5 Tips for marketing your family entertainment centre

As we’ve previously touched on, marketing your family entertainment centre as we ease out various lockdowns around the world will be key in making sure your business gets off to a great start.

To help you start preparing for this, we thought we’d look at a couple of ways you can maximise the footfall to your family entertainment centre. Before developing the BookNow Software booking system, we owned a trampoline park business ourselves, so we’ve got years of experience of marketing in the industry, and it is one of the reasons we sought to make the marketing capabilities of our solution so powerful.

Monetise your website

Obviously it goes without saying that potential customers should be able to make a booking via your website, but there are additional things you can do to increase the likelihood of someone booking a visit when on your site. For all the criticisms they may get, a well thought out pop-up can have a conversion rate of 9% which could make a significant difference to your bottom line. A popular style of pop-up utilisation we often see is an offer when a user shows exit intent (think their cursor heading to the back button). This makes users think twice and can be a great way to get them to reconsider making a booking for your venue.

Use your customers social media accounts

We know how much consumers love to share their experiences on social media these days, which is why having attractions or branded tools (like the below from Rush, Oslo) that make for a great photo opportunity are excellent for getting your customers sharing their pictures on social media, particularly Instagram and Facebook. We’d recommend utilising a particular hashtag, and keeping an eye out on images you and your location are tagged in. This form of referral marketing can be so valuable in getting your brand out there – and it’s free for you! A final point on this, make sure you have a strong (and free) Wifi in your venue, particularly if your network signal is poor – this also helps keep customers in your venue longer, meaning they’re likely to spend additionally on food and drink.

You’re marketing an experience, not a product

There has been a shift in recent years, particularly amongst younger consumers, where there is more emphasis placed on experience over product. With the marketing messaging you put out, consider the story or experience you’re creating, not just focus on the deals and products – having a strong brand can help with this, especially when it comes to storytelling.

It’s also likely some of your staff fall into ‘Generation Z’, an audience group that is considered particularly passionate about the brand experience so don’t be afraid to get their input – it’ll also likely make them feel more valued as part of your team which is obviously a big benefit!

The birthday party campaign

In your CRM you should aim to get your customers birth dates from when they’ve previously booked, this will allow you to perform birthday drip marketing campaigns in the build up to their birthday. Because BookNow Software is built on Salesforce you’re easily able to build an automated flow which will send emails to your customer database in the build up to their birthday on specific times, set up by you.

You can take this a step further and utilise one of the thousands of Appexchange integrations and set up automated SMS marketing with the same messaging.

Consider time window based deals

If your entertainment centre is based in an area that tends to have a lot of tourist footfall, it can be a great idea to hit your guests with an offer of a discount if they come back to your venue within the next 7 days, within hours of them exiting your venue. This gives them another thing to do with their children whilst away from home, and the discount acts as an increased incentive.

We hope this helps give you a few ideas how you can utilise your marketing in 2021 and onwards, and if you’ve got any other ways you’re marketing your business we’d love to hear it so let us know! If you’d like to find out how BookNow Software’s booking and management system can help your business, then get in touch using the form below.