The 5-Step Guide to Marketing Success for Your FEC

Starting a family entertainment center business includes marketing your brand to get the word out and the guests in. Marketing success relies on being proactive in planning strategies to achieve your goals and KPIs for higher profitability, more foot traffic, and deeper guest loyalty for repeat visits. For start-ups, FEC marketing is usually done in a reactive mode, and with the lack of a marketing team, it is usually left in the hands of those who are already busy with kickstarting the business.

When done right, family entertainment center marketing is what reaches your customers and raises brand awareness to bring them to your facility repeatedly.

Developing marketing strategies will help you boost your FEC profitability. To get started, let's talk about some marketing basics, then do a deep dive on practical implementations based on different FEC revenue models.

Step 1: Set FEC Marketing Objectives

Objectives are setting your sights on where you want to be. When setting objectives, stick with the SMART principle (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely). Generally, your objectives are set for periods of time such as a year or 6 months. Planning enables you to set smaller objectives that you can use to ensure your business is on the correct path.

Example objectives include:

• Increase visitation during the school holiday period by X%
• Increase package sales during the low season compared to last year
• Increase average spend per customer year-round

Step 2: Determine a Budget

Budgets are key for developing an understanding of the potential scale and scope of your marketing campaign, and the various strategies and tools available to you. The key to creating a budget is to outline exactly how much you are willing to spend on a marketing campaign and identify the goals you wish to achieve through this campaign. This allows you to pick the best option that reaches the objectives.

Step 3: Identify the Target Market

You can create awesome marketing materials and have great promotions with the correct market and consumer segment targeting. It is key to understand who your target consumer is to identify the specifics behind your marketing strategy.

Example:

You have the Mobile Wallet virtual game card at your venue. While teens can use it, they do not exactly have the purchasing power for it.

What you can do:

Target parents with the Mobile Wallet's benefits that enable them to reload their kids' game cards from wherever they are, inside or outside the FEC. They can also monitor the spend-per-visit so they know when to top up.

PRO TIP 💡

Embed offers a FREE and editable Mobile Wallet Creative Kit to help you drive guest sign-ups and reloads with the Mobile Wallet through pre-designed marketing collaterals.

Step 4: Select and Implement Your Strategies

Your choice of strategies is based on your objectives, budget, and target market. A strategy is simply "how" (tactics) you will achieve your objectives. There are plenty of different types of marketing activities that can be used in conjunction with each other.

When executing an FEC marketing strategy...

• Apply your FEC branding (logo, colours, style guides, tone of voice, etc.)
• Stick with a consistent theme and message for a stronger impression across different channels.
• Design high-value, low-cost offers to attract your audience.
• Set a start and end time or date for your campaign with respect to your budget.
  
  

FEC Marketing Strategies

1. Loyalty or Referral Programmes
   Social media is an excellent tool to cast a wider net for your audience. It also allows you to get creative on every platform.
   Boosted social media posts - Pay for your social media post to be served to your target audience as ads to create a sense of urgency to avail your promotion and an enticement to visit your FEC soon.Trend-based - Hop on whatever's trending on the internet and cleverly insert your FEC brand or promotion in this agile marketing. Make Reels, TikTok videos, and other content formats that will drive foot traffic to your venue. Influencer partnerships - Localise your business by inviting the best gamers in your neighborhood to try your attractions and encourage them to post about their experience to expand your reach through social mentions.Online advertising - Direct traffic to your website or social media channels through Google search ads or social media posts.Email marketing - Create and grow a guest database that contains information about past or present customers, such as basic contact details, games played, days of visits, average spend per visit, etc. Incentivise them for subscribing to your marketing communications through limited-time offers or special pricing to keep them updated.
   
   PRO TIP 💡
   You can have access to your guest information when you adopt FEC technology like the Mobile Wallet, game card readers, and kiosks.
   
   
2. Loyalty or Referral Programmes
   Incentivise guests for repeat visits through tiered rewards and promotions that increase both foot traffic and average guest spend.
   
   Examples:
   - Bring a friend referral discount
   - Spend a total of $X to become a VIP
   - Reload through the Mobile Wallet or FEC app for bonus game credits
   - Collect stamps per visit to get a reward
   
   
3. Events & Partnerships
   Hold seasonal events like competitions or tournaments, watch or viewing parties, Happy Hour, and other enticing themes that will bring more guests, especially during off-peak times. You can also partner up with community events and organisations, local schools, and other groups in your neighbourhood for special rates on their regular events, such as Christmas parties, birthdays, field trips, and more.
   
   Don't forget to promote these accordingly with banners and signs at strategic areas for exposure!
   
   
4. Data-driven Personalisation
   Use your guest database to offer targeted promotions based on customer preferences, spending behaviour, special occasions, and other segmentations.
   
   Examples:
   - Birthday discounts
   - Claim a reward on the next visit
   - Bundle offers for previously enjoyed attractions
   - Post-reload offers and upsell privileges
   - Mobile Wallet balance-related automation (e.g if Wallet value is less than $25, a push notification is sent to reload + bonus value reminder)

Step 5: Post-campaign Evaluation

Once you’ve implemented your campaign, you need to track and monitor the results: Are people coming into your venue with a coupon they got from the local paper, or are they mentioning the promotions? Marketing needs to be a continuously evolving process if your aim as a FEC owner operator is to keep growing and succeeding as a business.

A part of being consistently focused on marketing is evaluating your previous marketing campaigns to identify what worked and what didn’t. This allows you to keep making improvements to become more effective and successful with each marketing campaign. Invest in what works, divest what didn't.

To evaluate the success of your campaign, look back at the objectives you set. This tells you if you succeeded in the areas that you focused on, while being straightforward to identify. You may also want to look at different types of measures that go beyond your objectives. Investigating the customer attitudes to your marketing, for example, is a different way to look at your marketing and may take more informal methods of data collection. There are other traditional ways to measure success, like conducting online surveys and regular check-ins via text messaging.

Conclusion

Marketing is a key FEC component and, when utilised effectively, is a great tool for business in increasing exposure and awareness. A solid marketing plan not only puts you on your guests' top-of-mind, but puts you ahead of the competition. Enjoy putting your creativity into revenue-driving marketing strategies!