Marketing your nightclub, bar, or event is a critical factor in your success. After all, marketing is what drives awareness of your existence and brings customers through your door. But what’s the best way to attract your customers in this ever-evolving marketing landscape?
Answer: marketing segmentation.
Marketing segmentation is a marketing strategy that divides a broad target market into segments (or subsets) of consumers. The consumers in these segments should have common needs, interests, and priorities that group them together. This then allows you to create messages specific to each segment.
But why is this important?
People don’t like to receive messages that aren’t relevant to them. It makes them feel unimportant, or as if you don’t even know them. Which, to be honest, is likely the case.
When you don’t know who your customers are, you don’t know how to target them. So, you end up doing a mass marketing approach with one message for all customers. Marketing segmentation instead allows you to do micro-marketing, or marketing directly to the individual consumer.
So how do I start with marketing segmentation?
Good question. Follow these steps to start your path of marketing segmentation.
1. Use a CRM system to understand your audience. A CRM system is your biggest marketing asset. Use one to collect information on all of your guests in one central system, whether they’re VIPs, guest list, general admission, or ticket buyers. Every person who walks through your door should be accounted for, which includes their name, email, and phone at the least.
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. This gets people to add themselves or make a purchase ahead of time, which in turn allows you to collect their information in a more casual interaction. If you have promoters, have them enter information from the CRM’s mobile app so it syncs to your database. This allows them to turn into a mobile box office and ensures you’re capturing all the right information.
Remember: people are conditioned to fill out forms and provide information for transactions. Don’t be afraid to ask them for this information. This is what allows you to know your customers on a deeper level, understand where they’re coming from, and decipher what type of a guest they are.
2. Segment your audience using filters. Filtering allows you group like-minded individuals together in a certain segment. Let’s say you want to target individuals who have a birthday this week between the ages of 21-35. Use your filters to get that list. Or perhaps you’re doing a co-promotion with a vodka company, so you want to target individuals who drink vodka and who come to your venue on Friday nights. Use your filters to get that list. Or maybe you want to target people who bought a ticket to a specific event because you have a similar event coming up. Use your filters to get that list.
The best way to filter is with a CRM system that has filtering built within it. This will save you time and will help you understand all your different audience groups. However, you are able to filter you audience even if you don’t have a CRM system with built-in filtering by exporting your CRM database into a CSV file and using your sort functionality.
3. Send messages specific to each segment. Once you have your audience segment identified and filtered, it’s time draft your messaging to them using your channels. You can have as many or as few segments that make sense to you — just make sure that each message is directed toward that segment and not toward all customers in general. And remember, you’re segments are already specific, so don’t be afraid to get specific and personal in your message.
We recommend using email and text messages to reach your audience. Email and texts are the best way to send one-on-one messaging to your customers, and with today’s tools, it’s really easy to create a campaign and address to a specific person with your segment. You’re also able to segment targeted ads on social media. Just make sure you’re using your different campaigns with different messages targeted to your different audiences so that your message is always 100% relevant to the people receiving them.
4. Analyze, measure, and repeat. It’s always important to track your marketing efforts so you know what’s working and what’s not. Did your targeted message persuade those customers to come back? Keep doing it! Did your message fail to result in your desired goal? Fix it. 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 guessing.
Have more questions about marketing segmentation or want to get started? Contact Vēmos to get answers and get up and running with your complete system.
