Market your experience NOT your technology

Market your experience not your technology

The number one mistake I see companies doing, specifically arcades that feature Virtual Reality, is in their marketing they always talk about what technology they’re using. They’ll make posts along the lines of “come check out our virtual reality on our HTC Focus 3’s fully wireless, 4k per eye, blah, blah, blah”. Quick question, are you Best Buy? Are you the retail tech giant trying to sell me this specific virtual reality headset? No? Then I don’t care what the specs of your virtual reality headsets are, the only thing I care about as a customer is that it works and that I’m going to have fun.

Customers don’t care what technology you’re using; the mom booking her kids birthday party or the best man booking a bachelor party doesn’t care how many pixels are in each eye, or how many times it refreshes per second, you’re just spouting unrelated gibberish at them and ultimately losing their interest.

Look at the entertainment powerhouse Dave & Buster’s, when was the last time you saw them marketing anything about what their technology is? Oh you didn’t see them share the specs of their TV’s that you were going to watch the SuperBowl with your friends on, weird! Take a look at their social media and take notes, they focus on the experience.

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MARKET THE EXPERIENCE

Customers are coming to, or considering your business because they want to have fun. In the location based entertainment industry it is our goal to get these hard working people to spend their limited time off and their disposable income at your business, they want to make sure they’re not wasting their Friday nights at some lame place where they could be having more fun somewhere else. So in your marketing, showcase those in your target demographic having fun so they can relate, see themselves in your marketing, and ultimately come give you their hard earned money.

I encourage you to try adjusting your marketing, be experience first and see the results. If the entertainment giants like Dave & Busters, Chuck E Cheese, and TopGolf are using this strategy, then it must be working! Try it for a month, if it doesn’t work you can always go back to your old ways, but I have a feeling you’ll be surprised! 

Now the one time I do make an exception to marketing your technology is when you make upgrades or add in new things. Just upgraded to all new VR headsets, don’t go out and list the tech specs, but you can definitely promote that you’re making upgrades. Something along the lines of we’ve upgraded our virtual reality headsets to provide you an even better experience; but more fun and creative. 

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SIDE RANT

Now this is directly targeted to those that feature Virtual Reality at their business. I owned an arcade with virtual reality for the better part of a decade, the number one thing that I saw competitors doing is they’d always talk about their headsets and how they were better than mine, and honestly we ran the original HTC Vive from 2017-2021, there were much better headsets on the market than what I was running, and my competitors would spend tens of thousands of dollars every year trying to keep up with the new technology, buying the Vive Pro, Index, Quest 2, Focus 3, but there is no keeping up. The technology is advancing at such a rapid rate that it is not fiscally responsible to try to keep up. But to this day, I am certain that my marketing is what kept me alive while my competitors went out of business, my competitors were so focused on their messaging being “the best VR headsets around” trying to dig that theirs are better than mine, meanwhile I was just focusing on showing people how great of an experience you will have at my place. I wasn’t focused on having the best technology out there, the majority of our bookings were done by moms booking their kids parties, they don’t know the difference between a 1080p or 4k headset, they just want to make sure that their kids have fun.

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