Creeva’s World 2.0

I have friends that work at a haunted house and busi­ness from my per­spec­tive seemed to be down — but once again I only went up there on nights where busi­ness would have been slow any­ways. I was think­ing yes­ter­day and today how best to mar­ket a haunted house in the Web 2.0 World.

Part of the issue lies within the audi­ence. Peo­ple going to the movies is down. Peo­ple going ot amuse­ment parks is down. These type of attrac­tions do not hold the same pull to crowds as they did a decade ago. Part of this of course is the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of kids are dif­fer­ent in the pre­vi­ous ones. They uti­lize the social net­works online and use those to find friends to do things. Of course big com­pa­nies are real­iz­ing this and mar­ket­ing right along. What does a small busi­ness like the haunted house indus­try have to do to pull in these way­ward souls back into the flock and increase ticket sales.

I pon­dered this for awhile and came up with some inter­est­ing mar­ket­ing con­cepts that would take time but lit­tle or no money to implement.

1. Pod­casts– Video pod­casts uti­liz­ing the skills of the actors that the haunted house employs would be a cheap easy syn­di­ca­tion and mar­ket­ing method. This would also attract those peo­ple out­side of the nor­mal regional mar­ket that the houses could appeal to. Beyond the stan­dard act­ing pod­cast where the actors were in char­ac­ter they could also do a hor­ror story reading/discussion pod­cast, or a spe­cial effect how to do stuff like they do on your own podcast.

2. Uti­liz­ing social net­works — Busi­nesses such as this should not limit them­selves to one or two social net­works they should be going any­where and every­where to spread there mes­sage. Peo­ple that are friended to an orga­ni­za­tion have a stronger psy­cho­log­i­cal pull and there­fore attract more visitors.

3. A Daily/Weekly blog this should be enough for the cre­ative mem­bers of their staff.

4. Uti­liz­ing sites like meetup.com to invite oth­ers in the area to come show up.

5. Doing announce­ments on sites like craigslist.

6. Cre­at­ing t-shirt and such mer­chan­dise through a site like cafe press.

The main prob­lem is places like this rely on news­pa­per adver­tis­ing and word of mouth. Word of mouth how­ever trav­els best through the Inter­net. News­pa­per ads are going up in price while read­er­ship is dropping.

With the steps above and adding in some adver­tis­ing to increase rev­enue they could actu­ally turn a profit in the off sea­son. Also it gives the work­ers some­thing to da and look for­ward to weekly. In the end it’s free adver­tis­ing that works for them instead of cost­ing them with a much larger audience.