Venue Marketing Plan: How Do You Create an Effective Plan?
Every venue needs a robust venue marketing plan if they want to be successful.
Venue marketing can be tricky if you don’t follow a plan.
You might think it’s easy to attract people to your venue and stir the buzz. But in reality, it isn’t.
With lots of competitors rising every minute, you need to showcase your venue as one of the best and if possible, unique venues to attend.
With social media at its peak, people are quick to update on Instagram about what they are doing and where they are at.
A stunning picture of your venue can create a viral trend while a small inconvenience while serving the customer from your side can cause your downfall.
So how do you create a fool-proof marketing plan that actually works? Let’s start with the basics.
What do we mean by a marketing plan and how can it be made effective?
A marketing plan is a string of strategically planned steps that will help to popularize your venue and let the potential customers know that you are open for bookings.
It contains a well-laid-out plan that details every step you need to take in order to achieve the prime goal – that is to let the world know about your business.
To make it effective and well-fuelled, the marketing plan needs to be based on actual figures. Here’s how you can make your marketing plan strong and fool-proof:
10 steps to creating an effective venue marketing plan:
1. Initial data collection and preparation
2. Boosting your social media presence
3. Defining a unique personality for your brand
4. Collaborating with the local communities
5. Maximize your online reach with a website
6. Reach out to relevant event planners with content marketing
7. Record a virtual tour for your website/social media
8. Come up with an email newsletter
9. Keep an eye on the Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews
10. Follow up
1. Initial data collection and preparation
Before you start preparing the marketing plan, start collecting the relevant data.
The first thing to do is to analyse what your competitor is up to.
If your venue doesn’t offer half the facilities as compared to your competitor, then you need to hype up the buzz.
Your marketing team needs to sweat a bit more to show the customers the ways in which your venue is unique from your competitor.
Analyse the common channels in which they are active.
For example, closely monitor the social media content that they push out, how they engage with their followers and what is the primary goal they are planning to achieve via social media.
Also, every brand or business has a particular tone. Try to figure out what theirs is.
Once you do a detailed analysis of your competitor’s existing marketing methods, you get to know their strong points, their weaknesses, and the opportunities they aren’t utilizing to the max.
Your target is to exploit the opportunities and prove that you provide something they don’t.
SWOT analysis
Now, that you already have an idea of what your competitors are up to, it’s time to analyse the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to your venue business.
This is where you have to put in your utmost care and your research skills. Never miss even the smallest strengths or threats faced by your business.
With the SWOT analysis in hand, compare it to that of your competitors, and boom!
You can easily find out the areas where you can excel, and market your venue in such a way that it stands out from your competitors.
2. Boosting your social media presence
The effectiveness of social media marketing is beyond words.
It is at the same time, the easiest and hardest tool to take leverage of.
If you have figured out what your audience expects, then marketing via social channels is a piece of cake. If you still have no clue, it’s going to be a long path.
But there is always scope for trial-and-error. Try out different content genres and then analyse which one your audience finds interesting.
For example, you could share stunning pictures of your venue, recent events conducted there, small excerpts of reviews left by your previous clients, or even share the story of how you managed to hold a hectic event with ease.
Since your followers are the ones potentially interested in your services, they would love to hear the previous reviews, as this makes the decision-making process easier for them.
Further, you can host some mini-flash sales wherein you give some discount coupons and offers to your followers.
This would help to spread the word about your profile and get some traction.
Also, if you are confident enough, you can conduct a mini ’ask us anything session’, where your followers raise their concerns, and you help them solve them at the same time.
This is a great marketing tactic as it shows the audience that you care about your clients and walk the extra mile to bring a smile on their faces.
Additionally, make use of all the social media channels.
People usually think of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter as the popular channels.
But don’t forget the benefits of Quora and Reddit as well.
If a certain social media channel is popular in your area, invest your money there – as your aim should be to be present where your target audience is.
Pinterest too, is a great channel to showcase your venue.
You can create a board for the different types of events that can be hosted in your venue and link them to proper keywords and improve your brand’s visibility.
3. Defining a unique personality for your brand
What defines your brand is its uniqueness.
Try imitating and you’ll easily fall off the track.
You can start out by developing a unique face for your brand. This covers everything – from the unique theme on your social channels to the way you present your venue to the public.
Come up with a unique theme that resonates with the goal and mission of your business.
Defining your brand’s identity during its early days will make things much easier for your marketing team.
They can easily work around it and come up with some interesting campaigns that would familiarize the venue among potential clients.
4. Collaborating with the local communities
The best way to popularize your venue is by being active and helping out the local communities.
At first, you may have to support the local business ventures by allowing them to organize events for free in your venue.
This way, you not only show solidarity to the community but also make your business known.
The first event is always special. Show the community how you organize and set up events, and how much care and thought process you put into making sure the events are a success. In a few months, your venue would be the go-to place for events and other parties in your locality.
5. Maximize your online reach with a website
A website is a quite powerful tool for digital marketers.
With a properly optimized website that showcases what your business is, you can easily be seen in the eyes of your prospective clients.
For example, let’s say your venue is situated in a place, say XYZ.
If an event planner searches for the best venues in XYZ, your website should pop up at least on the first page of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
This can be attained with the help of Search Engine Optimization. Include the targeted keywords, make use of the locality factors and maximize the benefits of online SEO tools available.
Being visible isn’t the only priority. Your website should showcase the brand personality we talked about earlier.
If your venue has held a prestigious event before, prepare a story of how you collaborated with the event planners to make the event a success.
Showcase the different facilities and services offered by your business. Hire a professional photographer and create a portfolio of your venue.
This would help the planner to get an in-depth view of your venue and ease the decision-making process.
To take things up a notch, include a chatbot on your website. This way you can always be in touch with your clients and help them with basic queries anytime.
6. Reach out to relevant event planners with content marketing
Digital marketing combined with content marketing is a powerful way to market your venue.
If you have event planners nearby, send out postcards or pamphlets that truly represent your brand.
For example, instead of detailing out each and every service you offer, present a case study.
The time when a prestigious event was held in your venue and how efficient the spacing and other facilities of your venue are. This alone would do the work.
You can send the digital version of the same postcards to the email-ids of the event planners.
You can even prepare an e-book that details the amenities and services offered by your venue and how it is perfect for certain events. Further, if you focus on hosting a certain event alone, mention that specifically.
7. Record a virtual tour for your website/social media
The idea of visiting every venue in person can be a dreadful job for event planners. Thus, you can make their work easier and give your venue a higher chance of getting selected by recording a virtual tour and publishing it on various social media channels and websites.
When you do so, hire a professional to do it.
Tell them what to include and what not to include.
If your venue has a special hotspot or amenities that are not offered by your competitors, highlight it. A detailed voice-over would make an added advantage and give them the feeling that you are giving the tour in person.
Additionally, you include short videos of previous events held in the place. This will help the event planner know the ways in which the venue can be utilized to its maximum.
The short videos should include the highlights of that event and how the event planners were able to successfully conduct it.
8. Come up with an email newsletter
Apart from constantly engaging with the social media audience, you can also send out newsletters to the ones who subscribe for regular updates on your website.
The monthly or weekly newsletter can include the latest amenities added to the venues or the offers or discounts you are offering.
With that said, the newsletter shouldn’t be too long or monotonous.
It must be engaging, to the point, and should urge the reader to take some action. For example, offer a certain discount in each newsletter and ask the reader to claim it as soon as possible.
9. Keep an eye on the Bloc, Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews
Bloc, Yelp and TripAdvisor urge their users to rate the venues based on their experience.
Always make sure that you have a fairly high rating for your venue. If there is a sudden dip in the rating or if your customer has left a negative review, address it publicly.
Take the necessary steps to satisfy the customer. The whole interaction should be transparent as this can invite new clients.
Further, encourage your previous clients to write honest feedback on these sites. Usually, event planners take a quick search through these websites and see the venue rating before contacting the owners.
When you have enough reviews and ratings, your venue become an established and renowned venue, and this can attract even more leads.
10. Follow up
You might have a well-detailed plan right in front of you, but that alone won’t bring the necessary leads.
Put the plans to practice and also allot days for following up.
For example, suppose you are trying out a new campaign on social media for a week, say from Saturday to Friday.
Use the next Saturday to sit down with your team and evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign.
Conduct a budget analysis and draw a comparison to any previous campaign you conducted.
This way, you can easily measure the fruits of your marketing plans and devise a new one if the current one proves to be ineffective.
Summing up
Well, that’s our list of 10 steps to help you devise a realistic marketing plan for marketing your venue.
Not only are these plans tried and tested, but also yield notable results within a short period (say two months).
If you are a venue owner, try out all these marketing tips and devise a plan that fits and revolves around your business.
When you have that in hand, all you need next is to make it a reality and constantly measure your efforts.
Cheers to a booming business!
