Palace Cinemas: Strategies for Online Partnerships and Marketing

This report analyzes the online partnership program proposed for Palace Cinemas, focusing on attracting two key customer segments: retirees (60+) and individuals aged 35-44. The strategies include affiliate programs with local businesses and community groups, offering discounts to retirees, and utilizing affiliate marketing for the younger demographic. The report suggests partnerships with insurance and airline companies for cross-promotional opportunities. Evaluation metrics, such as Google Analytics and Alexa, are discussed, along with key performance indicators (KPIs) like total visits, new sessions, and conversion rates. The report also outlines the implementation of a digital marketing team following the SOSTAC framework (Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, and Control) to ensure effective execution and measurement of the marketing efforts.

Palace Cinemas
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Online Partnership
The Palace Cinema can engage in the online partnership or affiliate program that can help
bring the customers to it. The affiliate programs will encourage the partners of Palace Cinema
in earning some money in return of referring the customers to the Cinema. At present, there
are two customer segments that have been targeted for the online partnership program. The
first group falls in the age group of 60+ years. They are retirees who hold no responsibilities
in their lives and have ample amount of time to spend having fun. This group can be observed
hanging out in areas such as restaurants, winery, and local community.
The presence of these people in at the winery and in the local community groups can be
found in abundance and therefore these formations can be contacted to ensure that this
customer group is referred from there. In this referral, the party referring the customers will
be getting five to seven per-cent of what is being earned by the Cinema as commission. The
provision for the commission is important as it will ensure that the parties stay motivated for
the future and keep sending the customer to the cinema. In addition to that, it is also
important that the customers are also provided some element of attraction so that they can
come to pay the visit. As stated earlier that the first target customer is the retirees, therefore it
is clear that they have limited source of income but more time to have fun. Therefore, giving
them some discount on tickets would be an appreciable move to attract them. It has been
suggested that this customer group should be given 10% discount on the tickets they are
buying. The Palace can pay commission for each of the customers who is visiting the Palace.
This cannot be stated as the loss on the profitability for the Palace in the long run. The reason
is that in the long run the, it is most likely that with this effort, the popularity of the Palace
will increase and if the customers liked its services, then the current expenditure can be
covered in the later period.

The next target group for the Palace is to engage with the volunteers for conservation
activities. These can also gain the opportunity to earn some fund by referring the customers to
the Palace. Added to that, the partnership with the insurance company is suggested for the life
insurance requirements. Some of the examples are Bupa, AAMI, Allianz and others
(Bupa.com.au, 2017). The cooperation with the local grocery shops to put discounts on their
reward card or Flybuys will act as an appreciable move. Moreover, the cooperation with the
flight companies can be done for the achievement of the purpose. There are various private
popular flight companies would find the deal profitable and an opportunity to increase their
side income by engaging in the referral activities. Some of the airline companies are Vrigin,
Qantas, Jetstar, and others (Movies.qantaspoints.com, 2017).
It can be observed that most of the method that have been applied to attract the customers
from the retirees group is that the retirees are those adopt the technology very late and still
there are limited number of people from this group are who are present on the online
network. They are adopting the new technologies very slowly. This is the reason, the use of
referral aspects from the partners is important.
Affiliate Marketing
Another group who is under the target are those who fall in the age of 35 years to 44 years.
These individuals are the online adopters of the technology and they also use the services that
are being used by the retirees. However, they prefer to use the online method to facilitate
their life styles more than the online elements. Therefore, the use of affiliate marketing can be
beneficial for this group (Profile, 2017). In addition to this group, the individuals from the
retirees’ group can also be found on the online channels to some extent and therefore the use
of affiliate marketing can target both the groups. At present, there are various websites that

help facilitate this goal such as groupon.com.au, hotels.com, booking.com, agoda,
amazon.com, and others.
Evaluation Measures and Metrics
The evaluation and measurement of marketing effort is necessary to ensure that the
investment is going as per the plan and things are on track. As per the online traffic
assessment is concerned, there are various online tools and techniques that are available to
use for the marketers. The most common that is used by the marketers these days is Google
analytics. It is a well-known aspect in the online community that most of the search engine
optimization activity is done targeting the ranking improvement on Google. The Google
Analytics will help in understanding the source of traffic and the time they spent engaging
with the website. This will help in understanding or making comparison between the amounts
of traffic that reached the website of Palace and the percentage of them that got converted
into actual sales. In addition to this there are some more tools such as Alexa which has been
acquired by Amazon recently. Alexa also provides all the necessary analytics metrics that can
be used to understand the performance of the website.
In addition to above, if the sales from the website are increasing continuously then it can be
stated that the website or online affiliate program is performing appreciably well. However, it
should not be ignored that the sales alone cannot be the only the performance metric as
assessment of traffic becomes important. It can be understood by an example that if hundred
customers are visiting a store and only twenty made purchase which was 15 units higher than
the previous sale, then the store owner will view the increase in the sale by 75% however, the
store might miss to see the traffic that hit the store. In comparison to traffic, the sale was only
20%. The same concept applies in the online space.

There are some frameworks that can be used while working in the online space to get the
desired result. One of the interesting frameworks is that of Chaffey. In this framework, there
are six elements namely, Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, and
Control (Smart Insights, 2017). These six steps can be used design and develop online
marketing strategy. This can be the useful framework to utilise as helps understand the
objectives that are to be achieved and then focus on the formation of plans required to
achieve those objectives. This method can be used by the Palace to taste the online success.
Moreover, the visitor volume – referred as website traffic earlier – on the website can be used
to understand where the marketing effort has reached and accordingly the plan can be
improved every month.
However, one thing should be under the scanner that not all metrics can be useful for an
organization all the time and, therefore Palace Cinemas should use limited number of metrics.
Given below are some of the metrics that should be used by Palace followed by those that
should be ignored.
Metrics to follow:
Total visits: This shows the total traffic that reached the website of the Palace.
New sessions: This shows the number of unique visitors to the site. This will show the
effectiveness of new ads or affiliate effort.
Channel specific traffic: This shows from where the users are coming. This will help
understand the most effective traffic source.
Total conversions: This shows the number of people who made the purchase after visiting the
site.
Lead to close ratio: This shows the effectiveness of affiliate programs.

Metrics to ignore:
Bounce rate: The Palace’s website is not an engagement site as the goal of customers will be
to visit and make purchases therefore wasting time behind bounce rate would be unnecessary.
Errors: Assessing errors on continuous basis are of no use till it is not beneficial.
Social media sharing: It has no relevance directly to revenue generation
Satisfaction rate: It is more vague than clear and effort would be a waste behind this metric.
A digital marketing tea will be set up to bring the plan to fruition. The team will have a SEO
expert, SMM expert, programmer, ad developer, analyst, and a manager. These individuals
will be working together to reach the objective. The team will follow the earlier discussed six
steps – Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, and Control – to ensure that
the right actions are being taken.
Student Reflection
It has been identified that the urgent issue of Palace cinema is try to reach the 60+ retirees by
digital marketing instead of traditional method. They are not actively online so the best way
to interact with them is through their common community and social activities they join
daily. On the other hand, the other group are high earning and are active on the internet. They
are willing to pay for families’ ticket but considering reasonable price. This is where the
offers and discounts will come into the picture and benefit in attracting them. This group
wants the best quality cinema where they can enjoy with their kids.

References
Bupa.com.au. (2017). Member Discount Partners - Bupa. [online] Available at:
http://www.bupa.com.au/health-and-wellness/member-discount-partners [Accessed 5 Apr.
2017].
Movies.qantaspoints.com. (2017). Buy Movie Vouchers | Earn Qantas Points | Qantas
Movies. [online] Available at: https://movies.qantaspoints.com [Accessed 5 Apr. 2017].
Profile, A. (2017). 20 Top Australian Affiliate programs to make your blog money | Digital
Grog | Technology Blog Australia. [online] Digitalgrog.com.au. Available at:
http://www.digitalgrog.com.au/affiliate/20-top-brands-with-partner-affiliate-programs-to-
make-you-money-in-2016/ [Accessed 5 Apr. 2017].
Smart Insights. (2017). SOSTAC marketing planning model guide. [online] Available at:
http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/sostac-model/ [Accessed 5 Apr.
2017].