When it comes to being one of the most popular locations to visit in your region, marketing is absolutely essential to generating both new customers and repeat customers. This applies to the whole part of the customer experience, from discovering you, in-venue experience and post trip experience – all aspects work in tandem with one another, and when all in sync can have a huge impact on your bottom line.
Below are four essential marketing tactics we think businesses should be utilising – if you have any thoughts, or would like to find out more about how BookNow works from a marketing perspective just get in touch via the form at the bottom of the page.
Make sure you can be found
Did you know that 92% of search engine searchers will pick businesses on the first page of local search results, or that 88% of searches for local businesses result in an enquiry or visit within 24 hours?
So what does this mean for your business? Well, simply you have to make sure your customers can find you on the most prominent places they search for things to do – Google.
This means you need to have a strong search engine presence, which will need to be achieved with a well thought out Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.
Whilst there are plenty of agencies and freelancers available who can carry out the work for you, there are some basics that can be done in house, such as:
- Ensuring header tags are in place and optimised
- Keyword research and optimisation
- Google Business listing set up
Looking at this at a high level individually, header tags are your page titles and every page should have a H1 tag, but no more than one per page – the H1 tag should be keyword research backed, meaning it’ll be a term your audience is actively searching for.
Once you appropriately identify your keywords, you’ll want to include these in the body copy of your webpages – as search engines will identify you as relevant to what your target audience is searching, i.e. “days out with kids in Birmingham”. You can read more about the process of keyword research here.
Next up, you’ll want to make sure you’ve set up a Google business listing, which will list all of your key information to people searching for businesses like yours on the Google listing – like our listing on the screenshot below. This ensures your potential customers can easily get on to your website, see where you’re based or give you a call to place a booking!
As previously mentioned, there are plenty of agencies or freelancers that can carry out more advanced SEO work which will also help with your performance – you can take a look at a couple of the more advanced SEO strategies here, but in the meantime the three items above should help improve your search engine ranking and get more people aware of you, and more people visiting your venues.
Keep in touch
Whilst SEO will help new prospects discover you, it’s also important that you continue to market to the people that already know about you. An easy way to do this is through email or SMS marketing, and even better if you can set some of your marketing comms up through automation which means you don’t have to keep revisiting and putting together marketing messages.
Think about the best sort of messages you can set up with automation, for example a lot of our customers have a birthday automation which will email their customer base in the build up to their birthday with a special birthday offer for group bookings.
Another popular strategy we see is an automation to blast customers after they leave the venue, with a discount if they make another booking within a two to three week time window – this can be a great strategy to keep your customers coming back and keeping revisitation rate high.
Also think about when your peak times of the year are, school holidays, weekends and so forth – build your marketing campaigns to hit customers in the build up to these dates and you should see some great conversion rates as parents look to keep their children occupied.
Finally, the best thing about email and SMS marketing is that it’s a relatively low cost marketing activity which still has one of the best conversion rates, meaning you can see great rewards without little cash expenditure.
Social Media
Social Media is a great tool in terms of getting your message out there, not only from your own marketing activities but also customers inside your venues sharing content on their own feeds.
The main way in which it can do so is through people uploading pictures of themselves at your location and tagging you in it – few things can outweigh the power of word of mouth referral, and peers of your guests will want to get involved in the action if it looks like a positive experience!
So how can you encourage people to share their experiences on social media? Well, having prompts and sharing tools around your venue, like our customer Rush, will help as it encourages people to take pics and get them on their social channel. Having your social media channel listed throughout your venue will also help encourage people to tag you in it and follow you.
You’ll also want to consider the channels your audience are most active on – for example we know TikTok is massively popular with Gen Z, so consider how you can utilise this channel to your advantage. At the time of writing, the hashtag #TrampolinePark has 277M views, representing an incredibly huge reach for your brand.
Finally, you can also use social media’s paid advertising features allowing you to build specific audiences to target, making sure your brand is in front of the people most likely to be future, or repeat, customers.
You may also want to consider targeting parents, who will likely be the ones paying for the activities and taking their children to your venues, which could provide a great ROI.
The importance of a strong brand
A successful brand can have a huge impact on your business and how it’s perceived by your target audience. Because of the breadth of how a brand affects your business, the impact it has is wide reaching:
Recognition – You want your brand to be instantly recognisable, from how your logo looks, messaging, design elements and everything else branding encompasses. Potential customers know what they can expect from your brand because of this recognition of what you offer.
Trust – A professional and well executed brand should inspire trust in your customers, that they’ll be receiving quality on both the product and service from your business.
New Customers – Effective branding means you’ll have loyal customers, an end goal of all businesses, right? If you execute your branding well, you’ll even find these brand loyalists will be happy to recommend you to their friends and peers. And for all the great marketing in the world, few things are more impactful than word of mouth referral.
Makes Your Brand Aspirational – Think of the Mickey Mouse ears, it’s recognised globally as a sign of fun and the joy of youth – having a brand synonymous with the emotions you want to convey in your audience can be a huge separator between you and your competitors.
Buyers’ Self Concept – Every customer has a certain image of themselves in their minds. When they buy something, they would like the brands to go with their self-concept of themselves – for example, shoe and clothing brand Vans see huge success in the teenage market as their brand appeals to the ‘break the rules’ ethos we see hugely popular in younger demographics. Think about how your brand can represent your customers.
Hopefully this article has given you a few ideas on what you can focus on from a marketing perspective to grow your business in your region – get in touch with us via our form at the bottom of the page to find out how BookNow Software can support and carry out marketing tasks for your business.
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