With so many different types of venues, it’s no surprise there are so many different venue buyers. You may have read our blog on defining the venue buyer customer journey. Defining your customers’ journeys, from prospect to client, helps to plan marketing that’s destined to be seen, engage prospective customers and drive action at every stage.
To get the targeting and messaging right, it’s important to understand your various customer profiles and how profiles and journeys differ between different types of organisers and events.
This blog explains how to define customer profiles, how to understand them, tools and methods to research and how you can use the insight to enhance your venue’s marketing.
You will learn from this blog
- How to define and understand customer profiles
- Tools you can use
- Research methods
- How to apply this to your venue
Defining Your Customer Profiles
Here we’ll go through the steps you need to follow in order to define your customer profiles, you will first need to take a step back and take a look at all the events you’ve held in the held in the past.
The fastest way to define your customer profiles is to start by listing the types of events you can host, the budgets your venue caters for and the types of people that organise the events you want to attract. We recommend being very specific about the different types of events and the people that organise them. If you define your venue as a host of business events, within that area there several different business event formats and different types of event organisers. Even a venue that’s dedicated to hosting conferences must determine which types of conferences their venue is suitable for, and which conference business models they want to attract.
Your customer profiles are also linked to your occupancy. If you want your venue to be occupied seven days a week, around the clock, it’s possible. As events take place seven days a week – it can be achieved – but you’ll have to determine which event organisers will be using the venue on different days at different times and how your venue will appeal to the different event types and organisers.
By now, you should have a definition of the events you want to attract, the types of organisers you want to use your venue, their budgets and when they typically host their events.
Be careful, it’s not a matter of who you want to attract, it’s a matter of who you can attract. It’s finding the match between your venue and the type of event organiser it was designed for.
How to understand your customer profiles
Knowing that a training manager at a blue-chip company is a target for your meeting rooms that accommodate up to 30 people can be useful but aside from building an advertising audience based around job title and company size, there isn’t much you can do with the knowledge.
To make sure the marketing we create reaches and engages our customer profiles, and achieves our desired outcome, we research behaviour and emotions. We aim to understand their emotions during the event organising process, find out where they spend their time online and the sources of influence they use to make decisions. By mapping this out for every customer profile we’re able to create a marketing plan that delivers our clients communications to the right people, at the right place, at the right time with the right message.
Although this exercise may seem time consuming, the insight leads to significantly improved results, and the customer profiles and customer journeys will become the go to resource to determine if a marketing activity is right for your venue and based on your occupancy, if it’s something you need right now for that profile. As well as better marketing, it leads to better decision making.
Tools and methods to research customer profiles
Most agencies have a suite of research tools. They include tools that research behaviour on social networks, searches on search engines and audited research data to profile certain types of consumers their motivators and their behaviour. If you’re using an agency they should work with you to define your customer profiles and use their tools to research them in depth. If you are doing it alone, there are some free tools you can use.
keyword.io provides a free tool to check search volumes on several websites and networks. The useful ones it can check for venues are Google Search, YouTube, Bing Search, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Google Trends. You can use this tool to research the things your market is searching for across different networks and determine which of those searches could apply to your venue, which type of customer profile could be searching and where they are in the customer journey.
Answer the Public is a free tool that will tell you the questions people have been asking in relation to a keyword. It’s useful for discovering queries and concerns in your market that apply to your venue. The insight means you to shape your targeting, positioning, and messaging to appeal to the types of event organisers you want to host.
Customer profile template
When we research customer profiles for our clients, we use the template above (download a blank editable version here). We research the same information on each profile to maintain a standardised format to reference when we’re planning marketing campaigns and analysing impact.
After we develop customer profiles, we revisit them on a regular basis and repeat the research. It ensures the profiles, and our clients’ marketing activity, are adapted as the market adapts and it means we regularly gain market insight on demand so the venues we’re working with can adapt to the demands of the market.
Exercise
- Outline the type of events you can host in your venue
- Outline the types of people that organise those events
- Download the customer profile template
- Research your customer profiles and complete the template for each customer profile
- Use the information when deciding where to promote your venue and how to communicate with your target market