Promoting your venue is a task that can yield wildly differing results. The fact is, we don’t know with absolute certainty what is going through our target market’s heads, so any marketing or promotional campaign is undertaken with a heavy pinch of faith that it will resonate with those for which it was targeted.
So, what can we do to ensure our time, and our money isn’t wasted?
Thankfully, there are ways to promote your venue that don’t rely on your mind-reading skills. Let’s go through some of them so that your next promotional campaign stands the best chance of getting your venue into the public eye.
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1. Know yourself
Even the best marketing campaigns would fall flat on their face if they failed to understand the business they were trying to promote. It’s an underlying, crucial element to every campaign, good or bad.
So it makes sense for you to take some time before you really set things into motion to analyse what it is about your venue that makes it uniquely you.
Things to consider here would be the type of food you serve, or a particular atmosphere, or even a strongly-held and adhered to value.
Whatever it is, this is worth its weight in gold because it’s from here that you will build the rest of your campaign.
Identify what your venue’s unique selling point is, and use it as your marketing compass.
2. Know your competition
After you’ve identified what makes your venue yours, you’ll want to do some research into how similar venues promote themselves and push their identities across to their audience.
Start by looking at how other venues who share your values conduct themselves online. Consider their tone, and see which kind of content they post. Run through the comments and see how (or even if) they interact with their audience.
And just because they’re your competition, that doesn’t mean that they’re your enemy.
Good will towards a like-minded venue, and the sense of community that builds is an excellent way to get your venue into the conversation, especially if the other venues are held in high regard. It’s essentially building a veil of success via association, and it costs you nothing.
3. There’s never a bad time to promote
Most venues operate year-round, which means that they’ll be in the hunt for more and more customers year-round too, so there’s really no better time to start planning your next campaign than right now (you can repeat this to yourself throughout the year if you ever feel lazy for not acting sooner).
And depending on when you plan to launch your campaign, there are plenty of events dotted throughout the calendar that you can always angle towards a special offer if you’re stuck for ideas.
The point is, getting started with a promotional campaign can seem daunting, but it needn’t be.
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These are just a couple of tips to get you facing the right direction when you do choose to dip a toe into the marketing pool.
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