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Radio ads - Do they work?

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  • #16
    Several ways we advertise -

    Besides the radio ads Damien mentioned for our haunt, we also have done the postcards, standard flyers, posters, newspaper ads, "In Costume" walk arounds at fairs, facebook, etc.

    I would say in our 20 years of doing haunts of one kind or another radio has always been our biggest means of getting the word out, we generally advertise on most of the radio stations in the surrounding 80-100 mile radius - HOWEVER we did notice that last year after moving the event to a new location when we expected our numbers to drop for a year because of the move....they stayed the same. I honestly believe this was in part to Facebook - we created an event on facebook for our attraction, then begged and pleaded everyone to invite their friends...and their friends invite theirs, etc. Within two weeks of posting the event we had over 9000 invites for the event, and our page like shot way up.

    I do think we are still going to use radio this year, but our budget will be less for it - we will be dumping money into ads for facebook, and more money into the surrounding local newspapers - especially the papers given away for free at restaurants and gas stations. We will also be creating all new postcards for the event - a set of 4 each with a different character from the haunt to hand out at all our local fairs and events.

    One of the other ways we get word of mouth out is the news on television - for us finding a way to get in on the morning news broadcasts seem to work great, almost every year we get on the local news stations and we always get great feedback from it.

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    • #17
      Worked for me

      I ran teen dances at community centers and ymca's for years. We'd spend about $1000 dollars for a bunch of 30 second and or 1 minute spots. It always worked for us. With teens, news travels fast. We had packed houses after 2 weeks of radio commercials. Then, the kids spread the word around school, and there you have it.
      Just make sure you go with the right teen format radio stations. There are deals out there. Best of luck to you. I know what worked for me. This was a good move for our gig. After the initial buy, we didn't even need maintence spots to keep it going. Great initial investment with great returns. Go for it !!!!!

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      • #18
        It all depends ...

        It all kinda depends where your location is and the importance of radio to the community in which you advertising.

        I think radio ads can be effective in a town where radio is more predominant and where there are fewer activities that compete with your haunted attraction, but in large city like LA there are so many stations, and so much competition for themed entertainment that it really doesn't go very far.

        For us, we were in the Inland Empire ... an area just outside of Greater Los Angeles. We tried radio advertising and it didn't work out well for us at all. We ran a poll at the ticket booth to determine what advertisements worked best and not only did we get next to no patrons from the advertising, but we had also given different radio stations ticket packets to be distributed as prizes to their listeners and one of the stations was caught scalping those tickets in our parking lot!

        We had a HUGE return on coupons distributed both through local coupon magazines and at a variety of stores that catered to our target audience (Hot Topic, Spencers, Halloween stores, etc.). We also had a great response from discount ticketing groups (groupon, goldstar, etc.) where you sell the tickets at half price, but can set a limit on the amount of the discount tickets that were sold. These were particularly great because we would pull visitors from audiences outside of our local market (i.e. people would travel from San Diego, or Northern parts of LA, who would normally not travel that far to visit our attraction, but because the tickets were such a great deal they would make the journey).

        We also had great success with Television advertizements. The awesome thing about hooking up with a cable company is that they would pair you with your target demographic. We were able to pick the regions that we wanted the ads to run, the age of viewers we wanted to reach, and even the types of shows we wanted to be tied in with (i.e. sci fi channel, adult swim, etc.). Additionally, unlike radio which most people hear in their cars while traveling to and fro giving them time to forget about your ad by the time they reach their destination ... TV ads hit you at home where you can write the info down. We were pleasantly surprised at how inexpensive TV ads were and what a huge return we got in ticket sales from them.

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