Cheap advertising

[BrotherMysterio]

I just like to point out that it's not illegal to send an unsolicited email as long as you are clearly identifying yourself and your business as laid out in the Can Spam act. Having apparently stumbled into a snakes den of religious anti-spam zealots who resort to personal attacks, I resign... as I'm sure most contributors due under the unrelenting pressure of the Wikipedia moderator generation.

And BrotherMysterio, you remind me SO much of my older brother it's crazy. Can't wait to see the "quote=" and witty retort for each line.

Well, I thought you weren't going to argue with a "know-it-all", yet you do try unrelentingly to get the last word in (something that your older brother probably finds amusing), but, either way, since the general consensus is that most people here aren't keen on spamming, I think it only appropriate that we press on, sans spam suggestion.

C.

[Skeered]

Or it could also be one of those "third party announcements" options that auto-populate whenever you sign up for new email addresses, social media and networking accounts, and so on. There are so many "legit" ways for major companies to engage in email marketing, that they don't need to do baldfaced, blatant spamming.

I finally rented a movie from Redbox for the 1st time 3 weeks ago. When it got to the part of asking for your email address I grudgingly typed it in. I knew I would receive some junk mail but didn't know what. Over the next week I received junk email from about 25 different senders. A couple reputable namebrands such as Snuggle fabric softener and Welch fruit snacks was the top two I recognized and they offered samples with their ads. Took about a week to stop receiving emails after unsubscribing to all of them. If anything I am quite impressed that when I unsubscribed, that meant unsubscribe and not a bunch of crap trickling in slowly. Just goes to show how much value is placed in not pissing off potential customers.

[mrfoos]

yet you do try unrelentingly to get the last word

You mean like this?

And what's you opinion on emailing your local college about your upcoming haunted house? I'm not sure you were clear on your stance.

Thanks!


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[BrotherMysterio]

I finally rented a movie from Redbox for the 1st time 3 weeks ago. When it got to the part of asking for your email address I grudgingly typed it in. I knew I would receive some junk mail but didn't know what. Over the next week I received junk email from about 25 different senders. A couple reputable name-brands such as Snuggle fabric softener and Welch fruit snacks was the top two I recognized and they offered samples with their ads. Took about a week to stop receiving emails after unsubscribing to all of them. If anything I am quite impressed that when I unsubscribed, that meant unsubscribe and not a bunch of crap trickling in slowly. Just goes to show how much value is placed in not pissing off potential customers.

Indeed. Incidentally, you don't have to enter an email address. You can opt out of that.

C.

[Skeered]

religious anti-spam zealots who resort to personal attacks

What personal attack?

[BrotherMysterio]

You mean like this?

No, more like that.

Frankly, I'm not interested in a flame war, which is pointless. Either way, like I said, we'll simply have to agree to disagree.

As for your other question, I have no idea what you are talking about. Who exactly are you emailing? The college registrar? The head of the entertainment committee? What exactly are you talking about? I'm not sure you're clear on your actual question.

Either way, there are legit ways to build email lists where the recipients are actually happy to receive email messages, and those email messages are considered value added.

Apart from that, I'm not quite sure why you've spent some seven posts promoting spamming as a legit business practice. I'd say we simply press on with other methods of cheap to free marketing methods.

C.

[Jim Warfield]

Has to be or to get noticed to have a chance of stimulating customers.
What do they notice? Usually something strange, funny, different from the perceived "norm", I say.
When the Ford Motor Company began they were just barely in business when some anonymous person began printing postcards with simple cartoons making fun of the Model "T" Ford!
This was Ford's secret marketing tool that worked very well, considering how many years they manufactured the same car and how many they sold.
People like to laugh and think at the same time. (Some feel it as the ultimate challenge, maybe?)
My old, first flyers were full of my own drawings and silly sayings and people noticed them, thought about my place. Another bunch of my flyers for many years featured an original poem I wrote, with funny lines concerning my house and how people reacted to fear.
Some young men would have contests with one another in a tavern 30 miles away as they were shooting pool attempting to recite that poem from memory! (I would then assume this did stick with them then..)
My first "Haunted Parade car" was not a hearse, it was a 1979 Ford Thunderbird with a huge dent in the passenger door that I filled with a motorcycle wreck that happened to have a skeletal rider still seated on the bike! This Got Noticed!
I would drive this car 25 miles away to go shopping and people would follow me right back to my house!
Everytime I drove this car around people would show up that night because of seeing it.
I still think good advertising requires much more "Thought" than "money".

[BrotherMysterio]

I still think good advertising requires much more "Thought" than "money".

But that's not "advertising". That's marketing. Advertising is buying ad space. Marketing is getting into your customer's heads, and occupying a space there.

Put another way, marketing isn't a form of advertising, but advertising is a form of marketing.

Also, most all of the stuff Jim just listed is free, or at least dirt cheap.

Think about the response he got with his car. People didn't just notice and say, "oh, that looks nifty". They actually followed him back to his show. It was that engaging. That kind of thing is pure marketing gold.

Also, the poem contests at local taverns? That has more stickiness and staying power than all the radio and tv spots that you could imagine, and doesn't cost a dime!

C.

[HauntedDeadEnd]

I think we are going off topic. The thread is about cheap advertising for a Haunt. Please stay on topic. Thanks

[BrotherMysterio]

I think we are going off topic. The thread is about cheap advertising for a Haunt. Please stay on topic. Thanks

Well, recent bouts of thread hijacking aside, the last two posts were definitely about cost effective marketing. Ergo, the distinction I made.

When people ask about "cheap advertising", whether they know it or not, they are really asking about cost effective marketing. Cheap advertising is merely a function of how to get the lowest rate on radio, TV, and print ads. There is definitely merit in that conversation, but the greater concept is cost-effective marketing (of which cheap advertising is just one part), and, besides, you shouldn't pay a single dime on advertising until you have the other key aspects of marketing in place, and until you know for drop-dead certain what your key message is.

If your message is simply that "We have a Haunt! Woohoo!! Here's the address", then that might get some traction; but if that Haunt happens to be a Slaughterhouse type haunt with blood, guts, sinew, and ripped-out spines strewn all over the walls - and your ad runs in venues that cater to a family crowd - well, the last thing you want is to have families of little 'tweens and younger ones going thru a haunt with people getting violently ripped open, vivisected, mutilated, disemboweled, and otherwise tortured, with torrents and fountains of blood spewing everywhere. Not only would your ad spend be grossly misappropriated and squandered, but you also just bought yourself a whole ton of bad word-of-mouth.

Likewise, what if your ad plays in the more church-friendly venues, and your ad copy looks rather innocuous, and you have a bunch of church types show up only to find out that the name of your Haunt is "Satan's Lair", and you have tons of Satanic and anti-Christian imagery, with Satan triumphing over God, virginal Sunday school girls being defiled, and so on? Well, again, that can be a problem. As Wicked Farmer recently pointed out, moderate church groups of the non-evangelical and non-fundamentalist variety can be a goldmine as long as you don't include anything in your show that happens to be patently offensive to church types.

Then, of course, there's the classic example of a haunt doing fairly well using an orange-with-black-font-type billboard that lists the hours and location of the haunt, and then one season they get the idea of really making the billboard "pop" so as to compete with other haunts, so they include gory or grisly images, like a psycho clown chainsawing a coed, and suddenly they have a hard time getting corporate sponsors, or charities to partner with.

You have to know your brand inside and out, and know what your show is about, and who you are specifically appealing to, and you need to know that solid before you spend any money on advertising, cheap or not. All of that falls under the category of effective Marketing, and the more cost effective, the better.

More later.

C.