Entertainment Venue Digital Marketing Problems
Please, raise your hand if you’ve ever felt that your Entertainment Venue digital marketing efforts are incorrect.
Typically, when you market your entertainment venue, you’re hit with many marketing channel opportunities; a website, Facebook marketing, email marketing, inbound marketing, Google ads, Facebook Ads and so on.
It’s daunting enough creating and managing all these channels – never mind putting all this activity and data into monthly performance metrics that enable you to understand how this time and resources are impacting your business.
Well, the problem is: you don’t know, what you don’t know. Yet, with the right information and tools at your disposal, you could easily assess whether or not you’re doing some of the worst digital marketing mistakes that hurt your entertainment venue.
Continue reading, and we’ll walk you through the 9 digital marketing mistakes that hurt entertainment venues. When we’re done you’ll know how to diagnose your digital marketing problems.
Ready?
Let’s dive in.
9 Digital Marketing Mistakes You’re doing right now with your entertainment venue
1. Ignoring Local
Local advertising is not a new concept. The Yellow Pages have been around since 1886. What’s new is where you do your local marketing.
Whether you’re looking for locals to come to your entertainment venue or travelers from outside the area, you need to maximize local digital marketing strategies available to drive awareness.
Stats:
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4 in 5 consumers use search engines to find local information
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50% of consumers who conducted a local search was on their smartphone
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4 in 5 consumers want ads customized to their city, zip code or immediate surroundings.
Search engines are pointing their lens on a place or location. Not to mention, mobile search has reduced the about of traffic coming to your website from desktops, and is location/proximity based.
For an entertainment venue to reach it’s ideal buyers, which are commonly location specific, you must make sure you doing several strategies for targeting local.
TAKEAWAY #1
There are many, such as:
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ranking high in local searches by using keywords that use both your company and physical location with an emphasis on local for on-page and local SEO for off-page.
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be listed in relevant industry and geographical directories/listing like chambers of commerce.
2. Optimizing your website for mobile
People expect device specific content with regard to their mobile devices.
Stats:
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“60% of people in the US use smartphones and around 29% use tablets. Most Internet users in the US go online every day.
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This is true across all age ranges, with 66% of Internet users 55 or older coming online every day.”
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(Source: Connected Consumer Survey 2014)
With so many of your website visitors connecting to your website on multiscreen devices, it’s critical to provide a website experience that enables them to find the information they’re searching for and be captured by your company.
TAKEAWAY #2
The time and resources you put into optimizing your website for mobile will increase your opportunities to be found, which is money well spent. You must have a mobile marketing strategy.
News update: In April 2015 Google’s algorithm will see “significant impact” on all mobile searches in all languages worldwide. Google has said that users will find higher quality results. These results will lean more towards mobile-friendly website.
3. Avoiding Social Media
Entertainment venues often have resource limitations; you find yourself trying to maximize the effectiveness and extend the impact of every dollar and hour spent, which has lead many to ignore social media. Yes, you do have a Facebook page, and occasionally update it – but only because you feel you have to. This frivolous approach leads many to improperly measure monthly, quarterly, or annual performance.
Even worse, entertainment venues will follow the obligatory trend and setup social media accounts and pages, then ignore them. This creates a social hub of empty, outdated accounts that offer no value to your business and your ideal buyers.
Stats:
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84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form (Aberdeen)
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80% of U.S. social network users prefer to connect to brands through Facebook
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As of July 2013, Facebook is the most popular social network in the United States. (Nielsen)
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Google+ attracted 20 million users within the first 3 weeks of its launch. (comScore)
You’re missing out on a huge opportunities. increasing the search ranking of your website with relevant social media signals around your brand, message, and media coverage. You can also go above and beyond social media engagement and go into attack mode with targeted Facebook Ads that narrowly focus in on your ideal buyer.
Worried about diving into the social media deep end? Research. See where you competitors are in their digital marketing efforts, and more importantly, where you ideal buyers are.
TAKEAWAY #3
Social is driven by multiple factors: Find the ideal balance between engagement and targeted contextual advertising. Don’t feel you need to be on every social media site. Start with one channel, Facebook. Keep content fresh and consistent, share quality links, and as you settle in, add on channels as need. If you don’t want the hassles and have too much to do, consider hiring experts to drive business value from social media accounts.
4. Not capturing Emails
If you don’t have or are not working to build an email list, you’re making one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your business.
Stats:
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In 2014, email marketing was cited as the most effective digital marketing channel for customer retention in the United States. (eMarketer).
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89% of marketers said email was their primary channel for lead generation. (Forrester Research)
Legitimate email marketing email provides you a one-to-one environment to engage with your audience. While social media is important, it’s busy and crowded.
Another benefit is that email is harder to ignore. With millions of Twitter or Facebook updates, marketing your business with email will should convert better.
TAKEAWAY #4
Setup a simple opt-in form on your website and provide some offer in exchange for a visitor’s email address. Once you have their email, be useful. Make the content of every email and touch point useful, relevant and personal. Test this, but only send emails on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to get the highest open rates.
5. Publishing Duplicate Content on the Company Site
You know that great search engine optimization will have your website ranking well in search results. One of the components is having a high volume of well written and useful informational content that is focused on providing value and a proper usage of keywords.
You may have limiting systems of content creation and worry about content quality or see the content you produce as a disadvantage.
When this happens, typically, businesses take well-written, seo optimized sections of content from others. Duplicating their content. This method is worse than keyword stuffing!
For those of you who duplicate content and/or stuff your content with a bloated amount of keywords, you will be penalized by Google who’s cracked down on unethical SEO practices by removing the guilty website from it’s search results. Like most things that are quick and easy, it often causes more harm than good.
Stat:
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20-30% of the content on the web is duplicate content (Matt Cutts,Google’s head of search spam)
TAKEAWAY #5
Watch a Video from Google’s Matt Cutts,: How does Google handle duplicate content and what negative effects can it have on rankings from an SEO perspective? http://youtu.be/mQZY7EmjbMA
In addition to duplicate content on your website, there is duplicate posting on social media. This is where you share multiple copies of identical content across your social media channels.
This ignores the context of the social media eco-system you’re participating in provides you a lower return on your social media activities.
6. Forgetting to Post New Content
Continuing from the duplicate content mistake, a similar wrong move is not posting any content on a blog or social media. You may find it hard to schedule time to manage all your content channels, or to come up with content to use. However, it’s one of the critical activities you can d to increase search engine rankings for long-tail keywords and driving conversion opportunities from your social media efforts.
Consistent and new content positively impacts your business, and is a marketing driver you cannot afford to ignore.
Stats:
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79% of companies that have a blog report a positive ROI for inbound marketing in 2013. (HubSpot State of Inbound, 2013)
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Businesses with websites of 401-1000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages. (HubSpot Lead Generation Lessons from 4,000 Businesses, 2011)
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B2B companies place a higher value on educational formats like blogging and webinars, whereas consumer businesses are slightly more willing to experiment with advanced digital formats like interactive content and online tools. Infographics were also preferred. (HubSpot State of Inbound, 2014)
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Nearly 40% of US companies use blogs for marketing purposes. (eMarketer, August 2010)
TAKEAWAY #6
Consistently and strategically blog. Don’t let deadlines and other responsibilities get in your way. Blogging is a business growth priority, as is SEO. Bring in your team and coworkers, and if the budget allows for it, an agency who can write for you or help with writing.
7. Assuming that Search engine optimization is a Quick, One-Time Job
SEO, is a long-term marketing initiative. There is more to it than researching keywords and optimizing your website.
These tactics are a typical first step in a SEO campaign, but in order to have an impact on business growth goals; increasing visitors, leads, and buyers, you must follow a continuous SEO strategy and be committed to continuous testing and improvements.
Stats:
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The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page has. (QuickSprout)
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60% of all organic clicks go to the organic top 3 search results. (Business2Community)
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50% of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results, and 61% of those searches result in a purchase. (Search Engine Watch)
Entertainment venues in particular fall into SEO pitfalls by trying to reduce activity and conserve company resources. This will have a short and long-term negative impact on your marketing efforts. When you implement a strong SEO strategy built around your company’s goals, you’ll be able to maximize your return on investment.
TAKEAWAY #7
Think of Search Engine Optimization as monthly recurring campaigns. It’s a continual process of generating content, build credible inbound links to your website, and optimizing the buyer’s experience with your online hub. It may seem like a lot of work for you or your team to keep up with, but having on-going SEO activities will increase the visibility of your brand, your website traffic, and more buyers.
8. Have a “Reviews” Page
With all of the places a potential buyer can discover your Entertainment venue it’s important to display as many buyer testimonials as possible. Great testimonials communicate not only legitimacy, but that other people had a great experience with your brand.
The best way to collect these reviews is in a “Reviews” page on your website. It doesn’t need to be fancy, but it does need your sales copy. You have to sell your Entertainment venue and remind the buyer of the great experience they had with your business.
Stats
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71% of U.S. consumers leverage customer reviews resource more than any other content – Bazaarvoice and Newlio
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88% have been influenced by an online customer service review when making a buying decision – Zendesk
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67% of consumers read 6 reviews or less – Search Engine land
Some of the review sites you should encourage:
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Facebook Reviews
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Google Places
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Yahoo Local
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Trip Advisor
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Merchantcircle
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CitySearch
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YouTube Video Reviews
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LinkedIn Recommendations
Your business must have at least 15 unique reviews, each from the past 12 months, and a composite rating of 3.5 stars or higher
TAKEAWAY #8
Link all your review channels in one “reviews” page on your website, and add a link to that review page in every email. Best practice: acknowledge and respond to reviews left from your customers.
9. Not making use of your analytics
Are you extracting real results from all your digital marketing channels?
If you don’t know, you’re most likely not making use of your analytics. These insights refine and improve your all your marketing efforts.
There is tons of data being creating from digital, which is one of it’s most attractive elements. If you don’t aggregate that data and leverage it to measure performance it’s kind of worthless.
Tracking and using web analytics provides your business with knowledge, that empowers you to turn data into real results.
Stats:
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Three-quarters (75%) of the companies in the survey said they did not know where their most valuable customers were talking about them.
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Nearly one-third (31%) do not measure effectiveness of social media.
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Less than one-quarter (23%) are using social media analytic tools.
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A fraction (7%) of participating companies are able to integrate social media into their marketing activities.
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Source: a report by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services
Keeping track of your ideal buyers activity and lets you see how valuable they are to you and where they are in the buying process.
TAKEAWAY #9
Enable data-driven decision making by using Google Analytics or other web analytics applications like KISSmetrics or HubSpot. Without monitoring and tracking progress of your business growth efforts, you won’t know how large the gap is to reach your goals.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is a new force in Entertainment venues around the world. You are able to reach out and understand your ideal buyers as never before. You must move from “one-off initiatives” to using digital marketing as an integrated tool in your entire marketing and communications strategies.
The Entertainment venues that are most effective in digital marketing are not only running experiments with multiple channels, creating metrics to measure the impact, using tools to understand how to participate correctly in the conversations but also have a long-term digital marketing partner to keep up with all these moving parts and progress on their behalf.
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