Bars and nightclubs require a slightly different marketing approach than other types of businesses. When it comes to marketing and advertising, bars and nightclubs need more of a social approach. Luckily, there are a number of digital marketing approaches you can take to attract more customers to your business.

Email Marketing

Email is a very dependable way to get your message in front of people and build trust with an audience and readers. Email gives you the opportunity to connect with people on a regular basis who have chosen to receive your emails, allowing you to let them know about specials and promotions that might entice them to visit your business again:

• A strong email campaign isn’t complete without an email list. During promotions, contests, etc. take the opportunity to ask your guests for their email addresses.
• Once an email list is gathered, you’ll want to be sure your email content has a purpose and a direct call-to-action. Don’t send out the same email over and over, make each one unique with an exciting purpose.
• Don’t bombard your customer’s inboxes with your emails. Only send emails as frequently as you need to, otherwise they will get lost in the shuffle. Short and concise subject lines lead to more opens than long, busy subject lines

Mobile Marketing

In today’s world, it’s rare to see somebody walking around without a cell phone in their hands. The power it brings not only affects us humans, but also businesses. Mobile phones have allowed this new age of marketing to come to life:

• Text messages have a 98% open rate and are often read within 10 minutes, which makes this digital marketing initiative an extremely effective channel.
• By tactically planning the timing of text message campaigns, bars and nightclubs can reach customers when they are more likely to stop in, resulting in an increase in sales.
• Customer loyalty can be achieved through special offers, discounts, happy hour promotions, event notifications, contests, entertainment announcements, and more.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is made up of different forms of communication, entertainment, marketing and networking, making it particularly beneficial when it comes to promoting your bar or nightclub:

• Social media can do a number of things for your business; improve brand awareness, increase traffic from new customers, grow sales, enhance customer interaction, and give customers the ability to write reviews about their experience.
• Bar-goers are social people, and this method helps you meet your audience where they are most comfortable.

While there are a number of different social media platforms, it’s important to determine which is best for your type of business and where your audience spends most of their time. Using a platform such as Facebook allows you to boost posts to a specific targeted demographic, ensuring you reach only your intended audience. Twitter is an effective marketing tool for bars and nightclubs because tweets get read and shared at an impressive rate and is also used a lot on mobile. And, Snapchat allows you to reach a younger audience of 21 to 24 year olds.

If you would like to talk about more digital marketing ideas for your bar or nightclub, contact us. Our nightlife marketing team can help determine the best efforts for your business.

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Whether you’re the professor or a student at a college, you understand that higher education is constantly facing changes. One of the biggest challenges higher education has to take on is the way it reaches potential students. Through today’s technology and available digital marketing initiatives, there are various ways to reach your target audience. Whether you want to increase lead generation through inquiries, on-campus visits, or applications, there’s a digital marketing strategy to do so.

Paid Search

Paid search will reach prospects who are already searching for educational programs by placing your website at the top of the search engine results page:

• Both display and text ads will retarget previous website visitors with ads that include calls-to-action encouraging them to revisit and reengage with your website.
• If a website visitor has already filled out a contact form on your website, they are already in your system and considered a lead. If this is the case, the remarketing message will vary from the message a first time website visitor will receive.
• To convert the lead, the call-to-action  can be designed to encourage an application submission or a campus visit

Social Media

Social media is especially crucial for lead generation:

• According to a research survey, 30% of incoming high school seniors reported that they researched their prospected colleges on a social media site, with Instagram accounting for 82% of connections to students. Parents were more likely to be reached through Facebook.
• Targeted ads can be customized based on demographic and psychographic data of social media users.
• Ads can promote content that will inform and engage your target audience or they can also be an ad for the school itself or something especially relevant to the school.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most affordable ways to increase your leads:

• An email campaign can be started by encouraging potential students to sign up on your website to receive email updates. A follow up email can then be sent based on their targeted interests.
• Interests can be determined by digging into what students were looking at on your website, such as certain programs, extra-curricular activities, etc. As the leads come in, that will provide you the opportunity to roll out emails encouraging them to submit an application.

Contact us to learn more about college marketing opportunities that are available to help your college or university.

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What is it?

Geofencing sends a message to consumers’ mobile devices after they enter a predefined geographic area, whether it’s around your business, near a related venue, or even at a competitor’s location. When a prospect enters the chosen perimeter, their location-enabled mobile device is tagged, which enables businesses to deliver promotions, ads, coupons, and more to mobile phones. By creating a geographic “fence” around where your customers will be, you ensure you can reach those customers wherever they travel.

How does it work?

LNP Media Group helps you create mobile ads and messages, and then we work with you to identify which geographies should be targeted for best results:

• – You’ll want to target a number of locations to ensure you reach a critical mass of customers.
• – Messages are triggered once prospects enter the fenced areas. The messages appear on a host of popular websites or mobile apps on the user’s mobile phones.

What are the benefits?

You’ll be able to reach on-the-go consumers who are physically near your business, your competitors’ businesses, or any fenced location, even if they don’t live or work near you. Over 81% of Americans now own smartphones, which means you can reach the vast majority of Americans wherever they are:

• – Geofencing allows you to attract new consumers by showing them relevant ads and special offers in the right place at the right time.
• – Geofencing also allows you to weed out less interested consumers and engage the most relevant local shoppers.

Not sure how Geofencing will help your business? Here are a few ideas to try.

• – Geofence customers your own business so that when customers are near your business you can remind them of rewards or send them a special offer.
• – Geofence around your biggest competitor and nearby locations to steal customers and increase your market share.
• – Geofence around event venues. Send sponsor deals and promotions to customers that will be attending events.
• – Geofence real estate. After a potential buyer enters the targeted area, they get a notification of the available listings in the neighborhood.
• – Geofence hotels, airports and train stations to trigger last minute travel deals to users in the designated area.

Contact us and let’s develop a plan that reaches your prospects with the right message, at the right time, in the right place.

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Donating to worthy causes can be as beneficial for the givers as it is for the receivers. Businesses that support non-profits can increase customer loyalty, boost brand awareness, and even garner more sales. With so many reasons to give, this may be the right time to start thinking about how your business can incorporate charitable giving into its marketing strategy.

A survey of small business owners on charitable giving around the holidays found that 66 percent of small businesses planned to give to a local charity.

Businesses like to give, and give to support local causes. So how can your business develop a plan for charitable giving?

Be Passionate About Your Cause

Picking a cause you believe in is important. Consumers are skilled at figuring out which companies are sincere, and which are simply going through the motions. If you care about your cause, your passion will shine through.

Promote Your Efforts

Whether you’re donating goods or services to a local charity, don’t hide your good deeds:

• Send out a press release to local media outlets with information and photos that highlights your involvement.
• Include it in your newsletters.
• Create links on your website.
• Send out emails asking customers to get involved. Feature posts on your social media.
• Use all the media at your disposal to spread the work about the cause you’re supporting, and don’t forget to mention the work you’re doing for that cause.

Partner with a Local Media Outlet

Each year LNP Media Group has a great opportunity to be a part of Extraordinary Give. The Lancaster County Community Foundation sponsors Lancaster County’s largest day of giving:

• LNP produces a special publication for the event, and encourages nonprofits to tell their story.

Involve Customers

Include your customers in the process. Surveys have shown that many consumers would select one product over another if a percentage of proceeds were going towards a charitable cause:

• In 2012, REV Your Cause deployed a survey to over 100,000 consumers across the US. Statistics showed that more than 80 percent of respondents indicated they were more likely to use a service provider that supported a charitable cause over one that didn’t.

Can LNP help your charitable giving marketing? We offer sponsorships to select charitable giving events. Contact us and we can customize a plan that makes sense for both your business and your charity.

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Tis the Season!

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when the holidays are near? Food! Food might even be higher on the “favorites” list than holiday shopping and gift giving. Lots of Lancaster County foodies celebrate the cooler months by whipping out their seasonal recipes and indulging in seasonal foods.

Holiday baking, eating, drinking, and dining are a big part of the season. While appetites are running high, your competition is also ramping up their marketing during the fourth quarter. You’ll need extra marketing power to ensure your business will attract more customers.

Be Social

Let’s be real. Most of your customers, regardless of age, are active on some form of social media:

• Social media has rapidly become an increasingly influential marketing tool. Social media is extra active and festive during the holidays; this is a great time for food businesses to promote themselves.
• Businesses in Lancaster County should be inspiring customers and employees to post seasonal food photos, recipes, and stories. After all, food not only tastes and smells delicious, but looks beautiful too.
• Mouthwatering photos are sure to get consumers in the door. Use the best photography you can afford, and make sure everything you post looks delicious.

Location Marketing

It’s no surprise that we use our mobile phones to do the majority of our searches for local businesses, and it’s especially true when trying to find a place to eat:

• According to industry research, 68% of consumers said they were more likely to dine at a restaurant based on the results of their digital searches.
• People are performing more and more internet searches when choosing a restaurant in hopes of finding a full menu and reviews. Those two things make it a little easier to choose where to eat when you’re surrounded by so many great restaurants in Lancaster County.
• Investing in geofencing is a great mobile marketing strategy to incorporate into your marketing plan. Geofenced ads only appear on users’ phones after they have entered a defined virtual geographic boundary that your digital marketing agency has defined. Since so many people are already on their smartphones searching for somewhere to dine, chances are that extra mobile push might be the decision maker.

Boost SEO

RetailMeNot’s study, “The Evolution of Dining in the Digital Age,” found that consumers are turning to their smartphones to make dining decisions more frequently than ever before. Many diners are also choosing to use their personal devices even while at the table. Using SEO strategies combined with geofencing is a guaranteed way to get you in front of people searching for food solutions at the exact moment they are performing their search.

Event Marketing

Hosting an event that allows customers to try your food or drink is a surefire way to jumpstart business for your Lancaster County restaurant:

• Try sampling events that bring your holiday food and spirits to them in bite size or miniature form. Wow them with trial events, and they’ll be sure to be a customer in the future.
• One of the easiest ways to reach lots of new customers is by participating in Taste! Lancaster, Festival of Food, Wine & Spirits. This fun festival is a showcase of Lancaster, Pennsylvania’s restaurants, food vendors, vineyards, microbreweries, distilleries, retailers and much more. Thousands of prospects attend to find out what’s new and interesting in Lancaster County.

If you would like to talk about more marketing ideas for your food or spirits business, contact us. Our food marketing team will develop a customized plan for your business.

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How to Leverage the Power of your Database

Building databases is a lot of work. Businesses spend years gathering emails from newsletters, customer cards, trade shows, email campaigns, sales calls and more.

• Businesses work hard to build a meaningful list of customers and another list full of prospects. With so much time and expertise invested in databases, smart businesses want to leverage this valuable data.
• The challenge is timing. While it’s tempting to bombard clients and prospects with emails, overexposure may result in opt-outs, spam complaints, or even lost business.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use these databases to reach customers and prospects in ways that fit seamlessly into the ways they already look for information?

Conversely, no matter how much time a business spends building a database, they’re always missing a large percentage of prospects.

• The great news is that today’s technology allows you to exponentially grow your databases in a few simple steps. That means businesses can reach hundreds of other people, exactly like their best customers or prospects, without spending weeks to find them, and at a small fraction of the cost of purchased lists.

Thanks to the powerful tools built by tech giants Google and Facebook, businesses of every size now have access to sophisticated tools that help businesses reach hard-to-find customers and prospects simply by leveraging the power of existing email databases.

Google and Facebook Tools Leverage your Marketing Database

Here’s how it works:

• Google or Facebook have deep data analytics that will match your business’s email database to their billions of users. Once your emails lists are uploaded into Google or Facebook, individual addresses are hashed and anonymized to protect privacy.
• Good and Facebook are usually able to match about 30-60% of emails, so your list is going to be smaller once it’s uploaded. But that’s okay, because LNP Media Group can compensate for those losses by creating “lookalike” prospect lists that look, act, and behave just like your customer or prospect list.

It’s Easy to Create an Online Customer Database

Google’s email database tool is called Customer Match. It allows advertisers to send ads to their own database exclusively, providing super-targeted reach and minimizing waste. Your database is proprietary, so one else can access your database. Facebook calls this feature “Custom Audiences.”

Similar Audiences and Lookalike Audiences Make Audience Expansion Easy

The Google Display Network helps expand upon your list by allowing advertisers to send ads to “Similar Audiences” — audiences that share similar interests, activities and characteristics with your database:

• You’re able to increase your targeted reach from hundreds to millions. Both Google and Facebook allow you to refine your campaign’s reach with geographic qualifiers, ensuring businesses can limit campaigns to their geographic market area, whether that’s Lancaster City, Central PA, or larger.
• Facebook calls these “Lookalike Audiences”.

Build Databases of Website or Webpage Visitors

You can also create custom audiences of website visitors:

• Both Google and Facebook allow advertisers to add a tracking code to websites or webpages. The code tracks activity and builds databases of visitors. You will not be able to identify visitors individually, but you will be able to send Google or Facebook advertising to them.

Combine Website Audiences with Audience Expansion to Get Even More Targeted Reach

Maybe your website is new. Or you haven’t had high visitor numbers in the past. No worries. Google and Facebook both allow you to create “Similar Audiences” or “Lookalike Audiences” based on site traffic. That means you can expand a visitor database of a few hundred into a few hundred thousand.

Databases are Really Expensive Right? Wrong.

When you work with LNP Media Group, we’ll create online databases like the ones described here as a part of your digital marketing plan. In fact, creating databases on Google and Facebook is so inexpensive, it’s easily one of the most affordable ways, in any media or format, to expand targeted reach.

Digital marketing is a simple concept, but not always so simple to execute successfully. To find out which options work best for your audience needs and your budget, contact us today and we’ll create a plan that works for your business.

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