A digital marketing plan is a strategy that covers social media, SEO, SEM, PR, content, e-mail, branding, and everything you can apply to integrated marketing. Within the framework of this plan, it will be easier for you to see and reach your goals.
The Amusement industry is evolving. To keep up with the competition, businesses like yours need to adapt. Digital innovations compound exponentially each year – so the longer you wait, the further behind the competition your business becomes.
Set Your Goals
If you do not have a digital marketing plan or strategy yet, the first thing to do is to determine your goals and target audience.
Making decisions on behalf of your brand can entail great responsibilities. But you also need to know for what purposes you undertake these responsibilities. To have a plan, it is necessary to determine where you will reach as a result of this plan and what you will achieve at what stage.
You can ask a few questions to determine which goals your brand will work towards.
- Who is your brand’s target audience?
- How can you attract new potential customers without losing your current audience?
- Which advertising and marketing strategies will benefit you?
- Will your budget and team be sufficient for this plan?
Here is an example of a goal you want to achieve in the short term:
Main Marketing Task: Creating an email list with 1,000 subscribers in the first 6 months.
- Step one: Create a landing page for the email list and edit a form so visitors can subscribe.
- Step two: Offer free products with sweepstakes to entice customers.
- Step three: Create automated emails and schedule them so you can send them on specific days.
- Step four: Generate more content ideas and seek help from specific tools for content ideas if needed. Write content and attach it to automated email series.
- Fifth step: Follow the process for six months. Keep track of subscriber numbers and unsubscribers. Develop your email marketing strategy until you reach 1,000 subscribers.
Digital Marketing Tools
It is very important which tools you will use when creating a digital marketing plan. You may be self-confident and think you have enough experience. In any case, digital marketing tools will increase your performance and move you forward quickly. So, you will need to determine which tools you should use in line with your brand’s needs and goals.
Create a website
Use a mix of visuals on your website.
Readers today have short attention spans, which is probably why studies show people only read about 20% of the content on a page. That means you must break up your content with plenty of visuals. After all, the brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text!
So if you want your audience to retain your message, use a varied mix of visuals. This can include user-generated content and professional photography, whether paid photoshoots or user-generated content you find online.
Optimize Your Website User Experience (UX) for Conversions
It’s important to improve the user experience (UX) of your website. Basically, make it easy to navigate your site so users don’t get frustrated and exit out of it altogether when they can’t find the information they need.
Start by thinking about what you would look for before visiting a theme park. You’d need to know important facts like hours, location, and pricing, as well as what rides and games the park has.
You’d also expect authentic photos, pages that load quickly, and clear call-to-action buttons, so make sure your site has these details if you want to convert more people who land on your site.
Showcase the Diversity of Experiences Your Theme Park or Attraction Offers
Your theme park is full of different experiences your visitors will enjoy, and your website should reflect that. This means you shouldn’t just have one or two big pictures on your homepage.
You should create a custom gallery of multiple images that show several of your best attractions. Doing this should allow you to see a big jump in page views, engagement, and more.
Make Sure Your Website Is SEO Friendly
If you want to ensure your website shows up at or near the top of the search results pages on Google, you need to employ SEO.
Start by identifying a few keyword phrases that best describe your theme park and that people already use on their Google searches. Then sprinkle those in throughout your website copy, including in the title tags, headlines, subheadings, meta descriptions, bullet points, and image descriptions.
Social Media And Other Promotional Activities
Ready. Set. Wait. What social media platforms should you start with? This will depend on your current customer demographics. If you’re dealing more with 30-49-year-olds, you’ll want to fire up a Facebook page. If you have a younger demographic, you’ll want to start an Instagram.
Marketing projects include opening accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. When a new attraction is ready to open, put photos on the park’s Facebook page, tweet about it, and blog. Ask followers to talk about their favorite ride is on your social media sites. Award tickets to followers with the best posts.
You can bring promotional activities too that are showcased to the audience via online media presence. These activities include discounted fares, coupon codes and other on-demand featured promotional activities.
Personalize Your Marketing to Each Customer Segment
Think about who your target audience is. While it might mostly consist of families, young adults and couples will likely want to visit your theme park, as well. Keep this in mind when marketing.
For example, Cedar Point’s Facebook page regularly posts pictures of families and children enjoying the park, but it also features photos of young couples having fun there.
And of course, if you send out email newsletters, change up the content depending on your audience at that moment, as families may be interested in different offers and events than young adults would.
Grow Your Local Outreach
It’s important to market your theme park with the local businesses that comprise the hotels, restaurants, and other market attractions that surround your theme park. Providing a source of additional engagement for your visitors as well as generate mutual benefit for the businesses.
Include Ads to Upscale your Digital Media Reach
ake the engagement level of your visitors a step further, with the most liked, shared, and watched content of your theme park activity getting promoted via digital media channels.
This allows you to further your reach amongst your audience and also promotes your business to a larger visitor.
Content Sharing
If you’re in the Amusement Industry, you see it every day.
Guests stop by the snack counter, snapping a pic before they take their first bite. They pose by your mascot, they stream themselves waiting in line, and they capture a majestic angle of your star attraction on a particularly beautiful sunlit day.
Now, we want to focus your attention on a ripe resource your business needs to be leveraging for quality content: your guests.
Constantly bombarded with ads across every platform, too savvy to fall for old-school paid endorsements, and inundated with endorsements by “influencers” – today’s consumers trust authentic content from real people because that content is earned rather than bought.
You can share the content you have prepared in 5 different ways. These methods are as follows:
- Blog posts (you can share your written, visual, and video content)
- Social media posts (you can share your blog posts, images, and videos)
- Email posts (you can share your blog posts, campaign promotions, and content related to your products)
- Digital publishers (You can partner with digital publishers and publish sponsored content)
- Influencer marketing (By partnering with well-known people or accounts, they can create content for you or you can share your own content through them)
Analysis and Data Follow-Up Studies
We said that the most important feature of digital marketing is the ability to see and evaluate data quickly and accurately.
You can use Google Analytics to make these analyzes.
Conclusion
Now your digital marketing plan is ready and your strategies are clear and you can get to work. Working with a plan makes you more disciplined and committed to your work.
It also allows you to foresee and solve problems that you may encounter. If you act in accordance with the plan you have prepared, you will reach the result step by step.
About The Author
Simge Karapınar is a Digital Marketing Analyst intern at the International Institute of Digital Marketing™.