EDUCATION SERIES
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue Bob Graham
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Table of Contents
Fixing Your Sales Funnel
03
Optimize your sales funnel, identify the easy wins to get more bookings, fast.
Online Marketing That Works
12
Learn the most effective online marketing strategies used by the busiest venues.
Modern Sales Best Practices
19
The internet has changed everything, including the way customers buy.
An Unfair Technology Advantage Are you using technology to the fullest in order to give your venue an unfair advantage?
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23
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Chapter 1
Fixing Your Sales Funnel
www.eventtemple.com
Bob Graham
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 1
Fixing Your Sales Funnel By Bob Graham
If your goal is to increase bookings at your venue, and therefore drive higher sales and revenue, the easiest way to do that is by optimizing your sales funnel.
Your sales funnel involves both sales and marketing. This is because you must turn strangers into website visitors, visitors into leads, leads into customers and customers into promoters.
You can think of your sales funnel as the entire process your customer has to go through from the moment they first find you online until the moment they book with your venue for their special event.
Essentially this can be broken down into 4 steps: 1) Attract 2) Convert 3) Close 4) Deliver At each of these 4 stages, there is money to be made.
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How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 1 - Fixing Your Sales Funnel The easiest way to increase your sales is to look for low hanging fruit in your sales funnel. You can generally find these opportunities much easier once you identify a critical metric for each step of your process. The first step is to attract strangers. The most common ways to do this is through ranking in search engines, online advertising (such as directories or PPC) or offline advertising (such as trade shows). In our research, we found that the most effective way for venues to attract more inquiries is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which we will discuss more in Chapter 2. However, knowing that SEO is a key driver of business for any venue is a fantastic first step, because know that you know that, we can easily find out if there is any low hanging fruit in your online marketing strategy. www.eventtemple.com
SEO is all about being at the top of google when someone searches for your keyword. Most venues make a critical mistake here and think that they have to rank for terms like: -Houston Event Venues -Houston Wedding Venue -Houston Meeting Venue etc. This is a big mistake. While those terms may be useful in driving traffic, there are probably a lot of other keywords with much less competition that can bring in just as much traffic, if not more. This is called "Keyword Analysis" and can be done with tools like www.ahrefs.com Through keyword analysis you can speed up your SEO efforts by finding keywords with lots of traffic and not much competition and work on showing up for those words first. This means more traffic, much faster.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 1 - Fixing Your Sales Funnel There are many online guides to doing keyword analysis with Ahrefs or similar tools, but the goal here is to keep in mind 2 simple things: 1) Find out the keywords that have a lot of traffic and low competition using Ahrefs or a similar tool. 2) Find keywords that your IDEAL customers might be searching for (you learn this by talking to them and asking them what they googled when searching for a venue.)
The second part of your sales funnel is a bit trickier to get setup, but it's worth it's weight in gold. Your website essentially has only one purpose and that purpose is: Get your visitors email address. It's so important that we want to say it again. The goal of your website is to ****GET YOUR VISITORS EMAIL ADDRESS****.
What gets measured gets managed, so make sure you consistently use Google Analytics to check your traffic over time. If you are getting more unique visitors to your website, that means your traffic is increasing.
This is because it's very hard to drive traffic to your website. You are essentially in a competition for that traffic. Once the visitors actually make it onto your website, you have already completed the hardest part. Now you need to make sure you "catch the visitor" by getting their email address.
So, the first goal is simple. You want to increase your traffic through SEO by finding high traffic, low competition keywords.
By getting their email, you have captured that lead and are able to proceed to the next step with them:Â Nuturing The Relationship.
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How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 1 - Fixing Your Sales Funnel Have you ever visited a website or blog and after spending a few seconds on it, you saw a popup offering you something in exchange for your email? Some examples might be: -Enter a contest -Get something free -Subscribe for updates -Get our newsletter etc. These sites are attempting to convert you, the stranger into a visitor by capturing your email address. They are trying to offer you something compelling in return for it. So, the goal in capturing emails is to give your visitors something you know they want. The best way to find that out is to visit other venue's websites to see what they are offering, or to ask your customers. We recommend Mailchimp or SumoMe for email address capture popups. www.eventtemple.com
Other common ways of capturing the visitor's email include: -Landing Pages -Forms -Contact Us tabs in your menu The most common mistake we see venues making is they don't have a popup on their website asking for the email in return for something. The second most common mistake is that the venue's contact form is long and annoying to fill out, or it's hidden and not readily availably. Your goal as a venue is to make it easy for your visitors to give up their email to you and so you want to put an email popup and contact form on every page of your website. The goal here is to make it very easy for leads to be able to contact you. Remember, you have about 2 seconds (literally) to capture their attention before they will be gone forever.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 1 - Fixing Your Sales Funnel Once you have captured the visitor's email, you are ready for the third step, nuturing the lead. Another common mistake that nearly all venues we have studied make is that they don't spend enough time on their leads. Venues spend significant resources on driving traffic to their site, but even when they've captured the email and/or received an inquiry on their contact form their lead nuturing is so weak that the leads never convert. Have you ever received an inquiry from a potential customer or a request for a proposal, only to reply and never hear back from them again? This is the most common roadblock any venue will ever have in their sales process after initially driving traffic. This is the nuturing stage and it happens well before the lead is even close to being converted into a sale. The key is not to rush it. www.eventtemple.com
Most leads that submit their email are very cold and unlikely to take any immediate action, especially if they are from advertising like Adwords, Facebook Ads or submitted their email on your website's popup form. In order to "warm these leads up", you need to nuture them. This involves providing the client with value to establish yourself as a credible expert they can trust. Usually it's done over long periods of time and requires multiple touches. For example, normally when someone submits their email on your popup form, you should have a prewritten sequence of scheduled emails that go out to them every few days. If they are searching for a wedding venue, you can provide wedding tips for example. If they are executing a large event, you can provide links to local vendor directories and associations.Â
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 1 - Fixing Your Sales Funnel Warming the lead up could take 6-8 emails like this before they are ever ready to engage with an actual human being at your venue via phone, email or text message. It's less of an active follow up in this case and more of a passive, gentle reminder to the customer that you are still here for them and that you are definitely an expert who can offer them tremendous value. As such, you should have different nuturing campaigns for different customer types. You also shouldn't expect a large number of your email submissions to turn into real leads (those ready to talk to a real person) right away. Often the nuturing phase can last months or even years depending on the customer type, the size of their event and where they are at in the planning process. Automate nuturing with a tool like Mailchimp. www.eventtemple.com
You will know a lead is no longer in the nuturing phase when they connect with your contact form to make an inquiry, email you or phone you. Basically any contact that even slightly suggests they want to connect with a real person means you should mentally take them out of the first nuturing stage and put them into your sales process. Your sales process is the fourth part of your sales funnel. For venues this normally involves responding to inquiries, setting up a phone call or meeting, scheduling a tour, preparing a proposal, signing the contract or BEO and making the deposit payment. Each of these steps is essentially a goal where you can lose the customer. What if they don't respond to your initial email for example? You could lose them right there again, so this requires finesse as well.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 1 - Fixing Your Sales Funnel If you want to book a lot more events at your venue and increase your sales dramatically in a short period of time, fixing your sales follow up process for hot leads is the best way to do that. In a recent study we conducted at Event Temple, the standard number of times most venues were following up with hot leads was once by email. That means an inquiry would go from the visitor to the email capture stage, then they would be converted to a hot lead and then they would be lost there. Now that you know how much effort it takes to create a hot lead, I'm sure you find it as equally concerning as I do that for the majority of venues, this is where things truly fall apart. Once a hot lead lands in your sales pipeline, there is a very high chance they will turn into a booking if handled right. www.eventtemple.com
To get to the final stage and turn the hot lead into a customer, venues that win follow up. They don't just follow up after the potential customer fails to inquire to their original email response. They follow up on everything, up to 7 or 8 times over a period of months if needed until the customer completes each stage of their sales pipeline. Here is an example: -If they get an inquiry, they follow up until they get an email response -They turn inquiries into phone calls and meetings and don't give up until those calls and meetings actually happen -They turn tour cancellations into rescheduled tours and they remind people of upcoming tours at their venue -They follow up on their proposals and BEOs until they get a signature and payment They don't stop unless the customer asks them to.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 1 - Fixing Your Sales Funnel The end result of all of this following up at each stage is a successful booking. The venue has attracted strangers through online marketing initiatives and then turned those strangers into conversions by getting their email. Next, the venue has nutured those emails until they are ready to become hot leads and engage with a real person via email, phone or text message. Finally, they have worked with the hot leads, helping them overcome every obstacle until they complete the sales process and are ready to book with the venue. As we mentioned earlier, there is a final step and this is called the "Promoter" step. In order to turn customers into promoters, you need to deliver amazing customer service. This is where most venues are incredibly strong in our research. www.eventtemple.com
The chances are high that your venue already has a smooth event planning, operations and execution team that delivers great client experiences. In our research we didn't find very many venues that didn't. But we did find something very interesting. Most venues don't do a great job of bragging about it. We recommend creating a post-event checklist to ask your client and other vendors for reviews online and following up with that process to ensure the reviews is made. Video testimonials are another great trust builder and they'll come in handy later for helping you to convert strangers to visitors on your website. You can also use your events to create content which you can then distribute on your blog to drive SEO and on your social media to build trust with new visitors and vendor referral partners. Then the loop is complete.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Chapter 2
Online Marketing That Works
www.eventtemple.com
Bob Graham
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 2
Online Marketing That Works By Bob Graham
It's very important to know that SEO is very easypeople make it hard. Why do they make it hard?
On page SEO refers to all of the things you have to do to a webpage in order to make it SEO friendly to google.
Well, if you think about it the more confusing they make it seem, the more they can make you believe that you can't do it. But the truth is you can do it, or hire someone to do it and the cost and effort to get more traffic isn't that bad.
This only needs to be done once and the best part is that google themselves have put out a guide on exactly how to do it. If you know your keywords you simply need to make one dedicated webpage for every keyword you want to rank for.
SEO consists of two parts. "On Page" and "Off Page". www.eventtemple.com
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 2 - Online Marketing That Works On that dedicated page you put the keyword in the following places once: -In the page title -In the h1 -In the first sentence -In the meta description -In the URL And thats basically all there is to On Page SEO. Does it seem easy? Thats because it is. Its 5 steps. Sure there is more to it but all that stuff doesn't really matter much and Ill tell you why. Off Page SEO is what the secret really is to getting to the top of the google search results. Off Page SEO is what an SEO company will charge you for when they ask for a monthly fee. These fees range from $300-$5000 a month for a venue and typically involve a 12 month contract. Most of the venues at the top of google that you see pay for this. But after reading this guide you will be able to easily compete with them yourself. www.eventtemple.com
The key to Off Page SEO is to build links. You need links from other local, relevant sources to link to your site. You can't link back to them. If they link to you and you do not link back to them, in Google's eyes that makes you pretty important. So the goal is to somehow convince other businesses in your area to link to your site without having you link to them. If you think about it, you are asking people to do something for you. Thats all there is to it. How do you get people to do what you want? Well you can pay them, offer a favour in return, ensure by doing it they benefit, etc. There are a ton of resources on how to build links online but the key is to remember that its basically just sales. You make a list of people whom you'd like to link to you. You figure out whats in it for them and then you ask them to do it and thats it.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 2 - Online Marketing That Works What you dont want to do is ask really bad spammy websites to link to you. Google looks at links like neighborhoods. If you get a lot of links from other important businesses in your area you look important to google. If you get links from unimportant sources that arent credible google knows you are trying to pull one over on them. The key is not to try to scam the system. Make friends, request links, make sure there is something in it for them and you are all set. We will be publishing more about SEO in the future so if you'd like to know more please just ask and we would be happy to share. The most important thing we would like you to get out of reading this is that SEO will grow your business. Its only 2 parts, on page and off page. Off page means building links. www.eventtemple.com
On page means follow googles guide. If your website is on wordpress we recommend the yoast seo plugin to make it easy. Thats it. Its really that easy. Then you just be patient. It takes 6 to 12 months to rank for a keyword so just build links naturally over time (not all at once) and you will rank. Links are googles #1 ranking factor so if you do everything wrong but have a lot of good links pointing to your site you will still win. PPC The other type of advertising is PPC ads, also referred to as Pay Per Click. The two main places we recommend doing this type of advertising are on Facebook and Google Adwords. You can either run these ads yourself or hire a company. If done right, they can be a consistent and continual source of hot leads and inquiries to put in your sales pipeline.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 2 - Online Marketing That Works The problem is that the majority of venues do not use these advertising sources correctly. When running adwords its important to use landing pages. We recommend Leadpages or Instapage. These sites allow you to quickly build a webpage to send visitors who click on your ad to. This is better than sending them to your website because: -its easier to track ad clicks the filled out the form ob your landing page -you can test different offers/specials on your landing page to see what happens faster (experiment more easily) -landing pages are built to work well with adwords and facebook ads Lead Gen Directories The third way to get leads is through directories. Depending on the type of events you book, there are a variety of options. www.eventtemple.com
Normally these directories will offer to list your venue in exchange for an upfront advertising fee (usually paid monthly or annually) and/or a commission of sales. The standard is a 10% commission fee charged on any bookings. Directories that provide leads in exchange for commissions generally work with hotels mainly and charge the commission on room bookings associated with catering and event sales. When choosing which directory will work best for you, in your area, we have found the best method is to get references from other local vendors using the directory. If you are considering Cvent for example, ask their sales representative for 3-4 references in communities that are geographically close to you.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 2 - Online Marketing That Works Contact the reference via email or linkedin and ask what types of results they’ve been getting. Ensure that the reference is not a competitor before reaching out them. Usually 50 to 150 miles away is the right distance to find someone who can talk to you about ROI on their directory ad spend without feeling threatened by you as a competitor. We have found that in the right situation, these Directories provide huge sources of business for venues across a large variety of industry segments and are one of the best drivers of ROI for your advertising budget.
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Here is a list of some of the top directories we have seen generate good results: Social and Corporate -Meetingsbroker -Cvent -events in America -Socialvents -Evenues -Findavenue -Splacer.co -Peerspace -Eventup -Bizbash -Headbox -Findbestvenue -Venuefinder -Wefindvenues Weddings -Weddingwire -The knot -Weddingspot -Eventective
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 2 - Online Marketing That Works Whether you choose SEO, PPC Ads, Directories, or all 3, we recommend starting with just one lead generation source at a time. You’ll want to setup a software program to track UTM parameters so that you know when someone clicks your marketing content, then fills out the lead capture form on your website. Some directories send RFPs out, so tracking is much easier, but others just send leads.
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The key is to measure everything. You’ll want a system that tracks which sources drive leads, which leads turn into sales and the ROI on your advertising. We’ll talk more about that in the upcoming chapters.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Chapter 3
Modern Sales Best Practices
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Bob Graham
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 3
Modern Sales Best Practices By Bob Graham
The world is changing at a rapid rate. In fact, Moore’s Law suggests that technology is improving at an exponential pace every year. Consumers are also adapting. At the time of writing this ebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon has recently become the world’s wealthiest person. Ecommerce is stripping away business at a rapid pace from brick and mortar shops and even Amazon has branched out into providing server solutions for software. www.eventtemple.com
Major hotel chains have been disrupted by Airbnb and even the wedding venue space is being changed by businesses like Duo Venues. As a result of all of this disruption and change, it’s expected that the way consumers shop and make purchasing decisions has also fundamentally changed.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 3 - Modern Sales Best Practices They are much less likely to want to speak to a sales person on the phone or email and much more likely to look up pricing and reviews online, ask their friends on facebook for feedback or text your venue. In one of our recent studies, Event Temple took a venue generate a huge amount of monthly leads and measured the difference in reply rate they got when switching from email to text. Initially, the venue’s potential customers would inquire via email and the venue would respond by email. In our experiment, we had the venue respond by email only to be followed up by text the very next day (these were consumer clients, not business clients). The results were astounding. Replies shot up from 15% on average to 50% just by using text messaging vs email. www.eventtemple.com
Additionally, our study ensured that potential customers received additional email and text follow ups over a period of 6 weeks. Before our research project, this particular venue had not followed up at all and so we were essentially adding 6 additional sales touches into the process through our automation. By the end of the experiment, their reply rate over the campaign had shot up to 64% and sales were up by 28%. Using text messaging and automation, especially when combined into a follow up sequence were clearly impacting the bottom line. Technology has allowed us to have more rapid communication than ever before and as a result, our attention spams are shorter. Our experiment re-affirmed this and so have thousands of experiments since.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 3 - Modern Sales Best Practices Each month, our clients send thousands of emails to thousands of prospects and inquiries and our system monitors the top performing campaigns. We are able to see the fundamental reasons why certain response and response sequences get more replies than others. What we have seen surprised even us. The right messaging, sent via email and text communication channels, done consistently over time creates results that far outweigh traditional sales approaches. Put simply: successful sales reps sell using modern technology and that consists of text messaging, emails and automated follow ups. Taking things one step further, today’s leading organizations are using big data more than ever to drive sales and generate results.
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Imagine if, for example, you had access to the leading sales emails that were proven to get the best results after hundreds of thousands of experiments with real customers. You’d definitely use those emails, rather than write your own right? Of course you would! With modern technology brands are able to gain insight and information that was previously unavailable and they are exploiting it to ensure their success. Modern venue and hotel sales teams must also utilize this data to their advantage if they want to remain competitive. The results are clear: those who adapt survive and thrive, those who’s systems, mindset and sales philosophy stay the same get diminishing results for their efforts over time.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 4
An Unfair Technology Advantage
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How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 4
An Unfair Technology Advantage By Bob Graham
One of my favourite business books is called “Scaling Up” by Verne Harnish. It’s the updated version of “The Rockefellar Habits”, which was a best seller in the business management and growth category. In the book, Verne mentions that to grow a company, you need to really get three core things right.
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1) Develop leaders that can predict, create repetitive processes and delegate. 2) Create scalable infrastructure using technology. 3) Create a marketing system that works. I believe that great leadership is a learned skill that will always require significant training and practice. The other two though can be accomplished today using software.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 4 - An Unfair Technology Advantage In most venues and hotels, the software is genereally outdated. One-time market leaders built software in the late 90’s and early 2000’s and continue to sell the same applications today. Sure they are cloud based, but their interfaces and functionality haven’t kept up with modern technology. One interesting thing we noticed at our company is that it’s not their fault. It’s actually most likely not realistic for them to change their software now. They have written millions of lines of code and have now become victims of their own success. That was okay for the past 20 years, but one fundamental thing has changed in the world that means this is no longer acceptable. Technology has become an ecosystem.
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Technology companies in the past were rewarded for being generalists and for doing an o-k job of everything in their closed-off systems. Today though, there is a better way. This is through the concept of a platform. A platform is basically an ecosystem where various applications can plug together seamlessly. This means that your venue can now take advantage of the following: -The world’s very best dashboard app -The most compresensive accounting program -The smoothest automation systems -Phone apps that help you manage processes on the go -The best communication tools available and more! Since the world is always changing, your software should be able to also quickly adapt to change.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 4 - An Unfair Technology Advantage This is why an ecosystem is crucial if you want to follow Verne Harnish’s tip and create scalable infrastructure and marketing that works. As new companies continue to iterate and build technology and an exponentially faster and faster pace (Moore’s Law), you can definitely expect there will be better versions of just about everything you are using today in the very near future. When you use programs that are by nature designed to be closed off from the rest of the world, you limit your business in every area. Instead, to gain a competitive technology advantage, you need the ability to change quickly, at any time, to whatever you want to use. This is the new way of doing business and the way the world’s fastest companies operate. www.eventtemple.com
Is there a new way of tracking events that’s never been seen before? Great! Connect it with a couple of clicks. Is there a new dashboard application that puts everyone on the same page and tracks KPIs like a dream? Awesome. Push a button and start using it. This is the future. That’s because the one thing we know for sure about the future is that there will be change. Having a system that can readily adapt is the only way to prepare for advances that we know for sure are coming but aren’t here yet. So going back to how to get an unfair technology advantage, the key is to position yourself so that you are able to take advantage of new technology in the first place.
How To Increase Bookings At Your Venue
Bob Graham
Chapter 4 - An Unfair Technology Advantage We recommend an ecosystem that easily connects multiple programs to one another. It’s foundation should be sales and marketing since that’s the core driver of any business. Then, through various modules you can add on event planning, catering, staffing, customer service and more. The ecosystem should have an open-API and a zapier integration so that other programs can easily connect and push data back and forth with no complicated coding involved. Event Temple is the only software platform like this in the hospitality industry able to do this today and with our open eco-system we will give you the ability to readily adopt new technology and innovatoin for many years to come.
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Interested In Learning More? Contact us at www.eventtemple.com or email info@eventtemple.com About Event Temple: Event Temple is the hospitality and venue industry's first cloud-based platform. Our central hub is perfect for managing sales, marketing, events and scheduling. Our system also integrates seamlessly with thousands of other programs through our open API and zapier connection so you can build your own hospitality-based operations system using the world's leading software and still manage everything from one place!