Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category

What is marketing?

By Nigel Rawlins | Friday 10:51am 04/06/2010 | No comments

What is marketing?
Marketing is the only business of a club or pub. It’s all about attracting customers, retaining them and getting them to return. It’s a whole lot more than just advertising. For a club or pub this might be creating a great atmosphere, a friendly place to visit for a drink or feed, great value meals, a choice of entertainment or interesting events to come along to. Who makes the choice? The customer.




Planning a Marketing Strategy for a Club or Pub
All of the following points need to be considered in planning a marketing strategy:

  • Strategic thinking
  • Competitors
  • Opportunities & ideas
  • Pricing your offers
  • Target revenue, budgets & profitability
  • Determining customer needs and wants
  • Making a promise to deliver to your customers
  • Positioning your venue
  • Segmenting customers
  • Targeting & attracting customers
  • Retention & loyalty building
  • Making it happen

Then you’ve got to keep making it happen, over and over again.

What do you think?

cheers
Nigel Rawlins




Posted in Advertising, Clubs & Pubs, Customer needs, Database, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Membership, Planning Ahead, Revenue, Strategic thinking, Strategy
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Money follows success – Club or Pub Revenues

By Nigel Rawlins | Friday 11:37am 21/05/2010 | No comments

Success!Money follows success
Meaning be good at what you do and your customers will reward you. Chase money and it won’t necessarily lead to success. Worth thinking about. Clubs need lots of revenue to cover fixed costs, variable costs and to provide funds for growth along with community dividends. The more successful your club or pub the more members or customers are attracted and greater revenue generated.

Members are your lifeblood
In reading my articles you’ll notice that I firmly believe that members are the lifeblood of every club. For pubs think loyal followers. Members are loyal, they give you their contact details and visit regularly. They bring their friends, they go along to your shows and participate in other activities. They’re interested in your venue and what’s going on. Is it really that hard to figure out what you have to do to be successful? Getting members, getting them into the venue and getting them to keep coming back is your ultimate measure of success.

Two thing to do
That means all you have to do are two things. Keep your members happy and attract new ones. Marketing is where decisions are made about what it takes to keep your members happy and attract new ones, or for the pubs, customers. Your marketing budget is directly tied to your club or pub revenue and must reflect this.

What’s it worth?
How much should you spend on members? To start with you have to do some simple arithmetic. To keep things simple let’s start with 1000 members. How much do your members on average spend in the venue each year? If they spend for an example, $20 per week, that’s about $1000 a year. 1000 members spending $20 per week is a $1 million. What if they spend $40 or $50 more per week? Now imagine lots more members? What if we get them to buy an extra drink, or come along to a new show or special event like Bastille Day, American Independence Day or any other promotion you use to attract members. What happens then?

Grow
Your marketing budget is tied directly to revenue and should be percentage of this based on your margins. Margins for food, entertainment or other activities vary, so you will have to work out a percentage that works for your venue. Meaning your marketing budget may vary. However, you will not grow, attract new members or keep them if you do not pay attention to the things that make you successful. Your marketing spend is to keep reminding them of your club or pub and giving them all the good reasons to keep coming back.

cheers
Nigel Rawlins

Posted in Clubs & Pubs, Costs, Membership, Revenue, Strategy
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What your customer wants, not what you want to sell them…

By Nigel Rawlins | Tuesday 8:44pm 01/12/2009 | No comments
What customers want

What customers want

There are two ways to think about customers. Your way and their way and what this means to your venue.

If your club or pub bistro serves lunch and dinner 7 days a week chances are you are attracting a

Posted in Customer Service, Marketing, Strategy
Tags: ,

Advertising campaigns for clubs and pubs

By Nigel Rawlins | Wednesday 10:56pm 30/09/2009 | No comments

Marketing and marketing strategy is about customers
Marketing serves just one purpose – to target new customers, keep the ones you have and to upsell and cross-sell to them. Mind you, you can’t do this unless the customer wants what you have. First up, it starts with a marketing strategy. That starts with what you want your venue to be known for, the customers you want to target and how you are going to be different to your competitors. A simple strategy might be focused on food and entertainment. The sort of food and entertainment differentiates you from your competitors. Your advertising campaign reinforces this.

Effective advertising campaigns are internal and external advertising
Effective advertising campaigns include internal (in venue) and external advertising to reinforce your difference. External can include press, direct mail to your members, letterbox distribution into your community, radio and possibly TV. This will depends on your timing, budget and target audience. Internal advertising consists of displays, promotional banners, promotional posters, table talkers. A weekly advertisement in the newspaper is not a campaign.

Campaigns need time to work
Campaigns need time to work. The message needs to be clear and focused. It needs to be repeated and seen by a large enough group. It also needs to be reinforced within your venue. It also requires a realistic budget. More in later blog articles.

What do you think?

cheers

Nigel Rawlins
13th Beach Marketing



Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Strategy

customer obsessed companies

By Nigel Rawlins | Thursday 9:57am 23/07/2009 | No comments

Seth Godin,

Posted in Marketing, Planning Ahead, Revenue, Strategy

How much to spend on advertising

By Nigel Rawlins | Monday 9:58pm 15/06/2009 | No comments

Advertising is an important part of your marketing strategy. I will cover strategy another time, but it would be the rare club that didn’t want to get new customers or keep the ones they have.

Right now, it is a lot easier to gain market share, if you have the money to spend. If not, the club or pub with the money stands a good chance of gaining market share and keeping it when things pick up.

To figure out how much to spend on your marketing and advertising, look at your turnover.

Specifically:

1. Total revenue
2. The cost of providing what you offer, food, service, recreation activities etc,
3. The cost of selling- to bring people in, promotions etc
4. The cost of administering your venue – insurances, accounting, administration etc
5. Profit/Loss

The numbers involved are found in your profit and loss statement. If you are providing food, entertainment or leisure activities, there are costs involved. Each activity you provide will have costs with variable margins (money left after costs are covered.) Surplus funds (profit) are used to fund administrative activities and other expenses, for example, capital costs are funded out of profit.

There is a direct correlation between what you spend on selling and revenue. The more effective your advertising spend the more revenue it should bring in. Some say spend 5% of revenue, others 25%. But it will all depend on margins and how you control costs. It may be as low as 1-2% depending on the industry.

The venues I work with advertise regularly, most often with direct mail campaigns with attractive offers. They also look to run monthly in-house promotions, giving customers an excuse to visit their venues. The result of their advertising is observable through revenue growth and that’s the biggest reason they keep doing it.

What do you think?

Feel free to call me on 1300 761 780 or email me at nigel@13thbeachclubsandpubs.com

cheers

Nigel Rawlins,
13th Beach Marketing Services Pty Ltd


Posted in Advertising, Clubs & Pubs, Costs, Marketing, Revenue, Strategy

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