Online bar and club guide DesignMyNight is to continue expanding this year, extending coverage to Brighton and adding new services for the trade.
Offering free listings pages to pubs, bars and clubs, it will add the south coast city in February after starting with London and Manchester and expanding to Birmingham and Glasgow last year.
Having increased the size of its workforce from two to 22 people, the website now receives traffic of over 1.5million views per month.
It provides operators with easy-to-use administration tools to keep pages fresh and up to date. With different yearly marketing packages, it allows venues to promote directly to their targeted audiences.
Nick Telson, co-founder of DesignMyNight, said: “We like to think of ourselves as a second website for venues, a second marketing tool, which basically doubles their exposure.”
DesignMyNight also allows venues to become booking partners with the site, supported by an in-house bookings team which manages all enquiries to the venue and targets the audience wanted. They currently process bookings for over 20,000 heads a month into over 400 venues.
The latest addition to the business-to-business offering is software that allows venues to sell tickets for events through the website, from club nights to pop-ups and one-off parties.
Becoming a ticket partner also secures the venue and event free exposure on DesignMyNight’s Hot Tickets, What’s On and other hotspot pages. Events can also be found through the search function.
Nick explained: “We thought, why not create a software as good as, if not better than, all the others out there but the advantage to ours is that you also get free exposure to our 1.5million monthly users too. A lot of other ticket platforms give you the software and a link to use it and that’s it.”
During the Christmas and New Year period, DesignMyNight sold over 15,000 tickets for over 110 ticket partners in London alone.
“This creates a simple and effective journey from start to finish for the user, where they can search, discover and purchase an event ticket all in one place,” Nick said.
“We have over 1.5million people coming to the site a month and we want to make the journey easy for them so they can start and end on DesignMyNight. This guarantees less customer ‘leakage’ and more bookings and ticket sales for our venue partners.”
He added that DesignMyNight was planning to introduce another piece of software to help businesses this year. While currently under wraps, he said it would “revolutionise the industry”.
Click here to see the latest news stories from Barmagazine.co.uk
