What is a cinema owner’s dream? Probably having every seat taken every night and encouraging viewers to buy more tickets and food in the cinema restaurant… However, in a world full of marketing campaigns of all shapes and sizes, cutting through your target audience with the right message might be a tricky challenge. When it comes to cinema marketing, your strategy should be on par with the cinematic experience. Here is how you should start your highly personalized cinema advertising: use marketing automation. It’s an effortless way to automate your marketing communication based on cinema-specific actions and triggers.
What is marketing automation in a cinema business?
Simply speaking, marketing automation in your cinema-related campaigns refers to sending personalized messages, offers and relevant reminders in real-time. What you send depends on your customer profiles and their historic behavior. The concept of marketing automation in most industries isn’t new. However, it’s still something for early adopters in movie theaters.
How does such marketing work from a technical point of view? The key focus is data-driven campaigns. Data means everything today and cinema businesses aren’t the exception. Every time a customer interacts with your cinema – buys a ticket online, visits your website or social media channels – their behavior and preferences can be analyzed.
Then you use analyses to create targeted marketing campaigns to increase both, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and your revenue. In data-driven marketing, customers are narrowly grouped based on their past behavior. You can automatically track how people spend time on your site, what they interact with, what movies they are interested in, what is your visitors’ demographic data etc. Therefore, send personalized messages to particular groups.
Marketing automation in a cinema – examples
There are so many ways to make your marketing automated. Try changing established conventions using marketing automation features described below and finally make your revenue skyrocket!
Reminders
Send people targeted messages to remind them about upcoming movies. Manually sent reminders would be an extremely repetitive and time-consuming task, but marketing automation automates the whole process. Also, you can remind particular series fans that they haven’t seen the movie they have been waiting for yet. You can also remind about discounts and free snacks.
Birthday and anniversary
Restaurant updates
The new menu deserves an automated message! Send your brand-new tasty menu and wait for your customers to come and try it. You send automated messages to alert your customers of any updates in the menu or special offers.
Boost up sales with promo- and discount codes
Everyone loves a great deal or promotion. Send promotional codes only to the most loyal groups of customers who come to see your movies regularly. Thanks to marketing automation, it doesn’t cost you anything. A successful cinema marketing strategy offers the viewers promotions through SMS. Most people open messages within 3 minutes after they receive them!
Newsletter
In fact, a regular newsletter sent to all customers is passé. Marketing automation makes it possible for you to create personalized newsletters and send them to particular groups based on their previous behavior and favorite genres. Automatic newsletters are scheduled at a frequency of your choice – it’s one of the forms of communication that is extremely easy to automate. You can create emails using pre-made templates, add lists of subscribers and schedule them to send whenever you want.
Marketing automation in a cinema - a way to rebound
In the last several months all cinemas had to take movie marketing from the big screen to the Internet exclusively. The pandemic has changed it all and when everything gets in place finally, cinema owners will face a huge challenge – how to make people return in front of the big screens safely. Marketing automation might be just the answer.
