We’re going to talk about and help you put together a quick-and-dirty marketing plan for your attraction. In the show notes, you’ll find a Word document you can download and fill out. All the sections are there, the questions are there, and there are instructions. We’ll walk you through that process in this blog.
First of all, this is supposed to be a quick thing, so it’s not all-inclusive. If you’re a large attraction, you’ll need something more robust than this, but this should be adequate for most attractions. If you’ve never done a marketing plan, this is a great way to get started. The pieces of the marketing plan are broken down into analysis, target-market profiles, distribution channels, budget, next steps, and the executive summary. We’ll go through these sections one at a time.
Write It Down
The most important part of a marketing plan is writing it down. This is such a big step for smaller attractions and smaller businesses. Often, when you’re focusing on operations or other aspects of the business, it can be easy to think you’ve got these ideas, you have people working on them, and you don’t need to sit down and write a plan. But a marketing plan is critical. Once you start putting those ideas down on paper and begin discussing them with your team, family, and friends, you start to find the holes in them—holes you wouldn’t find if you didn’t methodically put all those ideas to paper. The template Philip has put together is essential, even if you’re just in the thinking stages about whether to do an attraction this Fall. If you’re thinking about doing a Halloween attraction or other event, you need to go through this process and test all your assumptions.
Begin with Analysis
The analysis section begins with SWOT. SWOT analysis is as old a business itself, and it’s the one thing you’ll see in any business plan. It’s an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Many of you are probably familiar with SWOT analysis, but let’s take a minute to briefly explain what SWOT is and why it’s probably the most important part of the marketing plan.
If you’re a larger organization, you most likely have a whole SWOT section. To make this easy to digest, the downloadable Word document contains everything that’s analysis or directly derivative of analysis. Essentially, your analysis component contains everything you know, everything you can research, and anything you can make an immediate decision about based on those two things without outside information.
For simplicity, the analysis section is divided into three categories of questions—questions about you, questions about them—all the thems including your competitors, your market, and your customers—and questions about your environment. One of the tools that will help you to answer these questions is the SWOT analysis. So, what are your strengths, and what market strengths are available to you? What are your weaknesses? So, you’re directly contrasting your strengths. What are some of the opportunities out there, and what are the threats?
Environment is another category in which opportunities and threats could affect you. SWOT analysis is done by dividing into four or putting into quadrants your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and then fleshing that out. The analysis section also touches on pricing and positioning, which is critical for all attractions but especially seasonal attractions.
It’s important, when you’re creating a marketing plan—especially for the pricing and positioning part—not to overestimate. Think about that reasonable number, and then subtract that by 20%, at least, and figure out if you could still make a profit if you have terrible weather and get rained out one weekend. You have to think about all those unlikely situations that always seem to become really likely in business. Let’s say the Fire Marshal doesn’t let you open on time, and you miss opening weekend. This isn’t a rare occurrence at attractions. You have to budget for those types of scenarios.
It’s really important to be honest with yourself and your team. You always want to have optimism, of course, but, when it comes to figuring out the cost to cover the production, the reasonable margins to make a profit, and how much you’re going to be able to charge your guests to come through your attraction, make sure you’re looking at what competitors have done in the same market, and make sure you underestimate those figures.
Consider the Political, Economic, Social, and Technological Environment
The analysis basically involves writing down all the research you’ve done on your customers and on the competition—what you offer, what they offer, and what everybody else offers. The environmental questions are the ones that are frequently overlooked. There’s a great acronym that can help with this—PEST, which stands for political, economic, social, and technological. Thinking of it in that way can lead to solutions you might otherwise have overlooked. For example, your products might be so technologically advanced that your customers don’t have the technology to use them. Be aware of how versed your customers are in technology, and whether that’s a barrier for them.
Social is a big consideration, especially for haunted attractions—it’s necessary to understand the social context you’re coming into. Economic refers primarily to tourism—the current status, how it’s moving around, and how economic factors could affect it. Included in that economic section are visitor seasons. Some attractions are in areas where overall demand is reduced, so if you’re trying to put a seasonal event there, people aren’t just going to pop out of the woodwork if it’s a bad time to be there.
Then there’s the political climate, which is a pretty big thing right now almost everywhere. So, think about these factors and write them down. Even at the local level, there are cities that, for whatever reason, ban attractions or just aren’t eager to have them. Talk to the city government or the city’s business development team to see what their opinion of your business is. They can make it very, very tough for certain attractions. Some cities still have old laws that ban certain kinds of attractions or arcades, so do your research.
Be Sure You Have a Unique Selling Proposition
That brings us to the unique selling proposition, which is the last part of the analysis. This is the point in your marketing plan where you need to come up with that. It’s not really dependent on your target market per se once you’ve done all your research and outlined everything—not just on your customers but on your perceived competition as well as the political, economic, social, and technological aspects. For example, does your city have a lot of live sporting events? That could be an opportunity, but it could also be a threat, because it could reduce your visitor count. Consider other activities that could draw your guests away from your attractions—which includes movies and even Netflix. At this point in the marketing plan, you should have all this information in front of you and know everything inside and out. Now you’re poised to make your unique selling proposition.
Essentially, the unique selling point is your differentiation—what makes you special, what makes you competitively viable. Now that you have the whole landscape laid out in front of you, this is your opportunity to really look at it and figure out where your event or attraction fits into the whole picture you’ve created.
However, this is the point that trips up a lot of attractions. What the owner or a person working for this attraction thinks is a unique selling proposition may or may not actually be unique to the customer base. You really have to be honest with yourself. You may believe your haunted house is going to be the biggest, scariest haunted house, but all haunted houses believe that. Is it actually larger? Do you have unique technology? Do you have an IP for your holiday event? What makes it unique? Is it the location?
Make sure, too, it’s a differentiation that can’t be easily copied. For example, an attraction may claim to be the least expensive in the area. It’s really easy—especially for larger attractions—to run deals and make it a race to the bottom of who has the cheapest tickets. So, put a lot of thought into your unique selling proposition. It’s probably more complicated than you think it is, and it really pays to get proprietary customer research and honest feedback from your consumers.
A big mistake that businesses make—not just in attractions but across the board—is to ask someone on a survey how much they think they’re going to pay for something. Usually, their response is a lot higher than they actually pay. Keep that in mind. Someone may say they’d pay $30 or $40 for that attraction, but have they actually done that with your competitors? You can run different tests in which you create a mock store to see if customers will actually pay $40. Make sure you really test those unique selling propositions, because, in most marketing plans, those unique selling propositions aren’t nearly as unique as people think they are.
Creating Target-market Profiles
The next section on the marketing plan is target-market profiles. Your customer groups are your target markets, and, for each target market, you list at least four sections—demographics, psychographics, objective for the market, and details of that target market’s flow or touchpoints. The last two—the objective for that target market and the details—aren’t standard on many marketing plans, but they’re important.
The process is to list all the target profiles and fill out those four sections for each of them. There are questions in the Word document to help you. Demographics is pretty straightforward. Psychographics trips some people up, so there are some questions in the document that frame what you should be looking at. For example, where does your target market spend its time? What’s their decision-making process like? What’s important to them in their lives? Those are important psychographics that people often overlook.
The psychographics, objectives, and flow are the most important sections. Your unique selling proposition is probably your second most important consideration. If you truly have a good psychographic profile on your potential customers and you know what your touchpoints are with them, that’s almost your entire marketing plan. If you know what websites they visit, what stores they visit, where they spend their time, who they look up to, who their friends are, who their idols are, what their political and religious beliefs are, and what their dietary restrictions are, you basically know what you need to do to be successful.
Is this sort of like a pipe dream? Yes. You have to be in a pretty rare situation or spend a lot of money to figure it all out, but you should always strive to get closer and closer.
A good rule of thumb is to update your marketing plan every year, especially the psychographics of the audiences you’re targeting. As you interact more with your customers or guests, you can begin to update your plan with a combination of anecdotal data plus data from surveys, demographic research from your website, or who’s following you on social media.
The target-market profile is also good for figuring out your audience size. It’s key for all sorts of businesses, but especially if your business is location-based, which is the case for almost all attractions. You need to make sure there are enough people in your target demographics that are within reasonable driving distance of your area. You start there and begin layering on the psychographics and other stuff. Once you have more detail, you’ll waste a lot less marketing money, because you’re able to target specific demographics.
And you can create things that are meaningful to them, which is a big part of it. That’s why the Objective section is so important. Ask yourself, “What’s the objective with this market? Is it development, new products, diversification, penetration?” Then, identify the touchpoints. Look at all the times your target market could potentially touch your brand, and make an effort to touch them. Make sure all those touchpoints are individually personalized to fit their psychographic profile and match the objective. You want the complete picture: “This is what we’re doing for this group of our customers. These are all the ways they could interact with our brand, and we need to make sure we’re consistent with what they’re looking for at all those touchpoints—or, at least, we need to have the ability to target our Facebook advertising so it’s personalized to them.” This could mean having four or five different ad sets.
Research Your Target Market, and Be Specific
Here’s an easy example that relates to attractions. Many attractions say they have the college market—”We target college kids.” OK, what colleges are in your area? What are the colleges known for? What’s the culture at that college? What does it feel like to sit in the Student Union? What type of restaurants do the students frequent? Who are the famous teachers at that college and what are their famous classes? Are there memes the college has? Does it have a Facebook page, and, if so, what do the kids talk about on that Facebook page? How many campus clubs are there? Looking into this information is something anybody can do, and it will give you a much better picture. It’s not just “college students.” There are generally students from particular colleges or maybe only one college that represent your target demographic. You need to know that. I always advocate interviews as a way to get a sense of your target market.
Continually Update Your Marketing Plan
The marketing plan should be continually updated as you get new information. You don’t want to just stick with the plan once it’s done. If you’re really invested in your business and doing the research mentioned previously, you should be learning new things every single day and always testing your assumptions.
There are huge resources available like US census data, which allows you to see how many people of a certain gender or age group live in your area. There are a lot of resources out there, but don’t feel you have to put all of that into your initial marketing plan. Start thinking about those questions, and make sure you continue to reevaluate those assumptions once you open your attraction, or, if your attraction is ongoing, as you gather that data. You want to eventually get to the point where you’re building these detailed personas from data about guests visiting your attraction. We had a blog recently on how to get more information from your guests and use that to better market and advertise to them.
Working with Distribution Channels
So, how do you put all marketing plan material that’s been discussed so far together to assure the right distribution channels have been identified to reach those target markets? This is the last section in the plan—listing your distribution channels. The marketing plan document lists sections you need to find answers for, which are the main channel and then the target market or markets that channel serves. What objectives are you trying to achieve with your market channel? Objectives are included in both the distribution channels and target-market profiles on the marketing plan document. Target-market profiles are more for when you’re trying to break into a market, trying to build development, or trying to diversify by offering different product types to this market. In the distribution channels, you’ll be more specific, because channels generally have campaigns attached to them. No campaign is successful unless you know exactly what the objective for it is, and those objectives will correlate with the objectives you’ve identified.
This section can get pretty long, because it’s anything you’re doing to distribute your message out to your customer. It’s important to know how the distribution channels will work together, because they should be. You’re probably familiar with the marketing funnel, which was discussed in a previous podcast and blog. You don’t want to say your objective is to sell more tickets, since that’s the overall goal for almost all attractions. For example, if your channel is radio, that’s going to be your target market of a certain type. Your objective is to get brand awareness, drive those people to your website, and drive that awareness about your attraction. Once you get them to the website, maybe your next channel is Facebook remarketing, where you’re remarketing those people that learned about your attraction from the radio. It’s necessary to really think about that customer journey. If you don’t, there will be gaps in your funnel. You might be remarketing to people but not actually driving them to your website, so they’re not learning about your brand.
If you don’t have gaps, you might have overlaps. Sometimes overlaps are okay, but you don’t necessarily need to be doing a ton of brand awareness if you don’t have a significant amount of budget to do remarketing later. So, think about how to move your guests from learning about your business to having multiple touchpoints where they’re seeing your brand in PR and different online ads and getting to the point where they eventually convert. As you get more data, you’ll get a better idea of how many touchpoints you need to be able to convert someone. That depends a lot on your attraction, your pricing, and all that sort of thing. Obviously, if you’re selling a $200 VIP extreme-haunt experience, a potential customer will be doing a lot more research on that and have a lot more touchpoints to your brand versus someone considering a $10 photo with Santa attraction.
Do the Budget Last
The final topic in the marketing plan is budget, which, in many ways, is the most important—or is it? It seems that no matter how big a company is, budget is always a constraint, whether you have $100 million and you need to generate billions, or you’re just trying to break even on a $10,000 haunted house you put together with some friends and family and your marketing budget is $2,000. You’re always constrained in some way. However, the budget is included at the end of our marketing plan because you don’t get new customers by spending less money. Usually, increasing your marketing, even in a recession, is always the correct answer. Everybody will fight you on this—everybody—but it’s always the correct answer. Budget is always a constraint, but once you figure everything out, this is the point where you’ll be able to say, “If we can only keep one of these campaigns, one of these strategies, one of these target markets, which one would that be? What’s the highest yield?’ Now that you’ve figured out everything else, you can see what you can actually do.
If you start with the budget and work backwards, your ideas will always be pigeonholed into that box from the beginning, and that’s a really good way to kill any sort of ingenuity you might come up with. Say you’ve decided you’re going to cut everything and focus on the top 20% highest-yielding thing. You don’t have the budget to achieve that, but you know it will generate X amount of sales. That would be a time where you could potentially work with the CFO to get a gap loan until the sales start coming in or work together to figure out a strategy. If you’d started with the idea that you couldn’t try something because you don’t have the money—and you have to do these campaigns at a minimum level because everyone expects you to do that—you’ve already backed yourself into a corner before you begin. So, that’s why we put the budget at the end.
Go pie in the sky first, and then you can always pare back. If, after you figure out the channels your target market is paying attention to and look at your budget to see if there’s any possible way you could make this work, you’re more likely to have a realistic vision. Instead of creating a marketing plan with the mindset of, “How do I make this work?” it’s more, “This isn’t going to work, but I have to prove myself wrong. There’s actually a way to make it work.”
As with most things in business, you have to assume—especially if it’s a new attraction for which you don’t have historical data—that you’re up against it, and you should be very pessimistic with the mission from the outset. Underestimate everything—revenue, budget, costs—and determine your margin of error once you put together the whole plan. Ask yourself if everything has to go right for it to be successful.
Contingency Plans
With any marketing plan, it’s essential to have contingency plans. When you start to see the revenue come in below forecast, you’re not meeting the attendance you expected, and you have a rainy weekend or something, it’s nice to be able to take your distribution channel plan and make a plan B or a plan C. This way, you’re not caught flat-footed. You’re being proactive by making that plan ahead of time instead of being reactive to the environment. You never know what’s going to be thrown at you once you begin actually implementing the plan.
The Summary
Once you have your marketing plan completed, the last step is to create the summary, which you put at the beginning of the plan to provide an overview of the whole picture. If you’re presenting your plan to a CEO, they’re just going to want to read a one-page synopsis, and then they’ll ask a bunch of questions for which you’re going to have to provide answers backed up by evidence. The summary is what you share with the entire team and the leadership. The details of the marketing plan are primarily for the marketing department.
Let us know what you’d like us to cover in future episodes.
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