Venue Marketing: How To Sell Out Your Location
Venue marketing is no cake walk.
Besides the fact consumers have endless entertainment options across the city, they also now have unlimited choices from the comfort of their home with streaming services.
With the stakes raised, is your venue going to rise to the challenge?
To turn your space into an unbelievable money maker, take our free strategies for advertising your venue.
Be Discovered Or Fail
The key for venues is to get noticed. Be discovered or you have no shot at succeeding.
With attention, you’ll always be booked, you’ll have to increase prices, and you may have to expand your building. You’ll have more money coming in than you know what to do with.
Without attention, you can have the best event venue in the world, but no one will pay for and enjoy the space because they don’t know it exists. Might as well not have a business if it’s not getting discovered.
Wondering where to start? Keep reading.
Our Venue Marketing Strategy
Be it a ski resort, wedding venue, concert grounds, or a sports arena, the best venues have elite marketing strategies that consistently bring in a stream of new customers.
If that doesn’t describe your venue, don’t panic.
This guide is going to show you the best marketing techniques to get your venue highly discovered and booked out for months.
Step 1: Content Marketing
When 84% of people expect the brands they engage with to create content, you have to ask yourself, “Is my business doing this?”
That’s a lot of potential customers you’re not impressing if you don’t regularly publish new content.
So let’s talk about what content is and how you can make sure yours will convert.
Content marketing can be a blog post (like what you’re reading this second), video, podcast, ebook, webinar, and anything that you make to give value to customers. It also helps your business get discovered.
Take this axe throwing venue customer located in the UK. The Hilt publishes blog posts on their website where they give tremendous value to readers.
They write about places to go in York, what axe throwing is, and city guides for visitors looking for the best activities. All of these posts are relevant to people in York and travelers when they search Google.
By posting about the cool places and events in their city, they’re supporting community members and local businesses. This improves the odds people discover their axe throwing venue and book axe throwing sessions.
Your content needs to inspire, entertain, or inform your audience.
Also make sure you include local keywords, like “Tampa wedding venue”, for example, in your blog post title, URL, and paragraphs. Local keywords will tell Google where your business is located. Then you’ll start to rank for searches and get free advertising in search results.
Producing quality content is the first step to getting foot traffic to your event venue.
Over time, you’ll rank first on Google for buyer intent keywords, traffic will flood your site, and your return on SEO will blow your mind.
Step 2: Paid Advertising
This next one can produce immediate results. A second avenue to boost your venue’s discoverability is paid advertising. It’s what our PPC agency uses to produce insanely profitable results.
Running ad campaigns on Google and Facebook can deliver tremendous upside to your venue’s visibility, leads, and sales. (This is especially true when adding Google callout extensions to your campaign.)
If you run wedding venue ads to all newly engaged couples, who do you think they’re going to call up and ask for a tour when choosing their wedding location?
Remember, it all goes back to discoverability. By running a paid ad, and retargeting them so your ads follow them around the internet, your company will be top of mind when they decide.
We have a guides for Google Ads and Facebook (Instagram) Ads to ensure your campaigns are ROI positive.
At Robben Media, we often run ads that make our customers 2-3 times their money spent, which means you have this potential too.
When you experiment to see what online advertising platform works best, you’ll have a leg up on your competitors and they won’t know why.
Step 3: Local Advertising
Online advertising gets all the buzz. But traditional advertising is still extremely effective.
In fact, 80% of consumers prefer to see ads from businesses near them. This makes sense. Wouldn’t you want to see ads from businesses you can actually go to than ones across the country or world?
So, here’s what we prescribe on the traditional marketing front:
- Radio ads on stations that your target customer listens to
- Local newspapers ads
- Consider including a coupon to entice readers to bring the ad in to your event space
- Flyers in coffee shops, retail stores, and other service businesses
- Many will let you hang up advertisements in their store
While this may not produce as many trackable results as the first two objectives, advertising locally will let people in your area know that you’re there and ready to host them.
This discoverability will propel your venue forward. Then monthly revenue begins climbing.
Conclusion
Get your venue in front of as many faces as you can to ensure success. Be seen online, offline, and in your customers’ dreams.
Remember, if you hustle, you don’t have to be, or pay, an executive at a Madison Avenue ad agency to grow your profits.
The formula for venue marketing is as simple as this: Experiment with different advertising strategies. See what works — video ad versus picture ad, for example. Continue what does, and stop what doesn’t. Never give up.
We believe in you and wish your venue all the best!
What type of advertising has been successful for you?
