The Highest Impact and Lowest Input Marketing System For Your Entertainment Centre 🚀

It’s hard to keep an entertainment venue like yours running and when it comes down to it, your priority is delivering experiences. Naturally, this means less time and money for marketing. For smart venues this makes marketing efficiency king, which is code for quick and cheap. But marketing outcomes aren’t equal. Smart venues know marketing’s most important function is generating sales. So if you want your marketing to be smart, you need a system that’s quick, cheap, and drives a ton of revenue. That’s precisely what I’ve got for you today.

But before I spill the secrets, you need to know who this is for and what you stand to gain. There are three types of people that need to read this… And chances are you’re one of them: 1. You know your venue should be marketing more, but don’t know where to start. 2. You’re already marketing but you’re fed up with throwing organic social posts into the void. 3. You’re looking to trim your marketing costs and focus on the essentials. If one of these hits the mark, keep reading.

This system will make you money in two ways: By attracting new customers and increasing their lifetime value. For smaller operators, this can mean big annual sales increases. For larger sites, the percentages are smaller, but the returns are consistent and powerful. Keep reading to find out how.

The strategies are split into two easy-to-implement parts. The first utilises influencers and we call it the ‘giveaway method’. It’s a simple way of getting £1,000s worth of social media exposure for free. As the name suggests, you give influencers free tickets and they create and share content with their audience. There’s no additional fee required and it’ll take you as little as a few hours per week. But don’t be fooled, there’s an art to finding the right influencers. Inside Attracto, we use three different methods (Don’t worry, we’ll be sharing in a future blog).

Now, you might be reading this thinking… 'This isn’t setting my world on fire. In fact, we semi-regularly allow influencers to visit already'. But for this to work, it needs big boy scale. We’re talking about going all in and booking 5 influencers per week. If you’re not at that level yet, you don’t know how well this can work. Still not convinced? Keep reading.

I’m going to peel back the curtains and share something with you. Recently, we helped with an Escape Room operator launch a new London location. It’s an ultra-competitive market and they were struggling to gain traction. They hit everything hard… Google & Meta Ads, Print, Socials, Email, everything in their arsenal. But it wasn’t clicking. Until they made more bookings in a day than the rest of the week combined… Interesting.

So we looked back at everything that had happened that day. An influencer posted and it went viral. Netting 250K+ views and a ton of engagement in less than 24 hours. You’d have to be negligent to not try and recreate it, so that’s what we did. Next time they went viral, the same thing happened. Everything else was slow and plodding, but this was dynamite. It’s a strategy that the venue still uses today. If you’re still not buying it, let’s push things a little further.

I want you to go and check your Facebook, Instagram or TikTok engagement for last month. If you’re lazy, your best guess is fine. Your average well-performing venue will be getting between 20-30K organic reach and roughly 500 engagements per platform of their choice. Compare your figures to these:

If you really want to drive the knife in… tally up how much time and money your social activity costs you. Now compare that to the potential 3-6 hours per week it takes to run a solid influencer programme. Who wins? Remember quick, cheap, and drives a ton of revenue.

So the first part of this system gets new people through the door, but the second is all about maximising their value once they’re in. If you’re a fan of Alex Hormozi, you’ll know this is the key to winning at business. The more money you make per customer, the bigger your per customer advertising budget. You’ll also have more resources to reinvest into your venue. Creating powerful positive feedback loops are the name of the game and they’ll propel you all the way to the bank, crushing your competitors as you go. You want that, right?

Before I tell you precisely how it works, I need to tell you about a problem. A problem that’s so widespread in the entertainment centre world, it affects the biggest and the smallest venues. I’ve met hundreds of venue owners and managers and they all say the same thing: “my business isn’t like other businesses.” And in some respects, they’re right. Entertainment centres aren’t traditional brick-and-mortar operations, but they’re not e-commerce either. So we all end up ignoring what works in other industries. But make no mistake, just comparing yourself to other venues can be a death sentence. Because you’re not just competing with Bob’s bowling down the road. You’re competing for spare time. Which means you’re on Netflix, Disney, and Lego’s hit lists. Now, nobody likes someone who doesn’t drink their own medicine, so the second part of this system is ripped directly from e-commerce marketing best practice. If you nail this, you’ll leave your competition in the dust.

Part 2 is an email strategy. But we’re not talking about blasting any old c**p to a customer list that may or may not have subscribed. No, we’re talking about automated emails. Powerful chains of communication that guests receive at key points in their customer journey. Automated email chains can be used to increase your average order value, recurring visit rate, and customer lifetime value. The best part is, once you’ve set it up, the system runs 24/7 on autopilot. That means you make money whilst you sleep.

If you’re an automated email virgin, we’d recommend starting with a welcome series. The flow begins when the customer first books and wraps up 100 days later. Before they arrive, you want to create a connection and hit them with your best café items or upsell opportunities. After their visit, get your gardening gloves on and begin planting seeds. Invite them to host a corporate event or a birthday party. Offer them flash discounts, plug your memberships, or educate them about the benefits of your experience. You know your business and customers best. Use that knowledge. If you’re stuck for ideas, don’t worry. We’ll be releasing our ‘Master Automated Flows For Your Attraction Playbook’ soon!

You’ve made it this far and all we can say is, we don’t know… yet. Yes, that’s a bit of a letdown, but we’re still conducting our own tests. The flows take 100 days to complete and the metrics we’re improving move slowly. But we’re already seeing a 0.5% MoM revenue increase from a single re-engagement email. It might not sound like much, but this system is all about accumulating micro gains. We’re aiming for our automated email system to add 10% revenue MoM. Let’s break down one of the ways that could happen.

Imagine your venue gets 1,000 visitors a month who spend an average of £100 per visit. Of these 1,000 visitors, 10% will revisit within 100 days. Now imagine that you’ve created a highly optimised automated flow that increases the number of people who revisit within 100 days to 15%. That’s an extra 5% revenue, or £5,000 per month. The best part? You can do the same for birthday parties, corporate events, and other high-value products. But you don’t have to stop here.

Whilst you can set and forget this system, its real potential can only be realised by frequent optimisation and A/B testing. Once a week, just test something. It can be as simple as changing an email’s subject line or as comprehensive as a new email timeline. We’d also recommend implementing an ‘omni-channel approach’, which is jargon for don’t just use email. You can include SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook messages too. At Attracto, we really believe that this is the next phase of venue marketing evolution and we don’t think anyone has really nailed it yet. But once they do, it’s easy revenue, every week, forever. Remember quick, cheap, and drives a ton of revenue. Will you be the first?

So, you implement all of this, where does that leave you? You’ll have a stream of enthusiastic influencers pouring into your venue, creating exciting content and recommending you to their audience. You’ll be getting a ton of social media engagement much more efficiently than posting and ads. Once the customers are in, you’ll have a 24/7 system that helps customers make the most of your experience. It runs on autopilot and if you want, you never have to look at it again. Bob’s bowling down the road has a lifetime customer value of £46, whilst yours is £61.

Things are good and you can sit back and relax if you want. But I know you’re better than that. You want bigger, better, and more. Sign up to our mailing list below and we’ll deliver the highest quality entertainment centre blogs directly to your inbox. It could be the difference between mediocrity and a record-breaking year.