How to Increase Bowling Alley Revenue With Digital Signage

As of 2023, there are currently 2,832 bowling alleys operating in the United States. The number of bowling alleys in the U.S. has actually been decreasing for the last few years.

On the other hand, entertainment centers are projected to continue to grow in numbers for the foreseeable future, and the growing popularity of these centers is certainly affecting the number of people who choose bowling alleys as their entertainment activity of choice. However, this does not mean that a bowling alley cannot be a profitable business venture.

To stay relevant, bowling alleys need to modernize and take advantage of the best technologies available to them for increasing customers and maximizing profit.

Digital signage has been increasingly employed in nearly all business sectors, and with good reason. Digital signage is without a doubt one of the best ways to increase revenue for a business, and this is certainly the case with bowling alleys.

In this article, we will talk about some of the best methods for using bowling alley digital signage to increase revenue. By upgrading your bowling alley with digital signage, you can bring your business into the modern age where it can deftly compete with other entertainment businesses.

How to Use Digital Signage to Increase Bowling Alley Revenue

1. Use Digital Signage to Generate More Foot Traffic to your Bowling Alley

In this digital age, marketing has become a lot more complicated. People often use their mobile devices to find places to go for entertainment, but marketing in physical space is also very important.

In fact, an ideal marketing campaign is an omnichannel marketing campaign, where each channel of marketing forms one part of a marketing ecosystem, and each part reinforces the other parts.

When it comes to entertainment venues like bowling alleys, making use of the omnichannel marketing ecosystem is specifically important. People are picky when it comes to where they want to go for their entertainment, and in many cities and towns, the bowling alley is just one of many options to choose from.

This is why marketing is so essential. Since many businesses put most of their focus into digital marketing, these businesses miss out on the marketing opportunities in physical space that are also incredibly important in the marketing ecosystem.

Of course, digital marketing is important for bowling alleys, and we will discuss how digital signage can help improve the effectiveness of a bowling ally’s digital marketing, but in this section, we will discuss an often overlooked marketing feature: the sign or signs outside of your establishment.

Signs outside of a business can be so much more than markers that indicate the identity of a location. Yet, that is how so many businesses treat the signs outside of their establishments. This is a major loss since the sign or signs outside a business are extremely important for establishing brand identity, increasing brand awareness, and affecting customer perceptions.

Most businesses still use traditional signage with static words to mark their location, but people are so used to seeing these traditional signs that they are unlikely to make any real impression on the person that sees them. Again, this is a major loss.

Depending on where your business is located, any number of people may drive or walk by your establishment, and you want to make sure that your business looks as appealing as possible to these people and that the sign sticks in people’s minds so that they think about your business next time they want something fun to do.

Unlike traditional signage, digital signage is highly versatile and, if used right, can be an extremely powerful signifier of the good quality of your business and the services you offer. This is because digital signage is not limited to static visuals.

With digital signage, you can display high-quality images, aesthetic text, videos, and animations, all of which make digital signage extremely eye-catching and visually pleasing. The sign in front of a bowling alley should give people a taste of all of the fun they can have inside the establishment, but static signs convey stasis and conventionality.

Digital signage, on the other hand, can display activity, fun with friends and family, good food, the satisfaction of getting a strike, or the other fun things that people can do inside your establishment like playing arcade games, for example.

Digital signage allows for creative marketing that static signage is simply incapable of, and thus, if you want to take advantage of the incredible marketing opportunity presented by your outdoor signs, then digital signage is the best option.

And of course, more people frequenting your bowling alley means more revenue.

2. Increase Customer Engagement with Social Media

As we have noted earlier, it is incredibly important for businesses, especially businesses in the entertainment venue industry, to have a strong online presence, and one of the key factors in a strong online presence is active and engaging social media feeds.

But what does digital signage have to do with social media? Well, with digital signage, you can display your bowling alley’s social media feed where no one will miss it.

If people see that you have an engaging feed, then they will be more likely to follow your accounts, which opens up a new channel for marketing and promotions.

But you don’t have to just show your bowling alley’s feed. With digital signage, you can show posts in which people have tagged your business in real-time.

This is a great way to encourage more people to post about your venue, something that is already common in entertainment businesses since people often go with their friends or family and want to share pictures online. By encouraging people to make more posts, you get customers engaged, and you also encourage this highly effective word-of-mouth marketing.

To incentivize people to post about your business, you can offer promotions or specials, or people could enter into contests over the best post for a prize. These kinds of things are what get people truly involved with a business, fostering brand loyalty and increasing brand awareness through recommendations and invites.

3. Increase Food and Drink Sales with a Digital Menu Board

Many, if not most, bowling alleys serve some sort of food and drinks. Having good food and drink options is a great way to increase revenue since your business can make money from selling these products. Additionally, having good food and drinks can greatly increase customer dwell time.

Customer dwell time is the amount of time the customer stays in your establishment. This can create more revenue because the longer customers stay in your bowling alley, the more games they will purchase. Thus, if people know that they can eat at your bowling alley, they will likely stay much longer, potentially playing a few games both before and after eating.

So it is clear that good food and drinks are beneficial to a bowling alley’s bottom line, but digital signage can take these benefits to a new level with the installation of digital menu boards.

With digital menu boards, you can display your food and drinks with high-quality images and videos. Unlike traditional menus or signs, digital menu boards are hard to miss, and once you’ve got the customer’s attention, the yummy visuals will seal the deal.

Additionally, digital menu boards can greatly improve the customer experience by reducing perceived wait time. No one likes to wait in lines for their food, but sometimes this is simply unavoidable. However, you can make the experience less painful with digital signage.

Real-wait time is the actual amount of time that a person waits, while perceived wait time is how much time a customer feels like they have been waiting. Typically, when people are entertained, the perceived wait time is decreased.

Luckily, digital menu boards can be far more entertaining than traditional menu boards. Thus, digital menu boards can reduce perceived wait times and improve the customer experience overall.

4. Promote Events with Eye-Catching Digital Visuals

Hosting events is one of the best ways for bowling alleys to increase revenue. Events bring more people to your establishment, and when people have such fun at events, they will be much more likely to visit your bowling alley in the future.

There are so many events that a bowling alley can host. One obvious example is bowling tournaments. These are great for people that love a little competition, which is certainly one of the major drawing factors for bowling alleys to begin with.

But there are many other types of events that your bowling alley can host. Some examples are ladies nights, karaoke nights, themed nights, and much more. Events like these can go a long way in drawing more customers to your bowling alley, and ultimately, fostering more loyal customers.

Hosting good events, however, is not enough. You need to effectively promote these events so that people actually know about them. Of course, social media is an incredible way to inform your customers about events that are coming up. Still, you can do much more.

It should be clear by now that one of the major benefits of digital signage is that digital content can be extremely eye-catching, entertaining, and visually pleasing.

Thus, if you want to promote your events to a demographic that would be likely to come to your events, then there is no better place to do your promotions than inside the very walls of your bowling alley.

With digital signage, you can use images, text, videos, and animations that ensure that no one will miss the event promotion and that the event looks as fun as possible, so once people know about the event, they will also feel a strong desire to attend.

5. Use Digital Signage to Generate an Alternative Revenue Stream

So we have talked about some ways that digital signage can help to increase revenue through optimizing marketing and improving the customer experience, but there is another way that digital signage can become a source of revenue for your bowling alley.

It is certainly important that you use many of your digital displays to showcase many of the types of content that we have talked about above, but that does not mean you cannot have other screens that are dedicated to another purpose: showing advertisements.

Many companies have realized that showing advertisements on televised commercial breaks, social media, and the radio is not enough. In fact, many businesses are realizing that one of the best ways to market their products or services is by showing their advertisements in other businesses.

With digital signage, your bowling alley can establish an alternative revenue stream by showing advertisements for other businesses on your digital displays.

In this way, you get all the benefits of a high-quality digital signage solution and the benefit of an easy way to generate an alternative revenue stream.

You might have been wondering while reading this article how much digital signage costs, and you may have been skeptical of whether the benefits would outweigh the costs.

Loop TV is a digital signage option for screens. Loop TV offers over 200 fully-licensed channels of premium entertainment content (with both music and non-music options) as well as digital signage platform that allows you to create customized signage.

Digital Signage: One of the Best Tools for Increasing Revenue

As we have shown in this article, there are tons of ways that you can use digital signage to increase your bowling alley revenue.

With digital signage, you can spread brand awareness, generate more foot traffic, improve the customer experience, and increase customer engagement. There are not many other technologies on the market that can do all of that!