Having gone to Golgotha last night, it occurs to me that a lot of promoters really… well… can’t.

Promote that is.

If it got any worse, there'd be tears of blood

I’ve decided that as I endeavour to make GothClub.com.au more of a site that is of actual use to the Australian gothic community, rather than something for the amusement and blitherings of myself & select friends, that I’ll be putting up a list of clubs that are on around the country, special events, etc., and a little bit of detail on everything that I can get. I was also hoping that a few people from interstate might even consider writing reviews for their local haunts and keeping me updated with events that are happening outside of Victoria

To that end, I decided to do some serious research on the national goth scene and found something that really flabbergasted me.

The majority of goth clubs are really poorly promoted.

This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to people. But last night I was talking to a number of people that I knew to be promoters and organisers of clubs, and a few of the same responses kept coming up:

1. Too expensive to run:

   1. an online campaign

      Bullshit!
      Paying for advertising is an expense you can control right down to the last cent. Too expensive? Set a maximum budget for it. Considering you’re going for exposure, rather than attempting to sell a specific item, do a pay-per-view (CPM) advertising campaign.
      Better yet, don’t pay for it at all. I’d be willing to bet half the goth scene blogs – get a banner campaign going, and some link tracking software, and send a “1 free drink” card to every blogger that whacks up a flier. Even if everyone hates your night, at least most people will be talking about it.

      Also, why the fuck does no one have their own website? Actually, I’ll rant about that below…

   2. an offline campaign

      Ok, I know how expensive print advertising is, I’ve done it before for events of my own, and fliers get pricey when you want to plaster every store in town with them. So think of something alternative!
      

      

      Bags like this can be manufactured for as little as $6.40, and people tend to be happy to pay out about $30. They'll then wear your clubs logo and details wherever they go when they need to carry shit.

      Merchandise – There, I said it.
      You know why Nike and all that sell clothes and give out stickers with their swoosh? It gets people seeing the swoosh in places. Get a semi decent logo done, get a few bumper stickers and pin badges made up, and give them out for free. The younger crowd love that kind of shit and will plaster it everywhere. As people stare at their finely toned, young, lithe, nubile bodies and then proceed to attempt to impress them into sleeping with them, they will be absorbing the logo as it is part of their sexually objectifying gaze. Consistent, recurring impression of a logo leaves a mental imprint.
      This doesn’t even include potential profits from selling more premium merchandise such as Tshirts.
      And if you are doing a flier campaign, for the love of god, don’t cheap out. You know what cheap fliers say about a night? It says it’s a night that you’re trying to save money on running.

      

      Instead of just stealing the first cool image from Google's image search, try looking on Flickr, and if the picture is in the Creative Commons, asking the person if they'd let you use it to promote your club.

      Pay to get some quality fliers made up that will actually grab some attention. Pay for a logo to be professionally designed instead of stealing some poor schmucks half tragic manga drawing from DeviantArt. Pay for some quality printing that stands out, such as metallic silver on one side, or embossing, or a nice texture to the paper. It makes a hell of a lot of difference the moment someone picks it up, and the moment it gets 10 more people through your door because they think it’s the kind of night they want to go to, it’s paid itself off.
      The same goes for ads in print media, like Beat Magazine. Sure, it’s costly upfront, and difficult to measure the returns, but you expose people to your event that otherwise would never here of it.

2. Too time consuming

   If it’s too time consuming to promote your own night, then you’re clearly not into it all that much. I’m well aware that most people on the goth scene have a life. Oddly enough, most people do. Either get a promotional team to do it for you, like Black Widows managed to pull together, or figure out ways to save time – mail fliers out to stores instead of visiting them individually perhaps.

3. Too technologically difficult to maintain

   Are you fucking kidding me?
   You’re so technologically incompetent that your only option is to run a site via MySpace and/or Facebook?
   I’m not saying that clubs shouldn’t have a MySpace and a Facebook page. They should. But that shouldn’t be it, that should be a complimentary part of the entire campaign.
   Seriously, it’s not hard to get a domain name (most of the nightclub names aren’t even taken in the .COM.AU domain space, and if people don’t move on it soon, I’m going to buy them and just point them all here folks), and a lot aren’t taken in the WWW.CLUB.COM space either… Zounds, it costs $9 a year to have a .COM and $25 for a .COM.AU.
   Imagine, you could have www.clubdv8.com.au or www.darkevents.net.au or something! ANYTHING!

   

   Seriously easy. Fercrisakes use the fucking thing!

   As for it being too difficult… Jesus is weeping and cutting himself so much that emos are believing in him again.
   WORDPRESS!
   Install it. It’s really easy. In fact, most hosting providers have a one-click install process now. And if you can’t do it on your own, probably 7 out of 10 of every goth you know actually knows how to do this. Once it’s installed, the most technologically inept person in existence can keep the articles up to date.
   I know this because my mother manages it somehow. Either way, once installed, there are numerous plug-ins (and they’re basically self installing) that will then automate the process of posting to all the other social sites out there for you. In essence, spending that little bit of time at the beginning will save you shitloads of it immediately down the track… And this is before we get into the benefit of being able to skin it in an attractive way – something that is beyond both Facebook’s (skinning) and MySpace’s (attractive) capabilities.

4. People will spread this by word of mouth

   Allow me to laugh at you in a very derisive, and possibly French, manner.

   

   This does not happen in real life

   I’ve been around the scene long enough to know that the word-of-mouth is negative 90% of the time. Most people don’t talk about good experiences that much, and will actively tell their friend of bad ones. This is an evolutionary behaviour to avoid negative consequences, and is still very active in humans today… Imagine how much worse this effect is with Goths, considering how whiny and complainy most of them are. I mean, have you checked out this site much? So much whining!
   What you need is for people looking up your clubs name online, to get immediately referenced to it… Not have to navigate through SPRACI, or MySpace, or the goth forums. Conversely, don’t send a private message or an invite to all of your friends via social networks to remind them about your night – it’s really fucking annoying. That’s where the specific fan page / profiles for your events come in, send private messages or invites through those channels.
   The best you can hope for is positive online reviews, which will get drowned out easily by someone with some cleverly search optimised page. Golgotha does this right, which is why it’s such a big deal.

   If you really want people spreading word of the club on their own, then you need to do something to stand out… in a positive way.
   Decorations for a start. Again, Black Widows is the only club that comes to mind when I think about appropriate decorations. Sure, they’re cheap and kitsch, but at least an effort is being made here. Is it so hard to get to the venue an hour earlier, and string up some chains with hooks on them? Maybe a few of those fake fire “vulcan” lamps? Something to make people actually stop and say “Wow, this looks like the kind of club you see in movies!”.
   It’s why I consistently recommend Gulag to my friends. Not because it’s free (although, we all ♥ Moni for that move), but because it actually looks like how I imagine a goth club should, having had a steady diet of craptacular vampire movies & TV shows…. Mmm, True Blood…

5. I’m trying to keep this scene exclusive and don’t want all the not-goth-enough types and emos to come

   Then your club will fail.
   It’s really as simple as that.
   As much as goths like to be pretentious wankers, myself included, but they don’t like it when other people are. It’s a little something we like to call hypocrisy.

   

   This has money, is easily impressionable, and will probably put out to anyone that has Robert Smith hair. It's basically an asset... And it will most likely be overage soon enough.

   Furthermore, you do want to get the younger crowd in (read: emos) because they actually have some discretionary income as they’re still living with their parents for the most part, and because they’ll evolve into full goths if exposed to enough UV-lighting based radiation.
   Volume over margin.
   You want more people coming because it leads to the club being more crowded, potentially having a line outside (an absolute rarity for goth clubs) that does make the club seem more exclusive without being wanky and pretentious (see above), and… uhhh… mmm… oh yeah, more people through the door means more money for you, the promoter! There’s also a chance that those people will actually bother to do the word of mouth thing.

This is even before you get into really advanced stuff, like exploiting the psychology behind building ‘cults’ and brand dominance like Apple do, and which I have explained to numerous promoters on many occasions, although to be fair, they were probably high or drunk at the time, because most goths barely ever see each other outside of the club scene.

Seriously, it’s not that hard people… I see someclubs doing one or two of these things, but none do all of them. The first club that does in each city is going to be the one that basically makes it pointless to try and run a night against them.

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2 Comments »

1. 

   Have I mentioned I love you lately?

   Because I do. Can we do one that’s a do and don’t at the club purty please? I can play miss manners for a post ^_^

   Also I’ll tell you about Perth’s goth and fetish scene as soon as I locate the right park benches. Seriously, their advertising is made of fail…

   Comment by Miss C Twist — April 16, 2010 @ 1:30 am

2. 

   Last time I checked, you actually have an account here… so if you want to be miss manners and make that post, go right ahead.

   Comment by Egofreaky — April 20, 2010 @ 6:43 pm

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