Picture Worthy Moments For Marketing

During the month of September you will start to see flyers and posters popping up all over. However depending on where you are located you may see monsters in a local parade or at a farmers market, in a store. You know what happens when people see this in our wonderfully connected world. Smartphones start coming out and pictures get snapped of the monsters and with the monsters. Then they send those pictures to friends and post them to Facebook, Twitter and Google. Now you have created buzz in your local community. Do something picture worthy to grab attention because if you do it will get shared its what we do in this connected world.

Top 10 FEAR Pics for the week of May 11, 2014 | Nightmares Fear Factoryand throughout the rest of the year.
Found at http://buff.ly/1kIA2Ij

A great example of the picture situation is Nightmares Fear Factory a haunted house in Niagara Falls which snaps photos as they scare you. Their pictures are famous for October

Social Integration

Every haunted house I go to or see sites for has began embracing social media. They have twitter feeds, Facebook pages, Google pages, LinkedIn pages they do it all. I am still surprised when I go to a local business and they have no links to social media profiles. These days social media and the engagement that comes along with it when you do something spectacular is a top factor in your success in local marketing strategies online. These main sites are where your audience is at. During the 2012 season we run a ton of Google and Facebook advertising and while we did not get to track a whole lot of it we did ask everyone Halloween night and what we found was shocking. Well over 60% had found out about the haunted house from those two locations. Not only that but on slow nights we could post a ticket promotion out to our Facebook fan base and in some occasions double our attendance. Whats that online marketing saying “The Money Is In The Email List”. Well its not just the email list, your Facebook following, Google+ and Twitter following (automate it with CinchTwet) work the same exact way. The great thing about Facebook is you can run ads on there for dirt cheap that target your exact audience so if you know your demographics you can go after them only. On Google you can target location specific really well also. With those two paid advertising locations you can do wonders.

Local Business Promotion Ideas

We give tickets away on the radio, Facebook and other places. One year we did hearse taxi service where we actually sent a funeral attendant out to pick up our promotion winners in a hearse. Talk about coverage on the radio, that went over great. We put the haunted house on the side of the hearse for promotional purposes and got tons of attention driving our victims to the haunted house.

NorCal Pirate Festival Pirates of Emerson – Google Search
Found at http://buff.ly/1kIGj6H

Other ideas are based around local events that can be tied into the haunted house. At the Nor Cal Pirate Festival every year the Pirates of Emerson bring their terrifying pirates to the festival and hand out flyers. Scary pirates, pictures and flyers. Think that gets shared online at all? Among that crowd which is also very likely to visit your haunted house… Yes!

Now imagine these iconic characters of your haunted house in a parade. Don’t have monsters and scary pirates you ask, well do you have a mascot? No mascot, what about sponsoring a float in the parade or doing your own? Now your in front of all those guests and able to hand out coupons, flyers, swag with your logo or business information on it. Think that might work? If your saying no you need to rethink because these haunted houses thrive on this type of stuff and they pull in all their guests in a single month. A mega haunt can see 40,000 to 60,000 guests in a month and on average spend $2-$5 per ticket sale on marketing to bring them in. This stuff works and it works well. How many times during the month of October do you see interviews and specials on local haunted houses. I always see something on my local news.

Local Business Marketing Scares Outside The Box

Haunted houses know how to market and they do it fast and hardcore. They push out tens of thousands of flyers to local shopping centers and related Halloween store locations. They participate in parades and other local events. They giveaway tickets and other swag on the radio and at local events. When you have to attract 40,000+ victims in a 1 month window you start a month prior and you push out marketing like no one else. Why do they do it? Because it is effective. The pictures get shared year round, especially on Pinterest. So when September rolls around in your town if you have a haunted house pay attention to what they do, some are small scale but the mega haunts you will find everywhere if you pay attention. Take a tip or two from this tiny industry that spends an incredible amount of its money on marketing every year, it could work for any business, just think outside the box and apply it to your business.

The post Market Like A Haunted House – Local Business Marketing appeared first on Grant Brott's Local SEO.

Sponsored Events

Every event I see has sponsors these days. If your business sponsors any kind of event then you should do everything you can to get the most benefit out of it. Not only can you obtain links from event sites for being a sponsor, often times you are able to setup a booth or put up signs at the event. These are common benefits of sponsoring an event. You can take it to the next level though. Go out and put the event on various event listing sites, run some ads for the event, put out a press release about the event and how your business is sponsoring it. Blog about the event. Tell your readers everything you know and what a great event it is and why you choose to sponsor it and how they can come out and show their support too. Then share that post across your social network.

Speaking Engagements

Many industries give opportunity for speaking engagements. Military recruiters often go and speak to high school classes. I have seen lawyers speak about reckless and drunk driving. Industry experts speaking on topics at conferences. There are many opportunities. If you are an expert in your industry and speak at any meetings or conferences or even are holding a meetup for a local community you can take advantage of this on your blog. Write about your speaking engagement on your blog, give the details about it and link over to any relevant information. Put tickets up for sale or link directly to ticket sales if it is a paid event. Then share the post on your social networks, use some facebook ads to target the local community also to drive some additional traffic to it.

Community Events

You can talk about the various events coming up in the community. Since your business is focused around the local area this information is relevant to your customers. It may not be directly relevant to your business service but it could be of major relevance to a customer of yours. Give the dates, times, location, directions, sign-up links, add a photo or two of past events if it is recurring. If it is a major event can you work with the organizer to offer some kind of discount to your customers if they sign-up through a special page for your business. There are many events that go on and here are a few to consider.

• Fundraisers
• Parades
• Holiday Events
• Food Drives
• Blood Drives

Your Involvement In The Community

Sponsored events, speaking engagements, community events are all items you can take advantage of and write about on your blog and push out to your network for getting additional exposure. These are just a few of the opportunities though. Consider holding local meetups on a specific topic, host a fundraiser, participate in an event and write about it and promote it. This is where creativity gets let loose, anything you can think of that involves the local community could be put to use on your local blog to help your local search exposure. Holding a holiday party, having a Santa at your business on a certain day, doing a toy drive bin, hosting a blood drive at your location are all great examples of things that you can do and write about on your blog, promote via a press release, run ads on via Facebook at targeted readers.

How Much Is Too Much

You do not want to only write about your companies promotions or publicity on your blog. A good strategy is to run about 20-25% of your blog posts as company promotion pieces. Then an additional 20-25% of your posts as company publicity and the remainder should be targeted at industry related content. If your a plumber you might write about how to protect your pipes from the winter cold, common maintenance. A lawyer might write about what you should do after a car accident. These are not exact requirements but if you run only promotional items about your business people will get bored and stop reading your blog so by adding in pieces on your companies activities and some useful articles that potential customers can put to use themselves you keep them coming back for more.

Let The Search Engines Know What Your Talking About

This last part requires some knowledge of web design. If you are not familiar with this then your web person should be skilled in adding the following items to your site. Schema.org has various code that can be used to mark key pieces of information to make it easier for the search engines to determine what it is. Some key schema markups you want to make sure you have implemented on your site are article markup for your articles your write and post for readers. You can also markup your bio page so the search engines can better understand it is talking about a person on that page. If you post any events you can markup the various event information also. Finally you can markup your business location whenever you list your business name, address and phone number.

Your blog is a powerful addition to your businesses promotion. Implementing a strategy you can make it work for more than just posting content for your readers, you can use it to help the search engines understand what your writing about and to tell about events. If you are not writing about your community involvement then you are missing out on a great opportunity. Take the opportunity to write about the various situations we have discussed here to get more local information out about your business and to help tie it to your local area and thereby help your local rankings. If you have any questions or would like some advice on how to put your businesses community involvement to work for you then contact us at local@grantbraott.com

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