Haunted houses have local business marketing down and you could take some of their strategies and apply them year round. Haunted houses operate for a single month out of the year so they have to pull their entire audience in during that time or fade away like a ghost. They will spend upwards of 30-50% of their money on marketing. Their goal to bring the locals to their location during their single month of operation. How do they do that? Through creative local marketing ideas. Ever seen monsters roaming your local store or a gang of werewolves in a parade? I have on many occasions and you know what I may forget the floats in the parade or what I went to the store for but you know what I remember is those monsters where they don’t belong. Its unique and outside of the box thinking that every business should be doing. You can no longer just throw money at PPC campaigns and SEO and content to be found online. You have to tie that all in with offline activities that are going to create buzz online.
Picture Worthy Moments For Marketing
During the month of September you will start to see flyers and posters popping up all over. However depending on where you are located you may see monsters in a local parade or at a farmers market, in a store. You know what happens when people see this in our wonderfully connected world. Smartphones start coming out and pictures get snapped of the monsters and with the monsters. Then they send those pictures to friends and post them to Facebook, Twitter and Google. Now you have created buzz in your local community. Do something picture worthy to grab attention because if you do it will get shared its what we do in this connected world.
Top 10 FEAR Pics for the week of May 11, 2014 | Nightmares Fear Factoryand throughout the rest of the year.
Found at http://buff.ly/1kIA2Ij
A great example of the picture situation is Nightmares Fear Factory a haunted house in Niagara Falls which snaps photos as they scare you. Their pictures are famous for October
Social Integration
Every haunted house I go to or see sites for has began embracing social media. They have twitter feeds, Facebook pages, Google pages, LinkedIn pages they do it all. I am still surprised when I go to a local business and they have no links to social media profiles. These days social media and the engagement that comes along with it when you do something spectacular is a top factor in your success in local marketing strategies online. These main sites are where your audience is at. During the 2012 season we run a ton of Google and Facebook advertising and while we did not get to track a whole lot of it we did ask everyone Halloween night and what we found was shocking. Well over 60% had found out about the haunted house from those two locations. Not only that but on slow nights we could post a ticket promotion out to our Facebook fan base and in some occasions double our attendance. Whats that online marketing saying “The Money Is In The Email List”. Well its not just the email list, your Facebook following, Google+ and Twitter following (automate it with CinchTwet) work the same exact way. The great thing about Facebook is you can run ads on there for dirt cheap that target your exact audience so if you know your demographics you can go after them only. On Google you can target location specific really well also. With those two paid advertising locations you can do wonders.
Local Business Promotion Ideas
We give tickets away on the radio, Facebook and other places. One year we did hearse taxi service where we actually sent a funeral attendant out to pick up our promotion winners in a hearse. Talk about coverage on the radio, that went over great. We put the haunted house on the side of the hearse for promotional purposes and got tons of attention driving our victims to the haunted house.
NorCal Pirate Festival Pirates of Emerson – Google Search
Found at http://buff.ly/1kIGj6H
Other ideas are based around local events that can be tied into the haunted house. At the Nor Cal Pirate Festival every year the Pirates of Emerson bring their terrifying pirates to the festival and hand out flyers. Scary pirates, pictures and flyers. Think that gets shared online at all? Among that crowd which is also very likely to visit your haunted house… Yes!
Now imagine these iconic characters of your haunted house in a parade. Don’t have monsters and scary pirates you ask, well do you have a mascot? No mascot, what about sponsoring a float in the parade or doing your own? Now your in front of all those guests and able to hand out coupons, flyers, swag with your logo or business information on it. Think that might work? If your saying no you need to rethink because these haunted houses thrive on this type of stuff and they pull in all their guests in a single month. A mega haunt can see 40,000 to 60,000 guests in a month and on average spend $2-$5 per ticket sale on marketing to bring them in. This stuff works and it works well. How many times during the month of October do you see interviews and specials on local haunted houses. I always see something on my local news.
Local Business Marketing Scares Outside The Box
Haunted houses know how to market and they do it fast and hardcore. They push out tens of thousands of flyers to local shopping centers and related Halloween store locations. They participate in parades and other local events. They giveaway tickets and other swag on the radio and at local events. When you have to attract 40,000+ victims in a 1 month window you start a month prior and you push out marketing like no one else. Why do they do it? Because it is effective. The pictures get shared year round, especially on Pinterest. So when September rolls around in your town if you have a haunted house pay attention to what they do, some are small scale but the mega haunts you will find everywhere if you pay attention. Take a tip or two from this tiny industry that spends an incredible amount of its money on marketing every year, it could work for any business, just think outside the box and apply it to your business.
Link to this page
Latest posts by Grant Brott (see all)
- CinchTweet Review - November 26, 2017
- Market Like A Haunted House – Local Business Marketing - June 17, 2014
- How To Get Reviews For Your Business - January 20, 2014