Advertising for 2010

[spookhaven]

I have been working overtime to find out what worked and what didn't for advertising this year.

I pulled all the numbers today from the website and it seems that two places stand out;

1. Largest percentage of unique visitors were direct. That means it could have been a number of places (ie fliers, signs, billboards, etc) and;
2. Hauntworld was my second largest draw for all search engines.

So my question to you is, what did you find most effective for advertising dollars? I found the largest place for click throughs was hauntworld, haunted house online, etc. So the banner paid off.

Any comments or ideas?

[EMBRUJADA]

For the beste results in advertising has billboards, flyers , posters, in parades, web pages of local events, sponsors, google, yahoo adds, youtube channel, coupons, social webs, press information

[Frightguy1]

We didn't advertise on Hauntworld this year but we did place ads on Facebook and found them to be very helpful. We also took advantages of numerous in stores with our characters and various street fairs. The best source however was still the local newspapers in our area..everyone who came out said they said our write ups in the paper then went to our website and used our coupons that were only valid on opening night. Print is still hanging in there...

J.
Producer
Grimlock Manor Haunted Attraction
www.grimlockmanor.com

[Badger]

I still think radio / TV is very effective if you can afford it.






(Of course I'm a bit biased because I make a portion of my living doing voicework for haunts...)

[legendsofthefog]

2010

More than 75% of our traffic was both direct, and from search engines via radio, billboard, and tv ads. The top 20 searches through google have been some derivative of Legends of the Fog. Our web traffic was up over 90% this year overall. Other traffic came from mdhaunts.com a haunt site set up just for Maryland haunters... great bang for the buck! Others were facebook, myspace, and other social networking sites and misc. articles written about our haunt.

We did not spend the money to purchase hauntworld banners this season, since we put our web budget upgrading our web site. I know that hauntworld drives traffic to your web site, but is there any way to measure how many people from hauntworld actually come to your haunt? Does hauntworld drive customers from long distances to your haunt? or does it also touch on your local market? I plan to purchase an ad this season, but I just wanted some feedback from others.

Badger,
Do you have samples of your voicework? or a web site? We used a company last season that didn't quite produce what we were looking for.

[Badger]

Badger,
Do you have samples of your voicework? or a web site? We used a company last season that didn't quite produce what we were looking for.

Just listen to Rotting Flesh Radio...

Or you can visit: http://www.voice123.com/andrewcale

I plan on having a web site for my consulting business, including voicework, up in early 2010. Stand by for that. Feel free to contact me if you need more info...

[monsterwax]

The problem with TV is there are so many channels, one can spend a fortune trying to reach a market that has cable. Standard cable offers 62 channels in this area. If one wanted to reach just 1/5th of the channels, that would be about a dozen different. None of them are willing to do any barter either. Gone are the days of just two or three stations per market. And with the DVDs, and on-demand viewings, it's very hard and very expensive to reach a large chunk of any given audience.

On the upside, it's very easy to find haunts on the web. Thank goodness for that.

[spookhaven]

[QUOTE=legendsofthefog;81387]More than 75% of our traffic was both direct, and from search engines via radio, billboard, and tv ads. The top 20 searches through google have been some derivative of Legends of the Fog. Our web traffic was up over 90% this year overall. Other traffic came from mdhaunts.com a haunt site set up just for Maryland haunters... great bang for the buck! Others were facebook, myspace, and other social networking sites and misc. articles written about our haunt.

We did not spend the money to purchase hauntworld banners this season, since we put our web budget upgrading our web site. I know that hauntworld drives traffic to your web site, but is there any way to measure how many people from hauntworld actually come to your haunt? Does hauntworld drive customers from long distances to your haunt? or does it also touch on your local market? I plan to purchase an ad this season, but I just wanted some feedback from others.

Legend: our website gives us a breakdown of hauntworld leads. We have gotten people from out of town and neighboring states directly from their search. Best thing we did was then have a quick verbal exit poll and ask the groups where they found out about our haunt, are the repeat customers, etc. We did NO radio advertising this year as we focused on local fairs and events such as parades for the local market, billboards, and signage. Our out of town people came mainly from searches on internet and were directed through Hauntworld, haunted house finder, google, yahoo, etc. Our direct hits were of course the larger percentage but I attribute that to local advertising, repeat customers, and facebook/myspace/twitter. I would highly recommend Hauntworld. I actually am "beefing my advertising up" on this site for 2010.

Good luck and thanks for the response. I am trying to get a feel for wait worked outside of our area. We have tried to work a bit smarter with advertising. I am looking into buying the click through with google.

[Darkangel]

Hauntworld

Maybe the prices for banners will come down a little this year in since the overall industry was down by around 25% or so ???

DA

[spookhaven]

I don't think so. I have been back and forth with Patty and I don't believe they are going up but not looking for them to go down. I believe Larry is adding some more features to the site for traffic however. With all the google, yahoo, bing, etc search engines hauntworld seemed to be my best click through on traffic. Believe me, I would love to see the prices go down, but they have the market on this one. You get what you pay for.