How to Regain Control of Your Venue Marketing

 Having promoters do your marketing for you is an excellent way to drive footfall and ticket sales to your events but if your venue’s events are often run by promoters, it’s easy to feel like you’re losing control of your venue’s marketing.

If you run an in-house night or want to support your promoters by doing some venue marketing yourself and discover you lack the tools to manage your own promotions, it might be time to regain some control of your venue marketing. The good news is that the majority of your customers are more likely to associate with your venue as well as the promoter’s brand.

Here are some ideas for how to regain control of your venue’s marketing without harming your relationships with your promoters.

Set Some Guidelines for Your Promoters’ Promotions

Even a few simple requests of your promoters could go a long way in helping you raise awareness of your venue – and not just the promoter’s night. Suggest your promoters include your venue website, share email addresses of people who buy tickets or follow your venue on Facebook or Twitter.

Start Building an Email Database

The easiest way to create a loyal fan base for your venue that responds to your marketing is to build an up-to-date email database. While your promoter might have thousands of contacts to whom they can send email flyers before shows, if you haven’t been doing much marketing yourself, you may find your email database is out of date or has only a few relevant contacts.

Post Your Own Event Listings

If you are relying on promoters alone to add your upcoming events to listing sites, you may be missing out on some major brand awareness.

Check out this screenshot of a promoter-posted event listing on Facebook. In the entire description there’s not a single mention of the venue, and only a small line about the location on the poster.

If you create your own event listings, you can take content from the promoter but also include a blurb about how great your venue is, include a link to the venue website or encourage readers to sign up for your mailing list.

Take and Post Event Photos

A great way to get customers to return to your venue website or Facebook page is to take photos at your events and post them online. Make sure to put flyers around the venue to let guests know that photos will be available after the event.

Run a Text-In Mobile Campaign

Leverage the technology people have on hand at your event to get them to give you their email address – namely their mobile phone! Put up fliers at the bar for a text-in campaign where if someone texts into a certain number, they will get a code for discount drinks or food. This will allow you to collect customer’s mobile numbers and send them venue updates in the future.

Talk to Your Customers

Spend some time with customers during the event – whether you’re having a quick chat at the coat check or greeting people as they arrive. Find out how often they come to your venue, how they heard about the event, and what sort of communications and offers they might like to receive from you as the venue owner. Once you’ve got some ideas from actual event attendees of what they’d like to hear, it’ll be much easier to reach out to them via email, mobile messaging or social media.

Although it may be easier to allow promoters to manage all of the marketing for events at your venue (the hint’s in the name after all!), your venue will be fuller and your events more successful if you and your promoters can jointly market upcoming events. Regain control of your venue marketing to support your promoters, improve your events and increase footfall to your venue.