Online Marketing Tips for Nightlife and Entertainment Professionals

Are you attending the Nightclub & Bar Convention and Trade Show in Vegas on March 8-10?

I would love to meet up with anyone attending, exchange ideas and contacts.

I will be blogging from the show anything that can be useful to nightlife professionals under the realm of online marketing or graphic design.

Reach me at alex@thecreativecomplex.com or at my Twitter:  @nightlifemr

It boggles my mind how nightclubs are still sending so many one-off emails about upcoming events.  Moreover, it kills me to see how the ones that are sending newsletter style emails are still not producing them effectively. It’s not rocket science. But I still come across clients that are missing the basics.

Here are some tips to get you started — or to help you quickly review your existing e-mail newsletter and confirm that you’re still in line with best practices to make it successful.

It’s All About the Reader, Not You

If Twitter is all about answering that seemingly simplest of questions, “What are you doing now?” then the newest location-based services are all about answering the more intriguing question, “What are you doing next?” The new location-based check-in services encourage people to share what they like, dislike, and generally think others might find interesting about the place they’re at right now in the context of the decision they’re about to make. As a nightlife marketer, these new check-in services, powered by social Web technology, are worth taking the time to understand.

One step that gets overlooked in most Nightlife social media strategies is how companies go about thanking their audience and customers. Your customers and audiences play a significant role in whether your online marketing strategy will succeed, especially if it focuses around social media. Saying “thank you” is now just as important as understanding where and how to communicate with them.

Don’t Say Thank You With Your Own Products or Services

Unless you give your customers a key to your venue, saying “thank you” with your own “stuff” comes off as self serving and a bit tacky. This amounts to silently saying, “I’m too lazy to get you a gift that you’d appreciate.”

Hip-Hop is hardly subculture when it’s in every country, in hundreds of different languages and you’ve got companies like General Motors sponsoring the BET music awards. It’s everywhere from the inner cities and Suburbs of America to South Africa, Russia,Poland, Japan…You name it, it’s there.

Great graphic designers have taken note of this and you can see it all over marketing pieces. A picture is worth a thousand words. The proverb has been passed around for generations. But what the proverb fails to note is that the presentation of the picture sets the tone of those words, which can mean the difference between effectively delivering a message and saying nothing at all. When producing a hip hop flyer, you’re presenting to a hip hop subculture, so you have to get your message across and simultaneously establish an urban image.

Nightlife professionals, as you prepare for 2010, there’s one thing you can count on: your job in online marketing won’t get any easier compared to last year or the year before that.

Why?

The proliferation of consumer devices, technology advances such as real-time search, and the popularity of social networks all bring new complexity to marketing strategies.

That means you need to figure out how to connect with consumers who are playing FarmVille and Mafia Wars, friending and unfriending each other, shooting and posting video and photos, tweeting, and more.

Social Search, Social Sharing, and SEO

In case you’ve missed the past couple of posts about design, we’ve been having a little excitement by introducing fresh collections of “Inspirational Flyer Designs”.  Chances are you could use some places to get inspiration for those days when the creative juices aren’t aligned and your thoughts aren’t clicking like they should.  We’ve compiled a list to get your mind ticking.

Note:  This list is compiled by using some variables like Design appeal, great interface, graphical enhancement, unique concept, brilliant personalities and styles etc.  If you think your designs deserve a spot on our top 20, send us a link to your portfolio.

There is good news of sorts on the economic front. If you believe Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, the recession is likely over and the nation’s economy is on the road to recovery. But for the Nightclubs and Lounges (that survived) who have had to weather the economic storm with diminished resources, the outlook isn’t so rosy yet.  Cash-strapped Nightclub owners are still scrambling to do more with less, including promoting.

Since the debut of NightlifeMarketingResource.com in February, we’ve talked about ways to successfully use your website to generate buzz about your nightlife venue online. As the year draws to a close, @NightlifeMR gives you an early holiday present: 12 ways to jump start your 2010 venue’s marketing plan before the New Year.

Over the last months, we’ve analyzed numerous Nightclub Web designs, observing emerging trends and weighing the merits of numerous design decisions and coding solutions. In this post, we present the Top 10 Nightclub Websites for 2009.

What makes a “Top Nightclub Website”?  Great question!

Our list shows exemplary websites that are pursuing “best practices” in website design & Internet communications.  They are judged on their developments, new design elements and new graphic approaches.

We, as nightlife professionals engaging this online revolution, have far more options than ever before to execute creative geo-targeted online media plans. Keeping up with the latest offerings in local can be overwhelming.

Considerations for Local Online Media Planning

Building a robust local media plan can be more challenging to source, can take more time, and requires considerable strategic thinking. When developing a geo-targeted media plan, consider these several important factors: 

• How long do you have to deliver the campaign? (Since geo-targeting narrows the reach, the shorter the campaign duration, the more likely you’ll have to plan to buy more diverse placements in order to reach the goal in time.)