Thoughts on Facebook Advertising?

[HordeOfUndead]

Still on a limited budget, but with one year of experience under our belt, phenomenal positive feedback, and in much better shape heading into our second season we definitely need to refine marketing efforts.

Modifications to existing attraction and building a second new attraction this season will blow people away and the time to modify will be minimal compared to year one.

However, we started marketing efforts a little later than we wanted to last season with basically a 5 person team building the haunt from scratch starting August 1st while the 5 of us also marketed throughout September & October. Our location is within a 2 mile proximity of many high school, college, and university campuses. (the best part of 30,000 students)

We heavily covered campuses week after week with our posters & flyers with success. Marketing material is already finalized for this season and we now have QR codes on posters/flyers directing to our Facebook page. We think this will be effective with where we concentrate our posters/flyers on campuses. But it needs to have more of an impact this year considering the mass amount of students near our haunt.

There are many things we'll be refining this year but we're considering new avenues for marketing such as, Facebook advertising, possible 1-2 billboards in our area (we're the only pro-haunt in the City of Buffalo compared to the 3 other excellent veteran haunts in other areas of town), earlier cross promotion with local haunts, flyer/coupon distribution points with local business, advertising in college/university newspapers, and getting involved with fall/Halloween events in the community.

Have any of you used Facebook advertising? We were messing around with setting up the target demographics (age, Facebook page Likes, interests, etc, etc) with a $50 cap each day PPC (pay per click). We could hypothetically run if for the whole month of September with potential for close to 100 new "Likes" each day.

Any thoughts from other owners who believe Facebook advertising may or may not be an effective way to advertise and increase fans?

[UnDeRTaKer313]

http://seoencore.com/products/facebook-domination/

I have an online course on Facebook Marketing and how we were able to make facebook marketing work for us without spending money on advertising.
It is definitely an important piece of the internet marketing puzzle.
Also if you are on the fence about spending money on advertising for your fan page or not, go ahead and check out this video first you might be able to save yourself some money.

If you need any help don't hesitate to contact me!

[HauntedPaws]

Ads via FB worthless. Having a FB presence and posting things on your page which are seen by fans, friends etc priceless.

[Greg Chrise]

Having your original characters freind people or be in the maybe you know this person catagory all year long costs nothing. People who dig it will join, people that don't like anonymous characters are no fun anyhow. It onviously is an advertisement for the haunt web site but not blatantly forced on anyone, you can invite everyone to an event!

Every post like casting calls, build out crew, set designer, make up people, are all excuses to contact everyone on the planet you have been able to freind organically.

Pay per click at 50 cents a pop still means only one in 20 might actually get off the couch and come buy a ticket so you have really paid $10 per customer. Hopefully they bring another person or two is your only hope. $10 a customer might be wonderful if you were a dentist and each visit made $140 minimum per ticket. on the other hand, that $50 budget might be fine as an investment long term but, I think it is expensive. I would not expect year to year loyalty or excitement but for small percentages of people.


I had some soliciter call my phone and tell me that is why Google is so rich and it would work for me too! They want to pay Google 50 cents and they want 50 cents too! So I give them $1 pay per click and somehow I'm thinking yeah, that is why google is rich because someone gave them money. It doesn't mean the crap coverted to anyone coming to your business and making a profit.


It just depends on whether you are sitting on stacks of cash or not. I have heard tale of big city people doing such things but they only see 10,000 customers in an immediate area of 240,000 population. If it really worked they would be at 24,000 people so I'm not impressed.

[HordeOfUndead]

Thank you guys for the replies already. Very good points. We were already leaning toward not doing Facebook ads, but it was on our list of possibilities.

Was just curious as to whether any others had used FB ads to pull in fans (more so 1st and second season haunters who are still building up a customer base).

[UnDeRTaKer313]

we spent $20,000 on marketing last year.
we did a huge facebook campaign and i did a big SEO campaign and %90 of the people that we polled at the door said either facebook or google. i would say %60 were google and %40facebook.

Also SEO does not cost you per click and you are not paying google just to clear that up.
Take it for what its worth, but the era of marketing is going completely online and you can either jump on board or be left behind.