Social Media Efforts?

thenexusvr

Just wondering what you guys are doing in terms of social media marketing, content creation, promotions, etc.

Spectrum_Waylon

We have a social media manager we hired. He is great at getting engagement on posts, but he constantly tells us the best way to drive likes is in store incentives. Whether it be added time, saying deals are announced through Facebook, offer on the spot discount, or even a free sticker/item it will drive likes. It is important to work social media into conversations with your customers, especially for the arcades that have their owners running the store at times it should be instinct. Once they are on your page you will want to engage your customers so they see what's new and exciting or what deals are available. We are going to focus efforts on social media a lot this Xmas season and after using in store engagement

eric.w.baggs

We've had a VR Guide who has done double time as our marketing manager since we opened a few months ago. He has noticed the best turnout when we give our outreach time to hit our audience, i.e. we're not blasting out an event that is happening tomorrow, but more like in two weeks or for an upcoming holiday.

Our best responses in turns of followers and engagement have been from three different types of efforts. First are free events allowing people to check out games that are polished and not complex in their interfaces. Second are contests/giveaways (such as for a birthday party package) that have a social media element built in. Third are promotions that are actually a good deal for the consumer and that make immediate sense, like a Buy One Get One for hourly rentals.

willstackable

Did anybody get to listen to the interview we did with Charlie Fink?

He has a ton of experience in the LBE sector and learned a lot of lessons the hard way back in the 90's with Battletech and VR World.

Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E40gG2yeyMo

Charlie comes out pretty strongly against discounts and promotions. (With some caveats).

In his opinion, it devalues your brand/product and ends up being mostly used by loyal customers that are willing to pay you full price. It also creates an expectation from them that you'll continually do discounting.

thenexusvr

willstackable

I can totally understand that. We generally stick to special occasions (such as VR Day) to do actual promotions or discounts, but we use "discount language" for most all of our pricing. Our standard pricing is set that it can be discounted (if someone has a coupon or is a local) and still have us well within our necessary margins. Then we have "bulk discount packages" for people wanting to buy large amounts of time and get it saved to a swipe card, but those prices still fall within our necessary margins. This way we keep making the money we know we need to make while letting people think they are getting the best deal possible.

HunterLaneSBVR

When using social media to promote, how much of it is marketing your location (events, specials, etc.) and how much of it is marketing specific content you'd say?

thenexusvr

HunterLaneSBVR

It varies from time to time depending on what we might have going on. We have several ongoing video series within different games that we offer in the arcade. Currently we are working on Arizona Sunshine, Beat Saber, Gorn, and Superhot. We do a few posts about any event that we are doing spread out through the week leading up to it. As well, we try to post content showing off the location as much as we can as we are able to capture it.

Spectrum_Waylon

HunterLaneSBVR

It varies, when a game every asks about like Beat Saber launches the posts get pretty good engagement. When we do get good engagement on specific content marketing, we want to setup mixed reality for these types of posts.