Interview with Opium Group’s Online Marketing Director, Richard Barrenechea

Opening a night club is an exciting time for club owners and their investors.  Granted, it’s a pain in the butt to do the planning, financing, licenses and passing code inspections.  But as the project begins to come to life, so does the excitement of the “Grand Opening”.

But what about the marketing needed BEFORE the nightclub opens?  Hiring a marketing director, the logo design, the teaser flyers, the website and social media all need to be planned for.  You would agree with me, right?  Having owned a web & graphic design firm that caters to the nightlife, I can’t tell you how many nightclub owners leave these all-important tasks for the last minute, banking on the fact that the club is “new” will be enough to pay the bills.  And in the short-term, it might.

In this article, I’m going to share some pre-opening online marketing you can do to help you get more business in the door and begin to develop your long-term online marketing plan.  I’ve interviewed Richard Barrenenchea, Online Marketing Director for The Opium Group.  Richard has been involved in the opening of 5 of The Opium Group’s latest nightclubs:  Mokai, Louis Lounge and Opium Hard Rock, Cameo and Set Miami.

That’s the title I want to use.  Essentially, I want to highlight things the club needs to do online to set themselves up for a great opening.

NMR:  In your experience opening up nightclubs, what did you do online to build up hype?

Barrenechea:  First and foremost we had a landing page with links to our Facebook, Twitter and to sign up for our Mailing lists. This helped establish us online, especially with the local listings on the search engines. We offered people to sign up for special access to the opening events by signing up to our different networks (Email, Facebook, Twitter) to incentivize the sign up process and get loyal followers. Our emails and social updates were continuous, fun and provoked suspense to the openings to keep our audience captive and enganged.

NMR:  What promo materials did you need set up?

Barrenechea:  We had our landing page and many teaser flyers leading people to the landing page where they can then “join us.”

NMR:  What social network should they focus on?

Barrenechea:  All social networks serve a purpose, Facebook is great for the event factor and the fact that if you have your team behind your posts you can stay on top of everyone’s feed. Twitter is starting to really improve but in the nature of nightlife, most people on Twitter are not the spenders you seek to make money, but they are the influencers you seek to spread the word.

NMR:  Would you recommend having a “video trailer” made for it?

Barrenechea:  Video trailers are cool… but they get lost in translation. It’s something nice to have on your site if you can get it done at an inexpensive rate, but they could be costly for the little return you receive.

NMR:  Can you tell us about your experience opening Mokai?  What lessons did you learn and what would you recommend to our readers?

Barrenechea:  When opening Mokai, we had a very simple landing page that linked to all of our social networks and our email subscription. But we also had the plan of a great website to launch as quickly as possible after the opening to have continuous engagement. It’s important to show progress on your web presence to your audience because they can easily get bored.

Richard Barrenechea can be followed on Twitter @richymiami