Category Archives: News

NCB Show 16 Recap

Last week marked the 31st Nightclub & Bar Convention and Trade Show, and it did not disappoint. With thousands of nightclub and bar professionals, the show was packed with interactive workshops, informative breakout sessions, invaluable super sessions and keynotes, and networking events/industry parties.

Our marketing director, Whitney Johnson, hosted one of those informative breakout sessions, titled “5 Marketing Tools to Boost ROI.” The session drew a full crowd and focused on teaching attendees the importance of marketing strategy and how to use marketing tools to reach the right audience.

In case you missed it, here are a few of the highlights of her session.

Part 1: Why We’re Having this Conversation

  • The legacy of marketing is in the 4 P’s: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. It was all about understanding and building a product, putting a price to that product, finding a place to market it and then, in turn, promoting the awareness of its existence. But as time evolved, so did the 4 P’s, especially “Place.”
  • The evolution is a result of the tech revolution – the biggest marketing shift that happened in our lifetime. Technology came in and disrupted everything we knew about business, including how we communicate, how we work, who we work with, and how we interact with customers. It’s changed end users and customers expectations of companies, and it forced businesses of all kinds reevaluate how they work. Consumers have been quick to adopt, and they have high demands and high expectations of businesses. However, businesses — including nightclubs and bars — haven’t been quick to adopt and aren’t meeting their demands. And if you’re not continuously keeping up with your customers, you’re vulnerable.
  • Don’t get phased out by your customers. Learn how to become digital and appease their demands. With today’s technological advancements, you get to have two-way conversations with your audience, and you get to provide them an optimized experience at your venue. It’s no longer a one-way communication street — it’s now all about providing meaningful messages and experiences in channels where they already are.


Part 2: Marketing Keys to Success

There’s a marketing foundation that needs to be established before any marketing can begin. Without this foundation, you’re throwing noodles at a wall and hoping something sticks. And then when it does stick, you’re not really sure what you did to get it to stick in the first place, so it’s hard to repeat.

Instead, follow these 5 steps to set up your foundation:

  • Step 1: Know your audience. Your audience is the number one component of your venue. Without customers, you don’t have a business. You need to get down to the nitty gritty t truly know who your customers are, including their demographic, geographic, and psychographic information. Read more about knowing your audience here.
  • Step 2: Define your objectives and goals. Your objectives are what you’re seeking to accomplish; what you want as a result of your marketing. Typically marketing objectives align with overall business objectives. Goals are a bit different than objectives because they are the end result of what you’re doing. With goals, remember that they always need to have a quantifiable number by a designated time.
  • Step 3: Be consistent. On average, it takes 7 touch points for a buyer to make purchase decision. You should use multiple channels to hit customers in meaningful ways, but the only effective way to do this is by being consistent in your messaging and branding. This is what allows you to be impactful and connect with your audience on an emotional level.
  • Step 4: Provide the experience you’re promising. Theses what your customers are really seeking, and this is what you led them to believe. If your messaging and branding is all about luxury, then you better deliver luxury when they get to your doors. Make sure everything is aligned — that your strategy is in place, your objectives are defined, your brand is consistently presented, and your messaging is promising a realistic experience.
  • Step 5: Measure. Did you hit your goals and objectives? What worked and what didn’t work? Repeat the things that did, and table the ones that didn’t. There are going to be things that didn’t work, and that’s ok. Failure is a part of any business initiative. Give yourself some room in your marketing budget and efforts to experiment and fail, and allow yourself to pivot quickly.


Part 3: Putting it Together with Tools

Tool 1: CRM System/Segmentation

  • A CRM system is your biggest marketing asset. Use one to collect information on all of your guests, whether they’re VIPs, guestlist, general admission, or ticket buyers. Every person who walks through your door should be accounted for. There’re your customer after all, and you should be able to reach back out to them. The best way to do that is by getting their info in your CRM system so you can reach back out to them later.
  • If you use a guest list at your venue, put a form on your website where people can add themselves. Same thing for VIP tables and tickets. Get people to add themselves or purchase tickets ahead of time. Consumers are conditioned to fill out forms and provide information for online transactions. If you have promoters, have them enter information from a mobile app so it syncs to your database. This allows them to turn into a mobile box office.

Tool 2: Email/Text Message Marketing

  • When you have your database in your CRM system, you’re able to use that list to do segmentation. This means rather than doing a mass marketing approach with one message for everyone, your’e able to do micro-marketing, or marketing for the individual. Email and text messages are the best way to send direct one-on-one messaging. Use different campaigns for different messages for different audiences — this allows your messages to be 100% relevant to the people you’re targeting.

Tool 3: Social Media

  • Build your social media presence on the channels that make the most sense to your business. Then, use the advertising tools within each social channel to target your audience. You can either upload your segmented lists from your CRM system, or you can create new segmented lists within the ad manager platform. Segmentation and targeted messages are your keys to success with social media. Couple this with a powerful image and a strong call to action, and you’re on your way to seeing a strong marketing ROI.

Tool 4: Live Streaming

  • Live streaming became a big deal last year, and it’s only going to get more advanced and useful as it continues – especially in the entertainment industry. Show you customers what’s going on at your venue in real-time. Use Periscope to live stream on Twitter. Use Live Stream on Facebook to show real-time videos of your venue. After all, Facebook noted that since its introduced Live Stream that people tune into live videos three times longer than non-live videos.

Tool 5: Affiliate Links

  • Affiliate links are a specific URL that contains the affiliate’s ID or username. This is what allows you to track which of your marketing efforts are truly working for you. You can also use affiliate links to track your staff and promoter results. Vēmos automates the affiliate link processes, so that you can track within your dashboard which marketing channels and which staff members are bringing in not only the mosts guests, but the best guests. This in turn allows you to understand how your venue is performing and what effort are actually working for you.



Contact Vēmos today to see how we can help you with these tools to boost your own ROI.

View the slides:
NCB Show 2016 – 5 Marketing Tools to Boost ROI from Whitney Johnson


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

Join us at NCB 2016

In less than a week, thousands of professionals will come together at the Nightclub & Bar Convention and Tradeshow in Las Vegas to learn from the best leaders and innovators in the industry. We at Vēmos are proud to not only be an attendee, but also a leader and innovator at this year’s show.

Last year, our director of marketing, Whitney Johnson, spoke at the tradeshow on Promoting Without Discounting. Her session garnered positive feedback and a desire to learn more. This year, she’s been asked to be a featured speaker as well as an expert in the new Learning Center on the tradeshow floor.

Her speaking session will discuss 5 Marketing Tools to Boost ROI and will be held Monday, March 7 at 3:00 pm, and her expertise will be provided in the Learning Center on Tuesday, March 8 at 2:30 pm.

The convention and tradeshow will be chock full of events, networking, and, of course, partying. Join us at our sessions during the convention, and connect with us over the many scheduled happenings. We’ll also be meeting up with folks for one-on-one meetings — reach out if you want to be one!

We’re excited for next week. See you all there!


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

Promoting Without Discounting Presentation

Our marketing director, Whitney Larson, hosted a seminar titled “Promoting Without Discounting” last month during the 2015 Nightclub & Bar Convention & Tradeshow. The session drew a full crowd and focused on teaching attendees the difference between promotions and discounts and how to focus on four key traits in the process:

1. Brand marketing
2. Pricing Structure
3. Inventory Control
4. Brand perception

Nightclub & Bar wrote a great recap article about this presentation, showcasing the importance of this topic in our industry.


“What Whitney wanted the audience to take away from her seminar was that there’s a difference between promotions and discounts. To understand this, nightclub operators must recognize the importance of brand marketing, pricing structure, inventory control and brand perception. She broke down each in expert fashion. When marketing your brand, for instance, you need to know what experience you want to deliver to your guests, present a venue that fits within that desired experience and understand that special events should be presented as a bonus to promotions rather than the whole promotion.


In terms of pricing structure, ask yourself the following questions: What are my guests willing to pay for my atmosphere? What are they willing to pay for my products? Answer those questions and avoid pricing yourself too low or too high. It turns out that pricing structure is rather simple to understand. Do market research, figure out your target market and figure out how to reach that market and be profitable. Once you’ve got your pricing structure under control, inventory control is next. Designate a decision maker who will decide what inventory will be marketed and who will control it, understand that reservations should be viewed as inventory and consider using a table reservation management system, and control your usage of free inventory as free items can make you and your brand look cheap in the eyes of guests.”


Read the full recap about this presentation on the Nightclub & Bar website, and get access to the presentation slides on SlideShare.

Vēmos Launches Smartphone Apps For Android And IOS

After our recent rollout of updated capabilities on the back-end web system, we have now released an app for iOS and Android devices. We know club owners, managers, promoters and servers are on-the-go, and a laptop isn’t always the most convenient. We took the most used functions from our system and put it in the palm of your hand.

Key features for iOS

All Apple devices, including the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad Mini and iPad, comprise of the following capabilities:

  • Reservation management. Users can create, edit, search for, confirm, and seat reservations no matter where they came from. The app and the web version are in sync with one another, so when a reservation is updated either on the web or on the app, it immediately shows up on both platforms.
  • Customer relationship management. Our in-depth client profile system made its way into the palm version. Each profile features reservation history, past liquors purchased, guests associated with reservations, and spend per date. There’s also the capability to add critical notes associated with a client. Again, the web and mobile versions are in sync to show updates as they come.
  • Point of sale. Manage bottle service orders and transactions right at the VIP table. This feature allows users to add bottles, food, or packages to a reservation and process credit card payments either through our mobile card reader or manually entering the information. Our system also has the capability to split bills based on a percent or a dollar amount.


Key features for Android

The following functionalities are available for all Android devices 3.0 and up, with more features to be released in the near future:

  • Reservation management, with the same functionalities described above.
  • Customer relationship management, which gives an in-depth look at a customer’s past experience at your club, his or her spend-to-date and any notes associated with that customer.
  • The apps are available as a free download in the iTunes App Store and Google Play store. Access to log into the app and use its functionality is reserved for BookBottles customers. Contact us at info@vemos.io for more information or to become a part of Vēmos.



Whitney Larson is the president at Vēmos. Contact her at whitney.larson@vemos.io

Vēmos Lands Global Partnership With Apple

Vēmos (formerly BookBottles) already simplifies VIP reservation management and point-of-sale for top nightclubs, so our next action was to simplify the process of getting access to high-quality devices. That’s why we hooked up with Apple.


The partnership with Apple enables each company to do what they do best: Vēmos to focus on its software and Apple to focus on its hardware. Each club who is a part of Vēmos will now have full support from Apple on all of its devices as well as support from the BookBottles team on its product. Here’s a deeper look at how clubs can benefit from this partnership:

1. Device Packages

Apple has put together packages for Vēmos’ clients, which gives nightclubs access to a bulk order of its products, including iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, and iPad Mini, at a discounted rate. Nightclubs also have the option to lease Apple products to always have the latest and greatest products at their club. These packages include insurance; the price of the package is determined by the quantity of devices needed.

2. Apple Support

Vēmos has an Apple support team assigned to its account that understands the full functionality of BookBottles. This team is available to any nightclub that chooses to use Apple products in their club through Vēmos, and is in charge of assisting with any issues related to the devices. The club can either call Apple support or go to any Apple store to get the help they need. They simply need to say they are a part of the BookBottles network and an Apple team member will be there to assist in any way they can.

3. In-Store Training

Apple will be hosting in-store training at its major store locations around the world for any Vēmos nightclub looking to get hands-on knowledge of each device. The Apple support team will educate customers on each device, explain which device is best for which job function within the club, and how BookBottles functions on each device. Apple arranges the day and time of these trainings. Vēmos will inform customers when a training session is available in their area.


Have more questions? Contact us at info@vemos.io for more information about this partnership.


Whitney Larson is the president at Veēmos. Contact her at whitney.larson@vemos.io.