As a business owner, you know how important it is to constantly attract new clientele to your facility. It takes patience and a well-devised strategy. Make a presence wherever your target customers are — whether that’s a local festival or Facebook — and you are halfway to capturing their attention. In addition to grabbing their interest, it’s just as important to understand your customers, especially if you’re targeting them for a specific service.
For family entertainment centers, it’s particularly difficult to identify a single customer base because FECs tend to attract multiple demographics. And it’s obvious why: Everyone loves fun! This is a no-brainer. It may even be why you chose to open your facility.
Alas, the love for fun doesn’t single-handedly lead to a successful business. The goal is to earn a profit and remain open for many years to come. In order to accomplish this, one vital component of any business strategy should be crafting customer profiles to help you understand their journey. Check out our tips on how to accurately identify and understand your customer base, and ultimately grow your customer loyalty.
1. Observe Your Customers
Creating a customer profile is helpful for several reasons, but most importantly, it gives you an idea of who you should target through your marketing and advertising efforts. Customer profiles provide insight on who is best served from your facility’s features, such as its floor plan, menu, attractions, and services.
First, spend a few weeks observing your customers. Keep track of the various demographics throughout the day and any noticeable patterns. For example, you might have parents bringing young children for skating lessons in the mornings, teenagers coming by on weekend nights, and groups celebrating special occasions after work during the week. Most FECs won’t have one core customer base and that’s okay. By identifying and grouping your customer base into different categories, you can segment your marketing efforts and business strategies to better cater to your customers’ needs.
2. Recognize Customer Intention
To further nail down who your target audience is, assess beyond the typical age and gender traits. Why are people coming to your FEC? This is one of the most important questions to answer. Your customers’ intentions for choosing your facility will also inform how they spend time there. Ultimately, you can use this information to create the perfect environment that turns them into long-term customers.
Customers tend to identify as one of two categories:
- The come-and-goers, maybe see you later: This group of people visits your facility on a one-off basis, such as for a birthday party, and doesn’t revisit for months at a time (if ever again).
- The regulars: This group of customers visits your facility quite often and for significant periods of time. They’ve probably recommended you to their family and friends.
If you’ve noticed that you mostly attract the come-and-goers, how well are you persuading them to come back? You can first assess what’s happening inside your facility. For instance, is your music catered to all ages? If not, change your playlists. Do you have a full staff behind the snack bar counter? The more hands on deck, the faster orders can be taken and customers can get back to their chosen activities. Secondly, do you have come back incentives in play to turn one-off customers into repeat customers? This strategy can be applied to even the regulars, to get them back in your door more often.
One way to do this is by collecting customer data to expand your targeting capabilities. Are you collecting email addresses and birthdays of your customers? With the help of aggregate data, your business will have the ability to create specific, targeted promotional outreach strategies (i.e., birthday offers and other coupons) that will entice customers to return to your facility.
To collect this customer data, you can do one (or more) of the following:
- Offer Incentive(s) for Signing Up: People are more likely to provide their data if they know they’ll get something in return. Offer a small promotional discount for their next visit. This is a great method to capture their attention and contact info.
- Provide Wifi Access: Set up a WiFi Collector at your business and offer visitors access in exchange for their email addresses.
- Send Email Campaigns: Let customers know you’re thinking of them with monthly coupons or an offer on their special day by emailing them coupons, such as a discount if they book their party with you in advance.
There are many ways to ensure you’re providing a quality experience and building customer loyalty. If you want to learn more about how to capture customer data, read about our partnership with FetchRev or contact us. Remember to make changes, ask customers for feedback, provide special offers, and see if the number of familiar faces grows.
3. Know Customer Preference
Understanding customer preferences is crucial to increasing revenue. Often times, they might be obvious. If you have a specific theme, you attract people that drift towards that theme. For instance, if you have a large arcade room, you’re most likely attracting gamers. If you have a bounce house, you’re probably attracting parents with young children.
Once you’re able to identify the preferences of your customers, then ask what else you can incorporate into your facility that will lead to customer happiness. If your arcade is popular, consider adding billiards for an older crowd or interactive games for a younger audience. If these changes improve arcade sales, you know you have accurately identified a customer preference.
Before investing in any major changes to your facility, it’s always a great idea to survey your current customer base to see how they feel about these changes.
4. Be Aware of Customer Lifestyle
Consider your customers’ lifestyles to determine the type of features or activities they are looking for. One of the telltale signs of your ideal customer’s lifestyle is your facility’s location. For example:
- A residential area brings in families who are searching for fun, all-ages activities that they can do together.
- If your facility is near a school or university, it may draw in individuals in search of a fun place to pass the time on weekends or after class. Parents will also want a place they can trust to drop off their kids.
- A central metro location may attract businesses or organizations with the need for a large meeting space, whether it be for a business gathering, team-building opportunity, or social function.
While location is one of the key considerations before opening a family entertainment center, it’s also something that continuously impacts the success of your business. Nearly everything related to your FEC will be affected by its surroundings, customer makeup, and their lifestyles. Consider these things and adapt your offerings to better serve your customers.
Understanding and using these components (intentions, preferences, and lifestyles) will aid you in creating precise customer profiles. These profiles provide crucial insights that should inform changes you make to your family entertainment center as well as outreach strategies. By proving to customers that you listen to their wants and needs, your FEC is bound to reach new levels of success.
Do you want to learn how customer profiles can improve your digital marketing strategy? Call TrustWorkz and talk to the pros.
