FaceBook advertising

[terrormasue]

Has anyone done any advertising with FaceBook and if so do you bid on the impressions or the click throughs? Any help with this is greatly appreciated.
Is it worth it?


Thanks!

Sue

[UnDeRTaKer313]

The goal is to big on pay per 1000 and try a bunch of different ads and see which one gives you the best return.
Cost per click is nice if you dont want to worry about ad designs but you will pay more.

[Greg Chrise]

Let me see if I can do the math here. You set a budget of say $50 a day at 50 cents per click. 100 people clicked and were informed but only 1% to 2% will convert into getting off the chair and coming to your event and buy a ticket. So this brings you 1 to 2 customers that might bring an additional person. 4 ticket buyers cost $12.50 each. This might be grand if you were a dentist and all you had to do was charge everyone that walked in the door $140 for Xrays. Not so much when tickets are $15 or $20.

There are experiments going on now but it doesn't sound like they are doing much better than the internet every did percentage wise to bringing in customers. So you mimick these advertising methods with free traffic (trying to elaborate on the above gobbldy goop) You put Utoob videos, facebook posts, pictures on flicker, and any forum you can find. Every entry gets you a rencent Google or other search engine ranking. Rather than just the week before, you post things every day to keep the traffic potential up. Then when people see your fliers, your truck wrap, drive by your facade, hear about it as videos and pictures are shared, You have a much higher rate of return because at this point the customers are more likely to come, more to the tune of 10% will bother to attend and buy a ticket. The are already looking at other haunts or other similar topics and are qualified intrested customers you are funneling in.

Even posts on Hauntworld end up in search results so perhaps a picture once a week or once a month is not really enough. There are so many things to take pictures of that you already have and your signage, it just has to be a regular did you put something somewhere today routine. To actually make money on each 1000 clicks may or may not be worth the time. Real world figures so far seem to show a single haunt or persons posting with the best content ever is only worth maybe $5 a week. And to do so, you have to have excellent content ranking over a period of time and achieve the higher earning rate by demonstrating regular traffic. But then everything you do also has someone elses advertising in front of it and that most likely detracts from the 10% conversion rates. It is a trade off. Kind of making money off of the search engines because they aren't really coming to the haunt. In your case that isn't what is happening Sue, so it is an incredible waste of time and energy.

It is better to not look like you are advertising anything but your own event and get them at your haunt paying for a ticket. All done with regular every day posts, not necessarily all on one service. Like Monday might be facebook day. Tuesday might be Utube day, Wednesday might be put 4 photos on flicker, Thursday might be Tweet things day, Friday is tell Hauntworld what is happening, Saturday is Something else and so on. IN the bigger picture you have indeed put some content somewhere every single day without spamming or turning any one particular group off.

When they hear your radio ad a few times and can remember the haunt name, they might go directly to Utoob or vimeo to see if there was something there. Even if you put it on Hauntworld it will show up and they see 4 videos and a post about your radio ad and they are all the more excited. It was still not totally free because you invested an hour a day to meet this obligation but over the course of many weeks you might have 300 points of content to draw from that all lead back to your web site and directions.

Over the course of years this 300 points of content become 600, 900, 1200 and so on and at some point you are a household name and there is a tipping point in your community with your name and event being talked about, asked about, sought after. Like the conversation you had with Ryan you had a year ago, his success was entirely by having a couple signature characters and something to post about them regularly that directed people to the haunt event. Non direct selling. Plus they kind of toyed with the process for 3 years before they decided to go independent. The characters were already wild and then there was a place they were available to see them at. Their clowns had natioal appeal which helped drive traffic but the local traffic was all that was actually precious in the whole campaigne.

So these clowns went to every party you can think of, made sure there were pictures, shared their weird rants online that were humorous. Instead of giving google or facebook $50 a day, they had sort of a national driver doing the same thing that buzzed the local area seasonally. You need crazy characters and crazy back stories to put out there content wise to already be entertaining potential customers all year long for free. So there is all the more incentive to put a reminder note on the calender for when it is open. People share what one of your crazy character says and does for quite some geographic distance and you will get people coming in from 200 miles away, besides other haunters supporting your efforts.

Unless someone corrects me on the rates, there is a reason Facebook thinks it is worth 100 billion and Google thinks it is worth 650 kazzilion dollars and some how we are on the PAY money part of that. Doesn't mean it converts into money back for money invested at a reasonable cost like $1 or $2 per customer.

[Greg Chrise]

Like since you have an eqyptian facade, I want to see a 20 second video of someone or some creature doing the walk like an Egyptian song. Then just the name of your website in an end banner, done. Or some other character has a rant in front of the old shed. Just silly things that sort of have a weekly fan base. The Terror nights guys knew exactly what kind of attention they were getting before any of us estimated how much it would do right out of the box and we were dead on for our town. Your town has the exact same numbers as ours in potential.

[Terrorknight]

FaceBook Ad's

Here's the thing I think alot of us miss when it comes to getting people to Like us on FB. You need to give them a reason to do so. Here's what we are doing and it's starting to work well. Number 1 Last Transworld we bought a Picture Marketing camera system, this gives us the ability to put something into the hand of a customer that they will want ( a FREE Photo ). Number 2 this Transworld we bought 9 foot tall Rot Zombie from Gore Galore, this gives the people a memorable experience. Number 3 but these to thing together at every fair, festival, horror convention, car show anything you can get into in the off season. We also printed bizz cards with our Name on one side and a discount on the other, it some says to LIKE us on FB and has a coupon code for our online tickets. We just did Comic Con in Philadelphia we took over 2700 photo's and passed out 8000 discount cards. We told people we were doing complementary photo's courtesy of our haunt. We took there photo with our Rot Zombie which they loved and were having a great time with and then handed them the picture card and a discount card. We did this last weekend and we are gaining about 20 new LIKES per day, plus when they redeem there photo's online I'm getting there email address and they are share there photos on there FB and all there friends are seeing the photos with our logo on them and that builds positive LIKES.

The moral of my long story is people no longer respond to empty ad's and sales pitches, they respond to tangible experiences, one on one contact. The tools are out there you just need to know how to use them. We bought the Picture Marketing system and Rot Zombie for less then 2 weeks of radio and we can use it year round.579491_10150833359847217_1111843086_n.jpg

[drfrightner]

Google works really well as does most web based programs where you can find target audience. I did not get much traffic from facebook last year it was below Google, Yahoo, Bing and Hauntworld.com. People who follow facebook they have found do not pay much attention to advertisement on their own pages.

If you are paying by the click you can't go wrong, if you are paying by impression don't do it.

Larry

[tonguesandwich]

Soft sale.. make people who want to buy.. its a power trip. Create a biz page on what ever you're selling. Put up at least 10 relevant post on the topic on interest. You will need at least 3 a day. You also should do question statements. Your ads will take em to the page. You should come up with about 45 different ads and test them but your target should be your facebook page not your haunt site. Make sure you are running ads to target facebook interest. Meaning use the facebook tools to see how many peeps have an interest in what you are selling say " haunted houses" make sure you have enough numbers to run an ad to that target audience so that your ad only pops up on their facebook pages..aka quality lead. Now give them a reason to "Like" your page.. say a free giveaway once a day like a shirt or coupon. Once they like now your in there newsfeed(Should be). We use to be able to put opt in pages on your facebook biz page which was pretty powerful but they have changed it and I haven't revisited. Now on your page soft sale but don't over do it and post three relevant posts a day.. a good give away is always an ebook... You can usually write one in a few hours. It can be on haunted houses, monsters, fx or anything relevant. Cost you zero and people love them. Most people running ads fail because they don't create a sales funnel! They just say buy my crap and try to sell to people. Selling is suckie.. you have to create people who want to buy. Buying is one of the most powerful things a person can do.. You must make buyers with your ads and sells funnel. Don't make the mistake of trying to sell with your ads.
Facebook makes lots of changes constantly especially with biz pages. So you have to stay on top of it.

[Greg Chrise]

Even going with Google. If you are playing with a million dollars and giving everyone $12 to come because you will get $15 from them is maybe a 20% on investment and if you put out a million you get 1.2 million back. Cool, you profited $200,000 for your investment. Or some percentage increase in customers occured because of this activity and it was at a plus. You can earn a living just by calling up the Google dude.

For a very small venue you just turned a $15 attraction into a $4 attraction per customer and the percentage increase on a couple thousand dollars is not worth discounting things just to have more bodies. It may be a judgement call of having a certain appearence and exposure but the actual dollar figure return is not great. Plus the smaller attractions kind of get the majority of customers only once every so many years, it isn't building any loyalty so you need the full amount of dollars you can get from even that last 2% of customers to reinvest in the attraction rather than some precense that costs money.

The Rot Zombie example above and the photo program may have cost a couple thousand but it is a one time purchase and then you use that tool over and over. The marketing in the internet is recourring never ending investment cycle. Say you spent $2,000 on Google ads and were able to target them locally, you would make back in ticket sales $2400. So was the wear and tear, complications and extra stress really worth $400? At $15 a ticket that would mean 160 extra customers perhaps. If it happened organically from some fun promotion you make $2400, if you want a robot to make you money you make $400.

If a haunt was hovering around 10,000 people and it was the entire reason they maintain 25,000 customers I would be all about marketing this way. Until then I'm not impressed.

[Greg Chrise]

The Rot Zombie and photo promotion is more on the level of personally inviting people who already love what you are doing. There is no way to actually verify that 160 people came out of 4,000 to 10,000 people accurately. Getting a coupon back has indeed some numbers that are verifyable and might be higher as people still come buy a ticket but didn't worry about bringing their coupon to redeem.

[tonguesandwich]

Google is definitely going towards big business if you look at what they have been doing over the last 6 months. Like major magazines.... who are very selective on who is able to run an ad and costly. Less people are watching TV. My main company that I am a founder for.. we run 240 hrs of TV commercials a day. Our budget is 100 million a year. We don't make money on the product we sell. That covers our cost.. we make money on the up sales. So for small biz is tv the way to go? Newspapers are almost dead. Radio marketing is horribly weak. You can run an internet campaign for under $3-2K a year ..yes it takes maintenance. Through niche marketing and some other tricks you can hit "Quality leads" so your dollar works for you. If you have an email list and actually know how to use it to get over the 3% hump.. you should be golden! Small biz has to convert to the net or your going to be extinct.

[Terrorknight]

I will say this and whoever can believe me or not. 4 years ago I went with a major change in the way I do marketing. I stopped spending $70,000 to $100,000 a season on radio, TV, Newspaper and every other new thing that can around the block. Instead I changed the amount of my ticket from $25 to $30 because my goal price ways $20 per person. This gave me the room I needed to take the money I was paying out to these different media outlets and pass a bigger savings to the customers. When I did this I took my numbers that hadn't changed in 3 years and had a noticeable rise in customers every year sense. I added Police, fireman, EMT, Student and Military Discounts. I could also do a better group price and I run a online ticket give away every week. The winner gets 2 free VIP tickets and the loser that week get a special discount to be used that weekend only and I change it every week depending on the crowds, the weather, whatever. But the key was to make as many people as I could feel special, like they were getting something that no one else could get.

When of course that goes with the pictures and festival thing, where we are making personal connection with people that will help to keep us in there mind come Oct. ( Oh those were the guy's that we got our picture from or hey I had a cool conversation about make-up ) This kind of marketing goes way farther then BUY MY STUFF.

Robert
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[Greg Chrise]

There is one other consideration, Sue's haunt is not in silicon valley or in the great north, In East Texas you might try Fax-a-monster or throw a brick with a message promotional campaignes. The hustle and bustle of the tech world and seeing something to go do and being motivated to do it does not exist. Most are still looking at the pretty lights if they have a computer at all here.

Doing some smart phone app might inform one nerd in a 200 mile radius, and expecting cold call adverting on the side of some web site has a very low click ratio.

So the getting out and being seen thing is still what is available regardless of what is happening in all those other fancy places.

[tonguesandwich]

95% Ages 18-34 with a margin of error of +3/-3 have a cell phone.. 85% on all us adults. 70% of that age bracket have laptops and another 57 percent have desktops. With computer/smart phones/tablets etc only 9% of people in America don't have one and these are 2010 numbers so the number is much higher now.
44.6 million register facebooks users under the age of 24 with 124 million US users. At the same time ownerships of TVs have fallen (New York Edition May3, 2011)

2011, 92% of adult US Internet users send or read email. The same source suggests that 66% of those email users do so as part of a typical day. There are 3.1 billion email accounts in 2011, by 2015 it will hit 4 billion.

If your target age range is 45 to 64 then you would want to use tradition media... else you have to get current.

In most markets money isn't made from getting people in the door... its made from returning customers... getting people in with the right marketing isn't usually hard..its offering a quality product that makes them return year after year. That builds upon itself.

[Gore Galore]

Robert (terrorknight) is explaining something that he is doing that ALL Theme Parks/Screamparks are doing. Making their events an interactive experience and giving his customers something extra for their money, an interaction, an in your face bigger than life experience, and A photo-op, whether that is at his event or at a public event full of brand new faces who know NOTHING about his events.
This is powerful one time investment marketing.
Buying a Giant Costume that stands 10' tall will be seen from a great distance and attract alot of attention at festivals, sporting events, parades, bierstube, allowing you to get your flyers into the hands of fresh new jaw dropped faces open to the experience etc... How often does anyone get to come into contact with a 10' Zombie, banshee, skeleton, etc...
And this ALL plays INTO the facebook (tagging and liking your company or event) and or internet experience. It all goes hand in hand. And makes for powerful marketing. Why do you think that our company Gore Galore Markets the sales of our GIANT COSTUMES to ALL our customers in this way. Because it works. It makes money.
And Robert and Many others who use them the same way are the proof.

[tonguesandwich]

I absolutely agree with you, photo ops should be part of everyone's marketing after your initial campaign. Its also fairly easy with one click, that you can send that photo/video to 20 different social media sites yourself and hit thousands in your target market on the front end of your season. Lots of tools in the bag.