With more than 4 billion people using social media worldwide, there’s never been a better time to engage with customers through social platforms. The benefits are obvious – increased exposure, brand awareness, access to direct customer feedback and an opportunity to get to know your customers. But with social media conversions at only 0.7% compared to email’s 5.3%, is it worth your precious time?
How can social media benefit your venue?
Social media helps personify a brand. It offers a human interface where customers and prospects can interact with customer service in a way that no other traditional marketing platform can. It also gives venues the chance to showcase ideals and values while getting to know their customers on a much more personal level.
According to HootSuite, social media users have jumped by more than 13% since this time last year. Almost 57% of the world’s population now has access to social media. These users represent a huge opportunity for marketers to target based on their online behaviour and preferences.
Social media advertising is cost-effective too. Organic reach costs nothing, yet the networks are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with a potentially unlimited reach. According to WebFX, direct mail setup costs can range from $50 to $7200, depending on your criteria, and that’s before you’ve factored in the cost of media and running multiple campaigns. Social media and all other forms of digital marketing cost significantly less money and provide longer-lasting results too.
Social media in 2021 is a highly complex place full of analytics, statistics, trends and behaviours, all of which are valuable to marketers. From optimal times of engagement to likes, reactions, demographics, click through rates and referral traffic, it’s all tracked and used to increase the effectiveness of digital campaigns.
So how can you use social platforms to promote your venue?
Here are 6 ways social media can work for you:
1. To nurture leads
Social media makes it easy to engage and interact with your audience, establishing a 2-way relationship between your venue and customers. This builds trust, and trust can produce conversions. But which social media platform is best? According to HubSpot’s 2021 State of Marketing report, Facebook is the social media channel that offers marketers the highest ROI.
And what sort of content should you be sharing?
In 2021, it’s still all about the video. Yes, product-related social media videos go hand-in-hand with increasing conversion rates. According to Animoto, 93% of brands have reported acquiring new customers through social media videos. Additionally, one in four consumers is convinced to purchase after seeing a video on Instagram Stories. And your videos don’t need to be big-budget promotions either. It just needs to be something that catches your customers’ eye and stops them from scrolling.
Video content, blogs and the like can be shared via social media and help establish your venue as an industry thought-leader. Instead of just sharing links to your venue’s event space or booking page, offer your customers content they’ll find valuable to boost your relationship. This inbound marketing approach will generate interest and trust amongst your audience, making them more likely to convert.
2. To offer a personalised experience
Did you know that 99% of users access social media from a mobile device? And around 78% solely access social media via mobile? A customer’s mobile screen and personal social media habits are associated with personal space, even being called an extension of self. This means advertising has never been closer to its audience.
Meanwhile, despite some privacy concerns, customers are increasingly engaged by personalised marketing. Adobe found that 78% like personalised adverts, while Yahoo said that consumers find them more engaging (54%), educational (52%), time-saving (49%) and memorable (45%) than non-targeted adverts.
Personalisation can also relate to customer service, which creates ongoing relationships and improves customer lifetime value. According to disruptiveadvertising.com, 77% of Twitter users appreciate a brand more when their tweet receives a response. This single statistic underlines the importance of social media as a method for engaging with customers on an individual level.
3. To increase brand awareness.
Regularly sharing unique, good quality social media posts can increase brand awareness simply because people interact with your content. Each post that is shared introduces a new network of potential customers. In fact, 93% of marketers claim that social media marketing significantly increases exposure for their business.
4. To drive more traffic to your venue’s website
Social media posts and adverts are an effective way to drive traffic to your venue’s website. When you share quality content such as a video or blog, readers are likely to click through to your website and even share it on their own social media pages.
Open a conversation with your audience. Direct questions at them within your social media posts to encourage a response. Rather than focusing on promotional messages all of the time, adding a ‘social’ element to your posts and offering your audience valuable content can go a long way in encouraging them to visit your website and make a purchase.
Make sure that your website address is visible on all of your social media bios so potential customers can learn more about you with a single click.
And don’t forget – for visitors to convert, your venue website must be fully optimised for mobile and offer an enjoyable customer journey. Integrate your venue website with the Rezcomm Marketplace to boost conversions with a seamless, responsive, brand-matched and fully secure online booking system. With Rezcomm on your side, clicks will quickly become conversions.
What’s more, you’ll have the tools at your fingertips to capture valuable customer data and incrementally increase revenue potential in the long term. Your customers benefit from a smoother booking experience, and you benefit from increased data capture and greater selling opportunities. It’s a win-win.
5. To partner with influencers
Most of you will be familiar with the term ‘influencer’ by now. An influencer is essentially a person who has built a reputation for their knowledge and expertise in a particular field. This person posts regularly about a topic and has a lot of followers and high engagement levels. Audiences look to this person for recommendations – the next big thing. They create trends and encourage their followers to buy the products they promote.
The majority of influencers are celebrities, bloggers, content creators, industry experts and micro-influencers – the latter being particularly important. While celebrities were the ‘original’ influencers, their influence is waning.
Did you know that 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations on social media to inform their purchasing decisions? Bloggers and social media influencers have an authentic and active relationship with their fans, which brands seek to harness. Research by Nielsen, Carat and YouTube found that partnering with an influencer has the potential to offer your brand four times more lift in brand awareness than simply collaborating with a celebrity.
Remember, word of mouth drives between 20% and 50% of purchasing decisions. When people start talking about your products, services or venue on social media, you set yourself up for more sales.
6. To convert
While social media conversion rates are lower than email marketing, they still account for 1 in every 10 online purchases. What’s more, 78% of consumers say that a brand’s social media posts influence their purchase. For these reasons, a massive 97% of Fortune 500 Companies use social media.
Social media ideas for venues
- Engage in storytelling to sell your event space. Remember, you are marketing to event planners. They want to transform that space to fit their needs. By telling the story of different events in your venue, you will help planners visualise their event there.
- Use hashtags to build social media presence. Consider the hashtags your ideal customer uses and include them in your posts. Create a personalised hashtag for your venue and encourage your followers and visitors to include it in their posts. This way, every tagged photo will show up on your profile and make it easier for clients to see the potential of your venue.
- Use social selling tools. Dynamic adverts and social media ecommerce integrations are great for selling products and services directly from your social media pages.
- Start a blog. Blogs are great for providing clients and visitors with inside information about your venue and its offerings. It’s an effective way to show off your venue’s selling points, your brand’s authority and boost your website’s SEO. Event reviews, client or team interviews, and live, behind-the-scenes videos are excellent places to start. The more regularly you post, the better.
Social media marketing requires creativity, thought, time and effort to achieve results. It’s a real case of “you get out what you put in“.
No time to be social? Schedule your social media posts across your networks in just a few clicks. Our Social Media Scheduler is offered as part of the Rezcomm Marketplace and comes with a simple calendar view so you can plan, review and publish your content with ease.
What’s more, our in-house team of talented marketers will work as an extension of your team, helping you create an effective social media strategy for your venue to boost brand awareness, customer engagement and conversions.
Interested in finding out more? Chat to our team about the Rezcomm Marketplace and discover how it can transform your venue’s marketing strategy.
As Director of Communications Sarah oversees project management at Rezcomm and works with clients to deliver their ecommerce projects efficiently, on time and on budget.
