Online Marketing for Venues: Digital Marketing Explained

Focusing on online marketing for venues is smart because it’s cheap and can reach a lot of people.

Traditional marketing has its own benefits, but digital marketing is the main player in the world of marketing right now.

And why not?

Digital marketing is mostly channeled through social media platforms, which are easily accessible.

If someone wants to look for cafes near them or hit the nightclub with their friends, all they have to do is look up venues on their smartphones – and they’ll get the information they need.

Online marketing for venues is as simple, effective, and affordable as that.

As an owner of a bar, nightclub, restaurant, café, or any such venue, you need to get your online marketing strategies right.

To help you get started, we have compiled a guide that would help you formulate an online marketing strategy for your venues.

Here are our top tips for effective online marketing for venues.

Use the links below to jump to the section you want to read about:

1. A creative, user-friendly website
2. Appealing lead magnet
3. Email marketing strategy
4. Search engine optimisation
5. Instagram marketing
6. Facebook marketing
7. Twitter marketing
8. Tik Tok and Snapchat
9. Bloc marketing

1. A creative, user-friendly website

A website is the first and most essential step you can take towards effective online marketing for venues and for creating your own robust marketing plan.

All the other online marketing channels will ultimately lead to this website, which is why you need to curate it carefully.

Always place yourself in the shoes of your customers and list out what the perfect website would be.

Try to incorporate all of these points into your website.

Remember, the website is the first impression of your business, so ensure to make it impressive and interesting.

These days, minimalistic yet creative websites are in vogue – something that instantly strikes a rapport with the customers while intriguing them to know more.

Ensure the theme is modern and appealing to the eye too.

You can put out amazing photographs on your website of the food, drinks, and ambience your club has to offer.

The unique selling point of your venue must be featured on the homepage.

Along with the aesthetic details, also ensure you have put up all the important details such as timings, contact information, booking details, group discounts, and themed days.

A blog on the website is like a cherry on the cake.

It will instantly enhance the purpose of your website from mere advertisement to a useful and informative platform.

On this blog, you can feature different food critics and bloggers, and write about different aspects related to your venue too.

2. Appealing lead magnet

It’s called a ‘magnet’ because that’s what it does – draws customers to your business.

So, what exactly is a lead magnet, and why is it so important for your business?

A lead magnet is a pop-up that people will instantly see when they visit your website.

The whole idea of a lead magnet is to get the email address of the website visitor. This email address then goes into your database and can be used to connect with the person again.

How to make a lead magnet effective enough for people to drop in their email addresses voluntarily?

Simply by making it appealing – offer a free drink or a couple of discounts for every subscription and watch how your lead magnet works!

With a lead magnet, you are assured of two things – first, the contact details of the visitor, and second, a definite visit to the venue.

Someone with a discount coupon for a free drink would want to make the most of it, right?

That’s how you must make the lead magnet – of course, these are the mainstream ideas, if you can think of something amazing and out of the box, go for it!

3. Email marketing strategy

Now that you have a list of email addresses in your database, the email marketing part will be easy to pull off.

But yes, do not take email marketing lightly, you need a strategy to launch your email campaign successfully.

The best part about email marketing is that you get straight into the inbox of your potential customers and communicate what you want to.

But the question here is – how effective is your communication?

To make sure your email does not end up in junk mail, you must make it as creative as possible.

Begin with a catchy subject to the email body. This would capture the reader’s attention, enough for them to scroll down and read what you want them to.

The frequency of your emails is very important – you don’t want to send emails back-to-back and lose subscribers.

Send out relevant emails with crisp and clear messages. Don’t paste a paragraph, no one really has the time to read it.

Instead, put out an interesting offer or discount or gift card that the reader will find useful.

The CTA (Call-to-Action) part of your mail is important too – clearly mention what you want the receiver to do at the end of the email.

And yes, hire a reliable Outbox handler, as you don’t want your carefully crafted emails to end up in someone’s spam mail.

4. Search engine optimisation

By now, we’re all aware of the importance of SEO in the world of online marketing.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the backbone of digital marketing, which is why you need to focus on building an effective SEO strategy too.

The whole idea of SEO is to get your club/bar/restaurant at the top of the search results page.

Whenever people Google the most probable keywords such as ‘Best Club Near Me’ or ‘Best Asian Restaurant Near Me’, you want your website and venue to show up right at the top.

Now how do you do this?

Firstly, create an excellent website that is mobile friendly.

Next, list yourself on Google Business and create an account.

The last step is the most important and effective one – gather a lot of reviews.

Reviews are what boost your visibility, instantly enhancing your rankings. These are the best ways to organically boost your site traffic and automatically bring up your position in the search results.

Another way is to find out the keywords best suited for your business.

An intensive keyword analysis would help here.

Once you find out the highly used keywords or phrases, you would have to use the perfect density on your website and social media pages.

You can also consider using appropriate backlinks to your website. If you link third-party websites to your website, visibility on Google will increase.

This in turn would increase your ranking on Google.

You can also connect with bloggers and other websites that compile lists of ‘Best Clubs’ or ‘Best Restaurants’.

Paying them to feature your business on their website is another way to boost your visibility.

Make sure your club or restaurant is listed in the top 3 in this list.

5. Instagram marketing

This is where most of the youngsters these days hang out.

And that’s enough of a reason for you to have bang-on visibility on Instagram.

Instagram is all about posting eye-catching, appealing photographs with witty captions. Add a dash of optimization to it and voila, you have your perfect Instagram marketing strategy right there.

You get insights, ads, shopping, primary and secondary inboxes, and a call-to-action button to your profile with a business account.

Knowing your audience is very helpful when it comes to Instagram, and you can churn out the content accordingly.

Keep the account as active as you can – keep the posts relevant to your business and watch the traffic grow.

You can use the stories to keep your target audience posted about upcoming events at the bar, themed days, discounts, and other important details.

Choose the perfect profile photo, write the apt Instagram description, put out visually appealing content on a regular basis.

Instagram thrives on impressive photos, for which you can also consider hiring a professional photographer for a proper photoshoot of your bar/café or restaurant.

Use new features such as reels to create interesting content. Check out the trends on Instagram and try to incorporate the same in your page too.

6. Facebook marketing

While Instagram is the most hyped app these days, you can’t really miss out on Facebook.

Facebook is a platform where still a major chunk of your target audience hangs out.

The marketing strategy for Facebook would be different as compared to Instagram.

For starters, you would have to set up a page for your business.

Just like Instagram, you must keep this page super active too.

Keep posting the latest events and happenings at your venue. Engage with your customers to improve your customer retention and word of mouth publicity.

To boost the visibility of your page, you can also ask your customers to tag your business page to their personal posts.

Incentivize them with an additional drink or discount voucher and they will happily post it for you. Your business page will automatically reach thousands of people.

Every venue has its own USPs and special corners that they love to flaunt.

Make use of these spots and encourage people to click photos posing against them.

These photos would obviously have an amazing background, which means they would definitely be worth posting on Facebook. Again, ensure you are tagged on the photos!

7. Twitter marketing

Now that you have an amazing presence on Instagram and Facebook, why leave Twitter behind?

It’s always better to cover all the bases, right?

That’s what you need to do to ensure your business has all-around visibility.

For folks who prefer Twitter over any other social media platform, you need to come up with relevant, crisp, and clear Twitter content.

Twitter isn’t like Instagram and Facebook, where you can type paragraphs together – you have a word limit which means you must get your point straight across to your audience.

Twitter does support images and videos, but the prime focus is on text. You can schedule your tweets to make them more effective.

Tap the days when the visibility of your tweets and the turnaround to your business is high. Tweeting on these days, at particular times is what you have to do to get the visibility you want.

Twitter is also the perfect place to find people who would be more than willing to write about your business.

Find the best journalist to cover your restaurant or café and it will only add to your visibility.

8. Tik Tok and Snapchat

Well, yes – there’s a whole lot of your target audience glued to these apps too!

Tik Tok is the hotspot for amusing, out of the box content and you have to ensure your page delivers such quirky content too.

You can also ask your staff and customers to create interesting content in your bar and upload it on their accounts.

Another thing with Tik Tok is that trends catch up fast with the users – so make sure you also put these trends to good use and market your brand as well.

Snapchat is also a good platform to post content. But remember, the content on Snapchat won’t be permanent – so you can only consider uploading event updates on Snapchat.

9. Bloc marketing

We have two opportunities where you can market your venue on Bloc.

One is the free and the other is pay-per-result marketing.

Bloc Nearby is a blog/website where you can list your venue for free.

We use tags for your listing that automatically places you in hundreds of articles e.g. The Best Venue in Central London.

Listings with the most likes appear at the top of the articles and will bring in the most clicks to your website.

Bloc for Business is where you can create a pay-per-result ad that pushes to every single Bloc app user within 10 miles of your venue.

If a user checks into your venue and physically attends (tracked via geo-location), we charge you just £2+VAT.

You don’t pay for clicks or impressions, only the people who go to your venue.

It’s a budget friendly and risk free way to advertise because every user should spend in your venue.

There is also a free trial where you can get £150 ad credit (so 75 customers for free).

Summing up

No one knows your business better than you do – all you have to do is work on the drawbacks while bringing out the USPs to the world.

Online marketing for venues is the most effective way to do the latter.

If you’ve never had an online presence for your business, this is the right time to create one. Likewise, if your online presence has been dead for a while, this is again, the perfect opportunity to revive it.

With the right analysis, testing as well as trial and error methods, you would be able to create an impressive online business presence.

If you’re looking for a pay-per-result online marketing solution for your venue then you could always check out Bloc.

Our app rewards people financially for checking in and attending venues. We also connect people before events.

You can also take the help of so many tools available out there. And if at any point you require professional help, don’t hesitate at all!

Good luck!