A little over four years ago, Bad Rhino was hired to build & execute the digital marketing strategy for The Bates Motel and Haunted Hayride.  Not only has this client been extremely fun to work with, we’ve also built strategies that have produced insane results. Below we’ll talk through a few of the challenges, objectives, and campaigns that led to one of our ads producing over $700K in revenue.

Challenges:

Like many haunted attractions, marketing tends to fall through the cracks during the busy season and in the off season it goes dormant. This means it takes longer to longer sales cycles when kicking off pre-sales and lower social engagement.  They also hadn’t had an internal marketing team. This just meant that initial data was limited and we had to put together some of the pieces before getting started.

Strategies:

  • Build a consistent content strategy throughout the year
  • Grow the community through both organic and paid methods
  • Test social ads across both cold & warm audiences
  • Monitor the community & engage with the audience

Community Growth:

What you see above is a chart that shows the growth over the last four years.  In that short time, you’ll see we took their page from around 32,000 members to over 64,000.  Paid methods led to 19,000+ new members, while organically we grew by nearly 21,000.

 

 

The ad on the left shows just one of the examples of ads we used to grow the audience.  Targeting an audience of haunt fanatics within a 40 mile radius, we used this ad to grow the page throughout the year.

Along with gaining new members to the page, this ad also produced nearly 4,000 shares and over 1,300 comments. This goes a long way to keeping a page top of mind throughout the year.

 

 

Ad Example for Ticket Sales:

Yes, you’re reading that right. We spent $21,500 on the above ad to generate 6,363 individual orders and 706,550 in revenue.

What’s most important to realize is that this doesn’t happen overnight. It takes consistency in your organic and paid strategy. It takes patience in testing your creative, audiences, etc.  We should also mention that you shouldn’t get used to your campaigns hitting a ROAS of 32. This is just bonkers. A ROAS of 2+ is a good goal with 4+ being great.

We spent the first two years building up the community, increasing impressions and engagements, and learning what the social community responds to most. We received great results early on, but nothing like the example above.

 

Total Engagements & Impressions:

You can measure the growth & exposure of a brand by reviewing the engagements and impressions. What you see below is a look at the total engagements and impressions that we’ve built over the last four years and the percentage those numbers increased from the previous four years.

On the engagements, we like to focus in on the link clicks, shares, and comments, which all increased greatly.

On the impressions, we’re most happy seeing the 500% increase in organic impressions. Anyone can spend money to improve impressions of a page, but the organic increase means that our consistent posting strategy did it’s job and improved overall exposure throughout the year.

Ready to chat about your strategy? Contact us here!