Make sure your online presence matches your offline for your entertainment business

Make sure your online presence matches your offline

When you're going to try something new, whether it's a new activity, a new restaurant, whatever it is, in today's day and age the first thing that people do is look it up online. I am 100% guilty of this, if my fiancee and I are in a new city looking to try a new restaurant my process is Googling food near me, from then we narrow it down to what sounds good that’s nearby, as we find stuff the first thing we do is look at their Google rating and then look at their website, if their google rating and website have sold us the next step is to go check out their social media. Now if their social media looks good, some nice pictures of some food that I want to eat then we’re sold, we book a table, and that’s it. Now I’m a millennial, so the process may be different for different demographics, but if you’re in the location based entertainment industry your primary demographic is probably going to be millennials or gen z, so stick with me here.

Now you’re going through this process of finding a nice place to eat, their website looks great, instagram looks great, everything looks like you’re setting up for a great dinner, then you show up and the place looks nothing like what the pictures looked like, the food looks gross, the restaurant looks like shit, and now suddenly your whole nights thrown off. The food may come out tasting good, but if it’s not what you expected you’re still going to be thrown off. This is the importance of matching your online presence to your offline, and by offline I mean your actual presence, what your facility actually looks and feels like, aligning with your brand.

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Think about the difference in perception from Chuck E Cheese to Barcade. Realistically they’re a very similar business, they have arcades and good times, but they target different demographics. Now imagine if you were in your 30’s looking to have a good time and you come across the online presence of a place that looked like the Barcade branding, and then you show up with your friends to a place that looks like Chuck E Cheese and you’re seated in the middle of a 7 year olds birthday. Wouldn’t be a great time right? So don’t do that to your customers.

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I was working with a client that owned a golf simulator business, it was a very no frills, cheap and affordable golf simulator place. But the problem that they had is they didn’t use pictures of their own facility, they used stock images of much higher end facilities with better technology. So people would look them up online, it would look great so they would book their time, and then they show up to an empty cement room with cheap IKEA furniture, a weirdly sterile but also dirty environment that just did not sit well. The amount of negative reviews that this business would receive solely based on that shock was outstanding. There was two main things that we worked on when we started working together to change this perception around, we met in the middle ground and we worked to make the place nicer within the facility, better lighting, seating, some decor, put some life into the business, but then we also adjusted the online brand to be more aligned with what the customers should actually expect when they arrive. Within weeks of making these changes the google rating started going up, (with some help of tricks to get more reviews out of customers), people actually knew what they were getting when they showed up so they weren’t leaving bad reviews about being disappointed. If they didn’t want just a no frills golf experience they went and booked at one of the fancier more expensive options in town, but if they were fine with the no frills, they knew what they were getting.

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Now in the location based entertainment industry we are at a disadvantage when it comes to aligning your offline brand to your online brand, because people actually come to our business and get to see it. You open up UberEats nowadays and your feed is filled with a ton of Ghost Kitchen’s operating under fake brands to make it feel more authentic and real. For example I just opened mine and there’s a nice looking restaurant called Chicken Chicken, this little authentic restaurant passing down generations of home made recipes to bring you the best possible chicken wing. It’s Pizza Pizza, the Canadian pizza chain, they’re selling their mid-tier chicken wings but rebranded to try to pull at your heart strings. If you didn’t look up the address of the place you would never know, because I’m not the UberEats driver going to pick it up, I just get to see their fancy packaging to try to portray the brand they are not. Now unfortunately in the location based entertainment industry we don’t have that option, because all of our customers come through our doors, so we can’t use shady marketing tactics like this. 

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So the moral of the story is be authentic, don’t try to trick your customers, because it will bite you in the ass, lead to bad reviews, people will tell their friends how underwhelming it was, and then you set the wrong standard for your business. Being authentic lets you target your right demographic instead of trying to fake it into demographics who won’t like you.

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