How to plan a reopening campaign
If you are wondering how to plan a reopening marketing campaign for your leisure business once the lockdown is lifted, you came to the right place. As thousands of businesses like escape rooms, bowling alleys, sport facilities and immersive theaters are set to reopen soon all at once you have to stand out with a stellar reopening campaign.
How to stand out from the crowd?
To reboot your leisure business as quickly as possible you just have to use this simple formula:
Find a marketing message that resonates with your audience
Create an irresistible promotional offer using discounts and merchandise
Use your business intel to personalise your marketing
Schedule and deliver your campaign
Don’t be afraid to change if something isn’t working
Sounds easy? Well it is this easy, but there are hundreds of tiny details that you will have to work out. This blog and my toolkit specifically designed for reopening campaigns is here to help you.
The marketing message
The key to creating a marketing message that resonates with your audience is to focus on what they want and not what you want. You clearly want bookings and you will get them. Promise.
Focus on what they want, not on what you want.
“Focus on what they want, not what you want.”
But you have to focus on your audience’s needs. If you are in the leisure industry, you are basically in the happy memories business regardless of what you do exactly. Let me explain. Whether you own an escape room, an immersive theater, a bowling alley or any other leisure facility, people come to you for entertainment and to spend valuable time with loved ones.
Your message has to focus on this aspect and highlight how you will help them create a shared and happy memory with their loved ones. A memory that is worth creating and more importantly worth sharing.
The Promotional Offer
Creating a message that resonates with your audience is one thing but you also have to have a promotional offer that sweetens the deal for your audience.
Sweeten the deal with a discount and memorabilia.
A discount is a great start but you should attach a memorabilia to the booking that is worth keeping. Like a photo frame, or a group photo turned into a fridge magnet. This will do two things for your campaign:
Your customers will keep this and hopefully display it, reminding them of their visit and your brand for years to come.
People love sharing their happy moments on social media and a physical “evidence” of their visit will be a great photo opportunity for them.
Make sure you work out the financial drawbacks of your promotional deal. How much does the discount eat away your revenue expectations and how much does a free merchandise set back your income.
Personalise Your Marketing
The more personalised your marketing communications, the better. Inserting their names in your newsletters is just the very basics.
Use your business intel to personalise the marketing.
You should segment your audience based on the group type, whether it’s a family group, a friends group or a work group. You can even create sub segments, like families with young kids, multigenerational families, etc.
Look at your past booking data and try to filter out as many useful information as possible. Here are a few suggestions of what to look for and how to use them.
Loyal customers
Filter out the people who visited you several times. You can create an exclusive offer for those whom you consider loyal customers based on amount or frequency of their visits.
Type of email address
Separate generic email endings from corporates. Simply filter your data for generic emails like gmail and yahoo, the rest could be all your corporate bookings.
Products tried
Segment your audience based on which products they’ve tried before and target them with marketing messages that offers the one they haven’t tried.
Only your imagination is the limit to how you use your past booking data to personalise your marketing campaign.
Schedule and delivery
Make sure that you have detailed schedule of what is supposed to happen when. Plan strategically when you send out newsletters, when you post on socials, when one promotion ends and the next one starts.
Create a detailed schedule that helps you stay on top of things.
To stay on top of everything, you should also have a detailed content plan about what is supposed to go where. There are several subpages on your website and you should use them to their full extent, don’t just post the same thing everywhere.
If you have a page dedicated to corporate bookings, they should have their own promotional offer and so should your friends and family visitors.
Don’t be afraid to change
There is only so much planning you can do ahead of time, so don’t be afraid to change the campaign as you go.
If something is not working, than amend course and don’t do more of that. If something is working exceptionally well, like an early birds offer that you’ve only planned to run for 2 days, then you should consider extending that offer.
Great campaigns are adjusted based on how they are received by their target audiences. Change is part of the game.
Take out wondering how from your campaign planning and focus on the doing. Grab the toolkit I’ve created with an 1+ video guides and templates.
Reopening Campaign Plan & Toolkit
