Category Archives: Marketing

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

What Your Millennial Customers Expect of You

The Millennial generation is driving change across all industries, including nightlife. Defined as the ages of 18 through 35 – the prime ages to be targeting for the nightlife industry – they value experiences over physical goods, and will prioritize their money accordingly. In today’s nightlife climate, engaging your guests in new, exciting ways is the key to building a strong business.

The old ways of doing business with long lines, slow bar service, and apathetic staff is no longer acceptable. This generation is going to go elsewhere to get the experience they want, and we’re no longer talking about just another venue down the street; you’re now competing with sporting events, the theater, movies, Netflix, and even vacations. After all, one Millennial interviewed in The Guardian stated “A night out now costs almost as much as a weekend away…and a weekend away looks better on Instagram.”

So don’t just open your doors and pray that people walk through – think about the best possible experience you can give your guests. Create themes for your night. Be a part of bigger event opportunities. Think about ways to host interactive events. Transform your space using more design elements. This is what creates those experiences this generation craves. People are more likely to go out when a unique experience is offered, and they’re more likely to continue when that experience is personalized. Challenge yourself, get creative, and have fun with the opportunities.

Here’s how you can provide personal experiences to your guests to attract and maintain their loyalty to your venue.

1. Capture Guest Information

A survey conducted by Accenture discovered that 85% of their participants are willing to provide their information to trusted retailers in exchange for targeted, personalized information. Use this to your advantage. Your customers are not only willing to give their information to you, but they’re conditioned to do so. This is especially true when pre-purchasing items online. Use guest list, ticketing, or reservation forms on your site so your guests not only begin to buy in advance (note: more guaranteed revenue), but also so that you can collect their information. You can also capture this information during your night at your door using a digital system. That way, you’re able to collect data on every type of customer that walks in your venue. And when you connect this to your point of sale system, you’re able to unearth even more valuable information. This means you have a database of all your guests, including their name, contact info, how many times they’ve been to your venue, whether they’re a VIP/guest list/event/general admission customer, how much money they’ve spent, and what their most popular drink purchases are.

2. Send Personal Marketing

With your database, you now have a complete buyer persona for all your target customer segments, including demographic, geographic, and psychographic information. This means you have the opportunity to get personal with your marketing. You can send a specific message catered to a specific group of people, such as sending a birthday text message to anyone celebrating a birthday this week and inviting them to celebrate with you. Or you can target customers who have attended a certain event in the past, and send them an exclusive invitation to an upcoming similar event before tickets are released to the public. Making your customers feel like you know what’s happening in their life, or like you understand their interests, is what makes your messages personal and powerful. They’ll feel like insiders and will naturally establish a deeper connecting with your venue. This also helps to make sure the time and money you’re spending on your marketing is spent wisely and giving you a return on investment.

3. Make Their Night Special

Your personalization shouldn’t stop at marketing. You can keep this experience going when they get to your venue as well. When you use a system, you take the guesswork out and are able to understand your customers at a deeper level. Say goodbye to paper guestlists, and start providing personalized service at your door. Use license scanning technology to capture information from every guest that walks through your door. If you see a customer is a regular guest list customer who comes to your venue every week, upsell them to a VIP table and provide a complimentary bottle of champagne as a thank you. Or, offer them a round of drinks on the house at the bar. This costs you very little, but means a lot to them. It’s a simple gesture that’s perceived by the guest as a premium, highly personalized level of service. It shows that person how much they are valued and entices them to stay longer, spend more, bring more friends, and com back more often. This is how you organically build loyalty.

4. Humanize Your Data

All of the above is made more possible when you have your data at your disposal. I know, the word data makes most people cringe – that’s why it’s all about humanizing that data. You don’t want to spend your time combing through spreadsheets of data points that don’t make a ton of sense, just to try to connect the dots yourself. Instead, use a system built specifically for the nightlife industry that handles event management, tickets, reservations, guest lists, and general admission while being backed by easy-to-understand data and analytics.

When all of that is in the same system, you get comprehensive results to truly understand and grow your business. You get insight on how your venue is performing, what your trends are, what your best marketing channels are, and in-depth details about your guests at a click of a button. Do you see something that’s working well with your guests? Keep doing it. See something that’s not? Can it. Want to send a personalized message to anyone with a birthday this week? Do it.

Treating guests like the individuals they are and catering your experience to their needs isn’t hard. All it takes is a system that captures all your information in one place, your staff to use that system so it automatically pulls necessary information on the guests walking through your door, and your ability to execute on providing that exclusive experience. It’s the little things that make the biggest difference to your guests and brings the biggest dollar to you.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

Create a Pricing Strategy to Get More from Your Guests

Your customers are the most important part of your business. Without your customers, you don’t have a business. But simply having customers in your door isn’t enough to take your venue to the next level. You need to understand your guests in order to have the highest profit potential each and every night. That’s why it’s important for you to understand your pricing strategy and how it relates to your customer’s purchasing habits.

Here are three areas to focus on to optimize your revenue per guest.

1. Know your inventory

This is the most obvious of the three — pricing your inventory. Take a step back and identify all the areas of your venue you can possible charge. Drinks and food for sure, but what about cover charge, tickets, drink packages, and tables? In all of these areas, 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:

  • Market research. What are the industry trends? 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.
  • Target market. What is your target market’s potential entertainment spend? This means you have to know your audience, and I mean truly know your audience including their demographic, geographic, and psychographic information. This helps you understand what your target audience is looking for and what they’re willing to pay for a venue like yours. If you price yourself too high, you’ll scare your customers away; but too low, and they might see you as cheap. Read this article to learn more about how to understand your audience at a deeper level.
  • Profitability. Always remember the formula r-e=p. That’s revenue – expenses = profitability. Understand your margins relative to pricing. If you’re cutting too far into your margins, look to see if you can stand to increase your prices. Are there other activities you can do to increase your profit potential, such as accepting credit cards at the door to appeal to more guests, using a system to streamline operations and cut down on vendor costs, switching to a different distributor, or even investing an entirely new entertainment concept? Explore your options; sometimes you have to spend money to make even more.


2. Treat guests like individuals

This is becoming increasingly more important with millennials dictating the scene, and is a huge opportunity for every venue. Nearly every nightclub and bar has an estimate of how many guests walked through their door on a given night. What they don’t know is who walked through their door. They get people in, serve them, and let them walk away without knowing anything about them — a reason stated by millennials of why they don’t frequent nightclubs as much.

But if you use a digital system to handle every aspect of your door, you’re able to collect data on every type of customer that walks in your venue. And when you connect this to your point of sale system, you’re able to unearth even more valuable information. This means you have a database of all your guests, including their name, contact info, how many times they’ve been to your venue, whether they’re a VIP/guest list/event/general admission customer, how much money they’ve spent, and what their most popular drink purchases are.

Now think about that. With this information at your disposal at the palm of your hand, you get to treat every guest like an individual. Everyone loves to be recognized. Everyone. And people naturally spend more when they feel appreciated and recognized. Here are a couple examples to do this well:

  • A customer is a regular guest list customer. They come to your venue and you see in their profile they’ve visited your venue every week for the past month. Upsell that customer to a VIP table and provide a complimentary bottle of champagne as a thank you. This simple gesture is perceived by the guest as a premium, highly personalized level of service. It shows him how much he is valued, and entices him to stay longer, spend more, bring more of his friends, and come back more often. This is how you organically build loyalty.
  • You’re hosting an event. You’ve hosted events in the past and used your digital system to build your database. You segment your customer list into a group of people who attended a similar event in the past that spent more than $200 at your bar. Send that group an exclusive invitation to your event before you release it to the rest of the public. They’ll feel like insiders and will naturally establish a deeper connection with your venue. You can also give your biggest spender a complimentary ticket to the event because you’ll know you’ll make even more in bar sales with him.

Treating guests like the individuals they are and catering your experience to their needs isn’t hard. All it takes is a system that captures all your information in one place, your staff to use that system so it automatically pulls necessary information on the guests walking through your door, and your ability to execute on providing that exclusive experience. It’s the little things that make the biggest difference to your guests.


3. Use a pricing strategy for events

This last area to focus on is automated and allows you to make incremental revenue without doing any additional work. For the win. While this is primarily focused on events, you can use this same strategy for an average night by treating every night like an event.

Let’s say you have tickets to sell to your upcoming event. Use an automated pricing strategy to earn more revenue as demand increases. For example, you can have early bird tickets available a month before the event at $50, which changes to advanced tickets two weeks before the event for $60, which changes to general admission the week before the event at $70, which changes to door ticket for $80 the night of the event. You can also set your pricing strategy to increase by inventory instead of time, meaning the first 50 tickets are $50, the next 50 are $60, and so on. This incentivizes guests to buy early and also brings more revenue to you for those that don’t.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

Marketing, Talent, or Timing: What’s to Blame?

Your event is coming up, but ticket sales aren’t going according to plan. How do you know if it’s due to a lack of marketing, bad timing, or the wrong talent? That’s the million dollar question for marketers and event organizers alike. While there’s no one-size-fits-all formula to determine the root cause, there are ways for you to understand your event performance as well as set yourself up for success regardless of timing or talent.

1. Provide Consistent Experiences

This is an ongoing task for your venue, regardless of an event you’re putting on.

Showing consistent positive experiences is going to allow you to have more creative reign to experiment with your events. When you’re consistent, people have a level of confidence that your venue is the place to be. It’s the place to have a good time, to see great music or talent, and it’s worth the risk of coming out to a new artist. When you don’t have that historic level of great experiences, then you have to make sure the talent you’re bringing in is worth people’s time and money. Make sure you’re providing great experiences every night of the week you’re open — from online to in person. That’ll set you up for success more than anything else. After all, people value experiences more than anything else.

2. Understand What Your Audience Wants

As always, you need to know your audience and what type of people you’re trying to attract. Typically with events, your results are going to depend more on the artist or talent than anything else. This means you need to understand what your primary audience wants in an artist, who it is they are most likely willing to pay to hear, and how much they’re willing to pay to attend. The more you know about your audience, the more likely you are to get your event right. As with experiences, you should be collecting information on your guest every night of the week you’re open so you truly understand your target demographic. This will help you for an event as well as your everyday business.

3. Invest in Marketing

Marketing is the one aspect of events that you can control, and it should also be seen as an investment rather than an expense. The best thing you can do for yourself is be able to look back and know that you did all you could to make your event a success through marketing, and to understand which marketing efforts did and didn’t work. The best marketing efforts have both an online and offline presence, and a clear stagey with goals in place. Your venue should be a walking billboard for your event. You should have a clear sign outside your venue so people know where to go. You should also update your social media profiles. to be centered around this event. Have a yielding strategy in place starting with early bird prices and growing so the price of tickets increase as demand increases. Your goal is to get people in your venue — if you have bad door sales, then you can assume you’ll also have a bad bar night. Not every event is going to be a smashing hit. When his happens, know who your influencers are and provide them a number of comps to hand out. While this may hurt ticket sales, it won’t hurt bar sales and it will still help to bolster your experience for future nights.

4. Monitor Metrics and Compare Results

The only way to know how your event or venue is performing is to track your metrics. There are systems built specifically for the nightlife industry that handles event management, tickets, reservations, and general admission while being backed by easy-to-understand data and analytics. And when everything is in the same system, you’re able to compare past results to see how your current event is trending. You can also set up tracking links for all your marketing efforts to know what brought in your traffic — both to your ticketing site and to your physical event. These results will inform you of what you should and shouldn’t be spending your tied money on. And when you can compare results to a previous event, you’ll get insight into whether it was bad timing, the wrong artist, or a lack of marketing efforts that caused your event to not do well. That’s the true power of data. When you have absolute clarity around your efforts, you can do even more to increase your success. Without data, you’re simply just guessing.


Get started with Vēmos today so you have the tools you need to host profitable events.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

Using Social to Promote Your Event

You have an event coming up. Your talent is booked, your event landing page is created, and you have tickets set up. Now, you need to get those tickets sold and get customers through your door. That’s where marketing and advertising comes in.

I oftentimes see venues and events blindly posting information with no true strategy. They’re handing out flyers,vaguely posting messages, and doing promotions to one mass audience without any tracking measures in place. And it’s not surprising. In the past, marketing and advertising was a one way street of communication, with businesses blasting messages and hoping someone hears it. It was nearly impossible to track results, and didn’t foster interaction with customers. But that doesn’t have to be the case anymore.

Today, you’re able to interact with your guests and have a two-way street of communication on social channels. You’re also able to track nearly every marketing effort to understand what’s bringing in the most guests and the biggest spenders. Not only does this allow for more engagement and more conversion, but it also allows you to easily see your ROI of your marketing efforts.

Social channels are one of the highest sources of conversion for most events. That’s because you’re able to target your audience on the channels they spend the most time on. You’re also able to boost content to expand your target audience reach, all at a fraction of traditional marketing channels and with the advantage of tracking its results. Here’s how to use social to get an even bigger return on your next event.

1. Update Profile Content

It’s imperative to have an online presence that matches the style of your offline presence. 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. On Facebook, add an events section on your profile page that gives full information about your event. When people click on either “Interested” or “Going” buttons on your event page, that shows in their newsfeed and organically reaches their audience, driving up awareness and social reassurance. You should also 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.

2. Leverage Organic Tactics

Customers now make purchasing decisions on multiple platforms — including social — and they expect you to be there. Make sure you’re contributing to the discussion with regular organic posts about your event, and don’t forget to use trackable links so you know which posts are working. Tease that you have an announcement before you release the event details. Regularly provide content and updates surrounding the events. Do contests or ticket giveaways to build engagement and interaction. If you’re posting on Facebook and you have your Facebook event page set up, direct your posts to your Facebook event page so your audience continues to engage with you on your channel. And always remember to reply to your audience when they have questions or comments — that’s what social is all about after all, and it helps you to build your momentum. Nurturing your community and having conversations within your posts is just as important as getting your post out there in the first place.

3. Invest in Your Marketing

Paid social marketing can be a lucrative investment for your event. It’s what allows you to reach a broader audience than your current fan base, and with today’s tools, you’re able to make sure you target your ad specifically to the target personas that make sense for your event. And with many social channels, like Facebook, your audience is able to share your sponsored content with their followers, resulting in organic engagement off your paid sponsored post. And it’s always a win when your organic engagement is higher than your paid engagement. This level of reach is what builds prosperity with your audience. People look for social reassurance to see if their friends are going to the same events. That’s what builds your engagement and what leads to conversions. Again, make sure you’re tracking your paid efforts with your affiliate links, and always monitor your campaign results in your ads manager platform. This will allow you to understand your level of investment in your marketing efforts. It’s no longer about budgeting for paid social ads; it’s about getting an even bigger return with conversions.

4. Continue Using Social During the Event

Your engagement on social media shouldn’t be over once the day of the event hits. This is an even bigger opportunity to get your attendees involved have them broadcast your event to their followers. This helps with your future brand awareness and with getting more people tuned in to the events that you’re doing. Have someone on staff live streaming your events. Invite your attendees to do the same or to post with an event hashtag. Use Snapchat to engage with your audience. Better yet, invest in Snapchat filters and stickers that are custom to your event for your attendees to use on their snaps. It’s these little things that keep your promotions going, and keep people engaged even after your event.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

Re-Engage Your Customers

How many customers do you have that attended your venue once or twice, but haven’t returned? Or how about customers that attended often in the past, but don’t frequent as much? Chances are you have a lot of these customers, whether you’re aware of it or not. Not everyone is going to be a regular guest, but there are ways for you to engage even your most sporadic guests so they come back more often.

Here’s how to know when it’s time to re-engage, and what do do about it.

1. Understand Their Habits

To be able to re-engage someone, you first need to understand how they engaged with you the begin with. Were they at your venue for an event? Did they book a table reservation to celebrate something? Were they on the guest list or a general admission guest? The best is if you can identify when they came in, what type of guest they were, and what was happening at your venue that night. You don’t have to be a savvy analyst to find this information. It’s just a matter of collecting and tracking that data so you can always reference back at it. And moving away from pen and paper and on to a system that helps you automate this is going to be your biggest asset.

2. Suggest Like-Minded Opportunities

Now that you know their past habits, you’re able to suggest similar ways for them to engage. Maybe they came to an event to see a certain artist, and you have a similar artist booked in the near future. Send them an exclusive invitation to the event before tickets are released to the mass public. This offers a sense of personalization and exclusiveness that’ll catch their attention while offering something you know they’ll likely be interested in. You can use this strategy for reservation guests and general admission guests as well. The trick is to not make the message seem like the same old night that’s always promoted, but instead framed to cater to their past experiences.

3. Make Personal Up-Sales

Another option is to offer a premium service to a guest that has become disengaged. Make this offer personal, and connect the dots as to why they’re receiving this message. Maybe they attended as a general admission guest 5 times throughout a couple months, and you noticed they spent over $100 at the bar each time. Send them a personal message offering a VIP table with a bottle of comped champagne, thanking them for being a great customer. Or maybe a guest attended several events in the past but hasn’t attended one in a while. You could offer that person their first round of drinks for the next event they attend. Again, it’s important to make these up-sells unique to their habits, and to understand the the cost of throwing in an incentive is worthwhile to get a valuable customer back in your door.

4. Provide the Experience

Lastly, it’s important to provide on the experience that you offered. You’re reaching out to disengaged customers to get them back in your venue, the last thing you need is for something to go wrong and for them to have a bad experience. That will just ensure they will likely never come back. If you up-sell a guest on a VIP table with a complimentary bottle of champagne, make sure your staff knows this customer is coming in so they can be greeted at the door and are served their bottle upon being seated. Going above and beyond with service after getting them come back will build loyalty stronger than before and allow you to keep them engaged for future nights.


Start tracking your guest habits and get access to insights to help you re-engage your customers and increase your revenue. Get set up now.

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