Category Archives: Marketing

You can have great promotions without knocking dollars off the price of your food and drink items. But what tools are the best to use to get your promotions in front of the right customer? Just because you build it, doesn’t meant they will come. For any marketing efforts, start by knowing your audience, getting a good grip on your brand, outlining a strategy, and set out with goals in mind. From there, use the following tools at your disposal to hit the right people at the right time to drive up your ROI.

1. Digital Presence

In today’s digital landscape, it’s more imperative than ever to have an online presence that matches the style of our offline presence. This means that whatever you publish online should be the same as what you do offline. Create a website that has the same vibe as your venue. Use SEO on this website to generate inbound leads, such as guests filling out your reservation form, guest list form, or purchasing a ticket. Build your social media pages, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, to connect with your guests in their own environment. Create content on relevant blogs, post in group discussions or forums, or even create your own digital content for your guests to read and become more enticed about your promotions. There are endless opportunities in the digital environment. You just have to start by creating your presence and tying it all back to your customers and your brand guidelines.

2. Marketing Segmentation

Chances are you have different audiences for different promotions. Perhaps you want to target your highest spending clientele one night, and ladies who have birthdays coming up for another night. This is both possible when using marketing segmentation tools. When you use a customer relationship management (CRM) system, you’re able to track all guest history, data and trends. This helps you understand your different audience segments and also allows you to play with the data to get the right segment for your message. Sort your customers into the segments that you want, and use that information to send more targeted, personal and relevant messages to individual guests.

3. Social Media Ads

There are billions of monthly active users across social media networks. In fact, on Facebook alone there’s 1.49 billion monthly active users. That’s a lot of people you can capture by sending the right message to the right people. Facebook’s advertising algorithms have changed and improved tenfold since it first came out. Now, you’re able to create various specified targeted segments and save them in your ad manager page for later use. As we discussed in the marketing segmentation section above, you’re able to use these specific segments to target different audiences for different promotions. You can even run multiple promotions at the same time, targeting different audiences, and capturing a return for your different promotions at once.

4. Email/Text Message Marketing

Once you have your audience nailed down as a whole or into segments, you’re able to reach out to them directly to get immediate feedback. The two most popular ways are through email marketing and text message marketing. For email marketing, you can schedule ongoing emails to go out to your whole database, or target a specific audience with a specific message and call to action. Same goes for text messages. The better call to action you have in your message (ex: buy your ticket now with a link to your ticket page), the bigger results you’ll see. And the more targeted you are, the more relevant you message will be to that guest, and the more likely they are to take that call to action.

5. Street Marketing/Grassroots Efforts

It’s easy to get sucked into the sexiness of digital marketing, but there’s still a time and place for traditional marketing. I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time in this area, but supplementing your digital marketing efforts with traditional can help boost your results. Use your promoters to sell tickets or get guests on the guest list or VIP reservation list. The best way to do this is through a mobile system that ties back to your venue management system. Know where your audience is hanging out and get in front of them in a more organic and face-to-face way.


To learn more about how you can use marketing tools to blast your promotions, and to see the above tools in action, attend Whitney Johnson’s session during the 2016 Nightclub & Bar Tradeshow.

There’s less than a month to go until New Year’s Eve. The hype of the holidays is building, and your guests are starting to think about their plans. Are you in them? If you’re not a part of the conversation now, your guests are going to plan their night somewhere else.

Follow these 10 tips to set up your marketing campaign now and accelerate it through to the night of NYE.

1. Define your theme

There’s a lot of competition at NYE — why should someone choose your event over another? You need to make this clear upfront and provide people with the benefits of attending your event. The best way to do this is to create a theme and stick to it. People connect with events that have a focused theme. It’s what aligns customer expectation with customer experience. Define your vision, create the essence you want your customers to experience, and design everything – including your imagery, benefit-driven messaging, and your interior – around these items. Never lose sight of this theme throughout your marketing efforts. This is what drives consistency for the public’s perception of your event and what gets people excited about attending.

2. Set up your event landing page now

You need an event page and you need it to be launched now. This gives you time to market your event and garner visitors to your landing page to start making their plans around your party. Keep in mind that it’s important to have a section of your website or a specific landing page dedicated to your event. Simply having a sentence description on a third-party ticketing company’s website isn’t going to cut it. People want to know the vibe of your party, understand why they should attend, and get a gage at what they can expect by attending — something a page dedicated to your event can provide. Plus, having your own page allows for greater SEO opportunities, allowing guests to find out about your event in search results. Make sure you also include a call-to-action for users to buy tickets. The best solution is for your customers to buy tickets directly on this landing page and not be redirected to another website. Redirects oftentimes leads to cart abandonment.

3. Incentivize guests to purchase tickets early

Encourage people to pre-purchase their tickets by creating supply and demand. Showing them your price will increase as the event gets closer creates demand for the few supply of early bird tickets. You can set your tickets to increase price by the week, day or even hour leading up to your event. You can also set your tickets to increase by quantity after x amount of tickets are sold. This encourages people to buy early and have time to share their plans with others. Plus, when guests pre-buy their tickets, you’re generating revenue before the night of your event.

4. Establish your social channels

It’s imperative to have an online presence that matches the style of your offline presence. Therefore, your social channels should be updated to reflect the theme of your event. Change your profile pictures and cover photos on your social channels to coincide with your event images. Add an events section on your Facebook landing page that gives full information about your NYE event. Integrate your ticketing page into your Facebook fan page for people to buy tickets directly through social. Keeping it all consistent between your website, social channels, and venue will strengthen your presence and increase awareness.

5. Engage through social

After you establish your social channels, it’s time to engage with your guests through them. Customers now make purchasing decisions on multiple platforms — including social — and they expect you to be there. Post your event on your social channels using referral tracking codes to track where your guests are purchasing from. Do contests or ticket giveaways to build engagement and interaction. Run Facebook ads to target a specific segmented audience, encouraging them to buy tickets to your event. The best way to do this is to craft different benefit-driven advertising copy for your different audience segments, then use Facebook to target these different audiences with your specified content. This personalized content becomes relatable and will drive more sales than one mass message.

6. Make it easy for guests to share

Speaking of social, make it easy for your guests to share your event and their ticket purchases on their own social channels. Include share links on your event page and make those links even more apparent after they buy their ticket. The majority of people attend NYE events based on where their friends are going. Allowing your guests to share your event in one click turns them into promoters and builds your organic word of mouth promotions, without you having to do any extra work.

7. Set your promoters up for success

Your promoters are a big part of your marketing efforts. Make sure they understand the theme of your event and know how to talk to it. Then, turn them into a mobile box office. It’s best to use a ticketing company that has a mobile app so you can do this. The mobile application will allow your promoters to sell tickets directly through their device through both cash and credit purchases. Consumers get a digital ticket, and that buying information is synced with the rest of your ticket purchases. This makes your promoters even more powerful, and drives more customers through your door.

8. Leverage partnerships

Chances are you have relationships with third-party outlets, such as your booked entertainment, sponsors, key social influencers, and media outlets. Tap into these relationships and leverage a partnership with them so they’ll promote on your behalf. Not only does this increase the amount of messaging that goes out, but it also exposes you to a new audience you may have otherwise not reached. Plus, the validity from these types of partners enhances your event’s credibility.

9. Strategize your lines the night-of

Create a different line for a different type of customer, such as a line for your pre-sale customer and a line for customers paying at the door. This is another way to encourage pre-sale and allows your staff handling pre-sale checkin to only focus on that task and increase line speed. On the other hand, it allows your staff selling tickets at the door to only handle that task, aiding in long waits for door sales. The more organized your lines are, the faster your speed of night will be, the happier your customers will be, and the faster they’re through your door to spend money on drinks.

10. Track and measure your efforts

You’ll never know how successful your marketing efforts are if you don’t track and measure results. Use referral tracking codes to track all of your marketing efforts mentioned above, including your event page, organic social posts, paid social posts, guest social posts, promoters, and third-party partners. Use a unique referral code for each promoter and partner to truly track your efforts. You’ll be able to track where guests are purchasing tickets and what marketing efforts are driving the biggest results. This sets you up for success for next year to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.


Whitney Larson is the president and director of marketing at Vēmos. Contact her at whitney.larson@vemos.io or fill out the form below.

The most common types of promotions in this industry are happy hours, two-for-one drinks, or free bottle for booking a VIP table. The common denominator in all of these options is discounting drinks. Discounts and promotions aren’t the same, and it’s possible for you to run promotions without giving up your profit margin.

When you boil it down to basics, a promotion is simply the act of 1) raising customer awareness of a product or brand, 2) generating sales, and 3) creating brand loyalty. To do this, you’ll need to focus on 4 areas, as discussed below. But first, you must abide by the number one step of marketing: identifying your audience.

Know Your Audience

Before you an start any type of marketing, you first need to know who your audience is. Customers are the number one component of a successful venue. Without customers, you don’t have a business. Discover who your customers are, what their idea of a good party is, the music they like to hear, the alcohol they like to drink, and the experience they expect. This information dictates your entire marketing strategy, including your promotions.

Once you’ve solidified your target audience, it’s time to get the pieces in place to set up your promotions. To be successful, you must understand the importance of brand marketing, pricing structure, inventory control, and brand perception.

Brand Marketing

The first part of promotions is brand marketing. Brand is king. This is something most venues don’t consider, but is one of the most important parts of setting up your business. People connect with venues that have a focused style, and that style is your brand image. It’s what aligns customer expectation with customer experience. Your brand needs to represent your club’s reputation through your attributes, values, purpose, strengths and passions. It should clearly differentiate you from the venue down the street or even across the country. Define your vision, create the essence you want your customers to experience, and design everything – from your logo, to interior, to your messaging – around these items. From there, your featured drinks, events and other promotions should aligns with this brand image. Never lose site of your brand, and always work to strengthen it online and inside your doors. This is what drives consistency for your public perception and what gets people to connect with you on an emotional level.

There are three critical components to brand marketing:

1. The experience. Promote and provide the experience you have for guests. This is what you customers are really seeking.

2. The venue. Ensure your venue supports the experience you are proposing. This includes interior design, layout, DJ, drinks, and service. Your customers expect a certain type of atmosphere based on your branding, and your venue needs to support that.

3. Special events. Events are a bonus to your branding, and shouldn’t be the branding itself. When putting on an event, make sure it aligns with what you’re creating and gives your guests that extra bump in excitement.

Pricing Structure

The second part of promotions is the pricing structure. It’s critical to understand what customers will pay in return for your atmosphere, party, drinks, and food. To do this successfully, focus on these three items:

1. Market research. What are your competitors pricing structures? Is that working for them? Why or why not? learn from this information to help you determine your own pricing structure so you’re not pricing yourself out of the market.

2. Target market. What is your target market’s potential entertainment spend? This goes back to knowing your audience and understanding what they’ll pay for a venue like yours. It also goes back to your brand experience. if you’re a higher-end establishment, your prices will naturally be a bit higher. If your’e the neighborhood bar, then your pricing needs to reflect that. If you price yourself too high, you’ll scare your customers away; but too low, and they might see you as cheap.

3. Profitability. Always remember the formula r-e=p. That’s revenue – expenses = profitability. Understand your margins relative to pricing. The only way to increase your revenue is to either raise your profit potential (by increasing the price of inventory) or decrease your expenses.

Inventory Control

The third part of promotions is inventory control. You need to manage your inventory and reservation process to get a predictable level of what you can promote. There are three steps to do this effectively:

1. Designate a decision maker. There needs to be one or more decision embarks who control what your sales and promotions team are selling. Every item of inventory – from drinks to tables – is up for grabs in terms of promotions. Remember, it’s not just the price that drives your guests in, it’s the overall experience. Bottle service is a part of that experience. The party is a part of that experience. All of that can be sold and can be promoted.

2. Sell. Create the demand for what you’re selling ad price accordingly. For VIP tables or event tickets, guests understand they have to pay more when it’s busy, so capitalize on that when you can. That’s your yielding strategy. Increase price as tables or tickets become more sparse.

3. Control what inventory you give away for free. This is where the “promoting without discounting” comes in. Free equates to a loss. A guests’ likelihood to spend drops more than 50% with every free drink or bottle. To get a good example of this, watch this episode of Bar Rescue.

Brand Perception
The final part of promotions is brand perception. This is the difference between promotions and discounts. Promotion is raising customer awareness of a brand, generating sales, and increasing brand loyalty. Discounting, on the other hands, falls within the price area of the marketing mix. Discounting and promotions are congruent in marketing, but they are not the same.

Let’s go back to free. Free is a four letter word, and that’s it. That’s all it should be to you. The last thing you want to do is promote anything for free. Customers equate the word free with cheap and never expect to pay full price. Do you really want them to think of your brand that way? Instead of giving away free inventory, create packages that entice your target market to increase the perceived value. Also, make sure your promotions make sense to your target demographic. If something is too obscure or makes little sense in comparison to what your brand is known for, it simply won’t work.

Next comes the fun part: putting it all to work. If you know your audience to a tee, you’ll be able to better identify which marketing channels are the best to reach them. It’s best to use multiple channels to spread the word and target your audience directly with messages that tie into your overall brand image. After all, brand consistency is a critical part to making your promotions work for itself.

Whitney Larson is the president and director of marketing at Vēmos. Contact her at whitney.larson@vemos.io or fill out the form below.