Haunted Attraction Marketing Using Myspace.com
As haunted attraction owners and operators we need to market our attractions to the teenage and young adult market. They make up the largest portion of our annual customer base and are the driving force behind the attendance of many others such as parents and siblings.
In order to reach these youths, we have to direct our message to them via a media that they will see and attempt to reach them at a time and place where they will be receptive. This generation presents a unique challenge in this regard. To make some generalizations; they are not newspaper readers, their television viewing is limited and they tend to flip through most commercials and satellite radio and Ipods® have replaced local radio stations for most of them. So how do we reach this illusive demographic? The Internet, plain and simple! There is no more cost effective or efficient method of marketing to teenagers and young adults today than the Internet.
We are all familiar with the concept that any haunted attraction needs a well designed web site to present your calendar of operations, preview pictures from your haunted house, special event information and online coupons. Many haunted houses report that a significant portion of their ticket sales are online via their web site. However, your web site cannot serve these purposes unless you get large numbers of online visitors. To do that, you have to get the word out.
What if I told you about a place with almost 65 million online users, where over 250,000 new members joined daily and that thousands of these members were teenagers and young adults within 50 miles of your haunted house? Would I have your attention? That place is Myspace.com; and if you are not currently including it in your marketing mix, you are making a mistake. Major corporations understand the power of Myspace; Toyota recently launched a Myspace profile to promote their new Yaris vehicle and Pepsi, Coca Cola, Burger King and Circuit City have full fledge Myspace.com campaigns in progress as you read this.
We launched our Myspace profile in February, 2006 and almost immediately saw traffic to our web site spike to levels we would normally see only during late September and October each year.
By launching and maintaining a Myspace.com profile for your haunted attraction you can tap into a fantastic source for customers as well as actors and volunteers.
Now that I’ve sold you on the power of Myspace, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts. You’ll need to create your Myspace profile, customize it and begin the process of adding friends to your profile. Everything on Myspace revolves around the concept of ‘friends’. Once another member becomes your Myspace friend, you can send them bulletins, event invitations, notify them of updates to your online blog, etc.
To create your profile, simply visit Myspace.com and fill out the online form. When creating your profile, keep in mind that you are creating this for your haunted attraction and not yourself. Select a birth date that will make you 99 years old rather than your actual birth date, etc.
Once you’ve created the profile, it’s time to customize it. Put just as much effort into this as you would your primary web site. Image is everything, particularly with this demographic. Your profile needs to be cool and reflect the fun and excitement of your haunted attraction. Make sure to fill the photo gallery with pictures of teenagers and young adults being scared and having a great time at your attraction, if you have video from your attraction, set it to some background music and post it on your profile as well. There are many sites online offering pre-designed templates to make your profile stand out. Often times, it makes sense to start out with one of these templates and then make the other changes you desire from there. Simply visit Google and search for Myspace profiles. You will find hundreds of sites offering templates for you to choose from.
Now the real work begins. It’s time to start collecting friends. You can’t sit back and let them come to you. Firstly, you won’t get the volume of friends that you want and secondly, the people who seek you out will tend to be other haunted house owners, horror movie fans, etc. who are not from your immediate area and not likely to attend your event. It’s fine to add these folks as friends, but your goal should be to keep 90% of your total friends from a 50 mile radius of your attraction. The first step will be to search for those people in your geographic area who are potential customers for your attraction. To do this, log into your Myspace profile, then click on ‘browse’ at the top of the page. This will bring you to a screen where you can narrow your search. I would recommend selecting ‘both’ for gender, the minimum and maximum values for age then checking pretty much everything else. In the located within section, start out by selecting within 10 miles of your zip code, you will be shocked at the number of results you get.
The method I have found most successful for adding friends is to visit their profile and send them a message telling them a little about your attraction and then asking them to add you as a friend. This will produce a much greater percentage of adds than simply clicking ‘add as a friend’ on each profile. Save this message as a text file on your computer so that you can simply copy and paste it into the message form. I’ve provided a copy of the message I send out for our attraction below to give you an idea of what I am talking about.
My name is Brett and I am the director of Fear Fair. It's a haunted house in Seymour, Indiana. We have been here for five years and we're the biggest haunted house in Southern Indiana. We put on a really good show and are just trying to make friends through Myspace to get the word out about our haunt. We will be having contests through bulletins and stuff to give away free tickets when we get closer to October, plus we are always looking for new actors and actresses. It’s a blast.
Be sure to check out the videos on our page from last year's edition of Fear Fair!
We also do a free concert every year the third Saturday in October, the last few years we have had some of the hottest local bands play the Fearstock stage! Bands like Year of Desolation, Creep, Maltese Cross, 650 North, Cornbred Mafia and many others.
Please consider adding us to help us spread the word. Fear Fair is a lot of fun.
You can also include a link directly within this message that the reader can click on to add you as a friend.
Something you may want to consider is purchasing a software application to automate this process. I have had great success with a product called Eek! Adder (www.eekrecords.com). This product can perform the process of sending messages for you automatically and save a tremendous amount of time. There is a very active user forum on the company’s site where you can learn helpful tips in using the program. I would encourage you to do a bit of research prior to using an automated adder such as this, as there are some mistakes and pitfalls to avoid; but it can save you a tremendous amount of time.
After you’ve sent your first round of messages to prospective friends, wait a bit, then log back into your profile. You will hopefully have a number of new friend requests. As you approve each of your new friends, you will want to add a comment to their profile. This will help cement the new ‘friendship’ as well as promoting your attraction to all those who visit your new friend’s profile. Save this ‘thanks for the add’ message as a text file so you can copy and paste it as well. I have included a picture of our current comment as an example.
Using this method, I have added over 2000 friends to our profile in the past few months, over 90% of whom live within 30 miles of our attraction. I challenge any other advertising method to produce this volume of responses with as highly targeted focus.
You’re not done now that you’ve added the friends, it’s a continuing effort to update your profile, send out bulletins, post blog entries, etc. Remember, this is a demographic with an abbreviated attention span. It’s essential that you do something on almost a weekly basis to keep their attention. If you see a trailer for a new horror movie coming out, send out a bulletin to your friends about it. Post frequent blog entries as you work on the build out for this year’s haunt. Consider sending out bulletins asking for input on what your friends would like to see added to your attraction. One feature of Myspace you can use to your advantage is the birthday feature. Create a comment entry similar to your thanks for the add entry and keep it in a copy and paste format, then send it out to your friends on their birthday. As you get close to your opening date, run contests for free tickets via your bulletins. The only limit is your imagination.
Properly used, your Myspace profile can be a very powerful marketing tool for your haunted attraction.
Brett Hays has served as director of Fear Fair haunted house for six years. Brett is also an attorney and has owned and operated several Internet marketing companies. Fear Fair is located in Seymour, Indiana and is the largest haunted attraction in Southern Indiana. Brett maintains the Myspace profile for Fear Fair at www.myspace.com/fearfair.
