of videos where a scientist-looking figure attempts to blend the wackiest of things, from marbles to coke cans to crowbars, using one of their blenders. The videos are all on YouTube, but you can see one of them below:
Will it blend
These videos have all of the ingredients of perfect social media marketing:
- Interesting and different
- Easy and free to access medium (youtube)
- Fun to watch
- Markets the product’s strengths, while not focusing on them specifically
- Consistency with the brand – showing of other products and logo prominently in videos
In fact, this marketing has done so amazingly well that Blendtec’s sales have gone up by 700%! Each video has over 1 million views each – and to be honest, I even felt a slight urge to go buy one of those blenders after watching!
So what lesson can we learn as nightlife & hospitality troopers?
Well have a think about how you can incorporate those 5 points above into certain elements of your venue. Here are just some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:
- Funny cooking class videos from your chef with interesting and non-conventional cooking ingredients
- A competition between two patrons in your venue in some funny game. Award prizes.
- All you can eat/drink competition
- A musical in your venue. No jokes! Check out this and this. These are incredibly viral & shareable amongst friends on Facebook.
- Exhibit the skills of one of your staff into a cool and impressive video. This could be cocktail mixing, musical performance or anything else they may be good at.
- Do a spoof of a popular trend, music video, film or show. Done the right way, these can be explosive.
- Do a funny false “media statement” where you announce new events, nights, meals, drinks, offers, musical acts.
- Do a coke vs pepsi styled taste test between one of your signature cocktails and another similar beverage
There are so many more that you can add to this list, that it can almost be the basis of another blog post.
Be creative, make a video that is engaging, shareable amongst your friends and friends of your friends, with the ultimate goal of sparking more interest in your venue or event.
As a continuation of the previous post, here are a few more tips (in no particular order) that may come handy to promoters, event organisers and venue owners.
1) Personalise your mailouts and SMS campaigns
Ok, so every venue, promoter and their pet dog out there is pushing their night/s as much as they can and they are doing it on many different mediums. Facebook, twitter, myspace, emails, sms, flyers…the list goes on. Trouble is, people have had it up to here (sideways hand raised to nose) with getting all this promotion crap shoved in their face everywhere they turn.
Solution:Check the previous post on using #name within MyGuestList to include your patron’s name in your e-flyers and SMS.
2) Schedule birthday mailouts/SMS to all upcoming birthdays in your database
Birthdays. It’s those things people go to on friday and saturday nights which have heaps of close friends all looking to have a good time and spend a lot of money somewhere. Make them have your venue/night in mind 6 weeks prior to their birthday. Offer birthday packages. More on this later.
3) Collect the right data
If you have contact forms, enquiry forms, booking forms, guestlist forms or anything else where your patrons contact you, have a think about what kind of information you would like to gather from them. If you are currently only getting a name, email and mobile number, you may be missing out!
Imagine if you collected only just D.O.B and their favourite drink as extra info.
Now, you can find yourself promoting to Alison who is having her 21st in 6 months and enjoys cosmopolitan cocktails, on a targeted, specific level. You can custom tailor a package based exclusively on this information you have about her preferred choice of poison.
4) Timing is everything
Not only is it about “who” you promote to, it is also about “when” you promote. Experiment around with different times of the day and week. Not so unusually, you may find that sending out that email or sms on a Friday just before lunchtime when corporates are figuring out where to go for their after work drinks or what they are going to do with their friends/spouses that night may give you some surprisingly good results. Your welcome.
5) Categorise and keep clean
Your database should be like your wife. Clean, organised and working for you. Errr…moving along.
A common action that is performed by most promoters/venues, is that the database consists of just one big slab of inconsistant information that has been gathered by various different methods over the past x amount of years and nobody that is responsible for its maintenance now or in the past, can make heads or tails out of it.
Categorise. Categorise. Categorise.
Create a category for your Friday nights, create a category for your saturday nights, create a category for your over 28s, create a category for your corporates, create a category for anything that deserves its own seperate marketing and promotion. In the long run, it really pays out.
6) Use HTML templates for your e-flyers
Many venues/promoters send out e-flyers and place a mere image as a part of their email. While this does remind people about the night you are running, you are not providing them any fast and easy way of being a part of the night.
Rather than just an image, why not use HTML flyers with a link to your guestlist/booking page. This then encourages people who read it, to immediately click one button and be on the guestlist for the night. And on top of that, they can then be automatically added to your database into the appropriate category.
Isn’t giving people the option to include themself in your night much better than just simply making them aware of it?
7) Do not send one generic mass email/SMS
This one of the many common pitfalls that venues and promoters get stuck into. Although a small percentage of the target audience will be affected by this, you will find a lot of discomfort amongst your large list of patrons since it has no personal affect on their psychological behaviour. It’s like trying to sell baby food to a room full of teenagers, senior citizens, chefs and japanese construction workers. Oh and maybe a couple of babies and parents as well.
Isolate as much information from your patrons as you can, categorise accordingly, and send incrementally. Even if this means sending out to only a selected smaller amount of different people each week, you will find it yields much greater results than just blasting out a generic one-size-fits-all message.
8 ) Have a photographer as often as you can
People love seeing themselves in photos. It’s a fact. So utilise this by having a photographer in your venue or night as often as you can. These pics (which can also be watermarked with your logo) will then spread onto the various different social networks online, amongst email inboxes of friends, and on the forums of nightlife websites.
But most importantly, you can put these pics up on your own gallery, and grow your database by excited patrons from the previous night, eager to check themselves out and how “smashed” they were.
9) Video Production
Although this doesn’t need to be a regular task, the next time you have a major event where you have celebrity guests, international DJs, special performances, opening nights or a venue birthday, think about producing a short video clip of the night and sending it out to some of your database contacts. This is a great and dynamic way of showing to somebody at home on a computer, what your venue/night is all about.
It is much more effective at keeping the attention of the viewer than what normal text is, so why not give it a shot?
10) Create Packages
For some bizarre reasons, it seems like many venues/promoters forget to implement what they learned in nightlife promoting 101 which is to create packages for their patrons. Whether it be for a birthday, hen’s night, buck’s party or any other celebration, packages are always a great way of assuring your patrons you are taking good care of them.
For example, suppose you organise the following for a group of 30:
- Limousine pick up from location
- Drive around with free bubbly in the limo
- Priority entry to venue
- 30 free shots.
- Host for the night with finger food/drinks always on arrival
Although the above might not suit your particular venue or night (change it around to suite accordingly with your vibe), it is the simple fact that you are creating a convenience for your patrons that they will appreciate. Price the package above how you will, but it is guaranteed that with the amount you throw in, patrons will be happy that you are looking after them and will be more interested in having their functions at your venue as opposed to somewhere that does not give them this incentive.
For more info on how MyGuestList can help you achieve all or any of the above, feel free to give us a bell.
Not literally.
Think about new years eve.
Think about the number of “Happy New Years Eve everyone” SMS messages you receive.
Now think about the people who actually make the effort to personally wish you a happy new years eve or even just merely use your name in the message. Doesn’t that act of consideration immediately strike you as more personal and warm?
Well that precisely, is the reason why you should always understand the difference between personalised marketing and generic blast outs. In summary, generic marketing sucks!
It is common knowledge that your e-newsletter/e-flyer is a great way to keep in touch with your patrons and we all know that people love having cheaper entry and free drinks so they want to know about when you are offering these goodies all the time, right?
Wrong!
The first thing that venues and promoters do wrong is blast everyone that is on their mailing list/database with a promotional email offering anything from half price drinks to cheaper entry. Whether this is an email or sms, you are immediately turning many people away from your promotion.
Why?
Well let’s face it, chances are that you probably sent something out fairly recently with a similar kind of offer, and you have had many optouts from your patrons since they don’t want to be flooded with emails from you so often. And if that didn’t do it, what about the fact that you are sending out just a generic email to all those on your list, suggesting that you don’t really think you should take the time to communicate to your patrons on a person level?
The solution is simple. Here are a few things you can do to make your e-flyers more effective:
- Use the #name or !name commands for the patron’s first name to be added in the email giving it a more personalised flavour.
- Do not send mass email/sms to every contact in your database. This is a turn off.
- Categorise contacts into your different nights and market accordingly so that your not cross-promoting to two diverse sets of crowds.
- Use scheduling to market birthday packages to those in your database with an upcoming birthday.
With MyGuestList, all of the above are only a click away from the home screen and very easy to use.
Even, if you implement only two of the four tasks above, it is a certain guarantee that you will have a much more effective marketing campaign.
When i was young, I would always play around the house and on the streets with the local crew of kids in my neighbourhood. Being the mischevious bunch that we were, it wasn’t uncommon to find us running around from the street, to the yard and into the house.
My grandmother would always try calm us down a little when she would see a handful of young rascalls storming towards her at top speed and then continuing to run laps around the kitchen table, all whilst incorporating the fantasy world of pirates, cowboys and superheroes in our endeavours.
But once all the fun and games were over, my grandmother would sit me down and say
- “I have no problem with you boys playing and doing what you do, but I do want one thing.”
- “Whats that” – I would say.
- “I want to know the names of these boys, where they live, and who they are.”
Bewildered, i asked why? Why was any of this necessary? I was making friends and having fun wasn’t I?
But apparently, that wasn’t enough for my grandma.
“I need to know, because I need to understand who they are, so I can understand who you are, and who you will become,” she said.
For years I never understood what all of that nonsense meant, but as I matured and learned what it was like within the nightlife and hospitality industry, it started making sense.
You have to know who your patrons are, in order to know what your venue is.
You have possibly been collecting a database for a while now, but do you really know what music Jane Denton on the fourth page likes?
Do you know what kind of drinks Andrew that came in last friday likes?
Why is this important?
Well imagine the following.
Imagine, that Andrew is having a birthday within the upcoming few weeks. Now imagine that you want to reach out to him in someway.
Those who keep databases buried in paper, or on an excel sheet, will be doomed. You just won’t be able to communicate to all your patrons on a personal and intimate level like you would with MyGuestList.
Not only can MyGuestList show you that Andrew is indeed turning 21 in four weeks time, but it can also tell you that he likes Vodka pineapple drinks and he loves electro house.
So, with this information at hand, now you can communicate to Andrew on a more personal level, asking him to have his birthday at your venue and promoting something to him which is inclusive of his likes or dislikes.
Do this for the number of patrons in your database and before you know it, you will be hosting more parties than you ever thought possible.
