The Venue's Target Market
You have probably heard of the concept, "customer funnel". The widest part of the funnel is all the potential customers, and as you move towards the bottom of the funnel, actual and real customers appear. Eventually, only regular customers remain. As the venue owner, you must know who your customers are and what market can utilize your venue and resources to hold an event. That's how you can earn income by selling your services to them.
One of the charms of this business is its limited market which is easy to identify. The venue's target market includes other businesses and not the public. That's why there is no need for doing extensive research to find out about certain details such as gender, age, income, language, and other features of your customers. When your audiences are the public, so many factors are involved which are quite hard to control and manage.
Develop a general perspective on the market and see which markets have the capacity for your presence but you haven’t entered them yet.
a. Types of Customers
Types of venue customers include the following items:
Event holders. These are some of your most important customers who: generally don’t have any financial trouble because they are familiar with the event business and have already considered a budget for renting the venue; are up-to-date, urbane and suave people with sufficient information regarding events who don’t need to be briefed by you; and have mutual dependency with your business, and the event holders themselves come for you. Using some ordinary tools, you can take control of a great part of the market. It is recommended to make relations with many of these businesses. Don’t just think of leasing the venue; rather, you need to plan long-term collaboration.
Governmental organizations and offices are some of the best type of your customers and bring you certain advantages. They are constantly holding all sorts of events, including seminars, gatherings, symposiums and conferences. Since holding events is not their main job, if they work with you once and your job pleases them, they will become your repeat customers. They usually look for a high level of services at the highest price, so they are your special package's customers. They tend to bargain less and ask for discounts less. They have regular and definitive plans, so there is no risk of sudden changes or cancellation.
Other businesses and companies. Nowadays, many companies and organizations hold several meetings, seminars, conferences and sessions annually, and they need an exclusive venue. If you properly introduce yourself to companies, they will become one of your best and most recurrent customers. You just have to make a suitable marketing plan. Many groups of venue lessors have an exclusive department for their relations with companies because these companies rent the venue several times a year and pay a decent rent. Of course, they expect better services, as well. However, the best of it is that their job is simpler and straightforward, compared to event holders and governmental organizations.
Associations and unions. You can collaborate with associations and unions in three ways. Membership: many of these centers accept you as a new member by receiving a membership fee, so you can have access to the association members. Based on the target market you have chosen, look for associations in which your market is present. Direct collaboration: you transform associations and unions into your strength and define benefits for them. For example, they can announce to their members that anyone who is referred to you by them will receive a discount in using your services, and you pay some fees to the association for every company which signs a contract with you (this method is a branch of affiliate marketing). Leasing rooms and venues to them in various events: you can give them your rooms and free spaces for rent. To make a profitable use of your space, you should not leave any part of your venue unoccupied. You shouldn’t always wait for big contracts. You can start small by offering your space to small and medium enterprises, which helps you get the recognition needed. Attendance of charities and NGOs is an introduction for you and for signing major contracts.
Embassies are great customers because they don’t have any financial issue and they also need to hold various events during the year. One of the common events for embassies is their country's national day. Many venue owners don’t look after the customer's needs, even though it is a quite simple task. By identifying their needs, you can offer them a package and announce which of their events can be held in which of your venues. Customers check various websites and catalogs, but they accept the offer which has directly addressed their needs.
Venues which lack your resources. When unable to provide certain services for their customers, these venues can refer their customers to you and gain some benefits. While they are in fact your competitors, it is always possible for them to be your customers. Many hotels don’t have the required resources to hold an event. These hotels can be your potential partners. They want to absorb travelers to stay in their hotels, and to sign contracts with you as the venue owner through their relations. For example, they take the smaller spaces and generating income from bigger spaces is left for you. You can sign contracts with hotels and refer your customers to stay at these hotels at a reasonable price. The benefit from this arrangement is mutual.
International customers. You should always take these customers seriously. Your location certainly interests many people. In the beginning, you don’t know who from where is interested in your market. If your venue is comfortable and the price is reasonable, you would surely get some people showing interest. There is no way you would own a venue and no company in the world would show interest in working in your location. It is possible that they don’t know you or that they don’t risk holding their events there.
b. Identifying Customers' Needs
So far, you have categorized various types of customers for your services. The next step is to identify the customers' needs.
Your goal of identifying the target market is to identify the customers' needs and subsequently, to introduce the venue's resources to the customer in detail. A simple example is designing different request forms for using spaces and services. For instance, you provide a form for the international customer, which is specifically designed for this type of customer. There is all the difference in the world between the request form you design for an event holder and the one you design for a company, because it is assumed that an event holder is aware of every stage of the work.
By identifying the target market's needs, design the marketing plan in a way that customers get a charming impression of you at first sight and assume from the beginning that you are aware of their needs.
The marketing team is in charge of identifying the market's needs. In most companies, the marketing team and the development team are not two separate teams. Based on the research conducted by the market development team and the items found by the marketing team, you can design an appealing form for the market's needs, posing questions which make sense for your technical team and represent the customers' needs in effect. It is extremely easy to gather information on customers nowadays. Google suggests certain keywords which result from the opinions of millions of people. For example, if you type "what types of event do embassies hold?", before you type the whole sentence Google makes suggestions, which are questions asked by thousands of other people. As simple as that, you obtain a large part of your information by viewing the answer to others' questions. Even if you claim that you know a great deal on the topic, you will realize that many of those questions have not even occurred to you.