How to Sell Out Your Haunt
By Asianna Madsen
Your fun-filled night of thrills, chills, and spooky scares is ready to be shared with the world. You’ve created a fantastic haunt, and now you just need to find excited guests to come experience it. It’s time to come up with a strategy that ensures no one will miss out.
Your ticketing and marketing strategies will determine the difference between a great turnout and a no-show event. We’ve outlined the essential steps to making sure you can sell out your haunt.
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Create a Spooky Event Page
The first step to bringing people to your haunt is making an outstanding event page. You’ll need an online site where people can find information about your haunt.
It’s important that your event page stands out. Whether this is an event website or a social media page, it needs to draw people in. This will be people’s first impression of your haunt, so make it look good. Use spooky imagery and language to set the tone. Add photos and videos of your haunt and your actors to give people an idea of the experience you’re offering.
If you’ve never made a website before, consider hiring a web designer to improve your site. Web designers are trained to know what will catch people’s attention, and can make your online presence stand out. Or, you can use Stride Events to build and host your website for free.
Most importantly, your event page needs to inform people about your haunt. Make sure you have clear information about where the haunt will be, and when it will be open. It can be helpful to include directions for how to get there, or information about where to park. You should also have information about how much tickets will cost and whether people will need to buy them in advance or if they can pay at the door.
Set Up Ticketing
Now that you have a website, you need a way for people to buy tickets. It’s important to decide whether people can purchase tickets online, at the door, or have both options available.
Selling Tickets Online
Setting up online ticket sales will help bring in more people and increase revenue at your event. People tend to spend significantly more money online than they do in person. Selling tickets online will also ensure that you make some sales in advance.
If you’re selling tickets online, you’ll need to set up ticketing and a payment system. There are a variety of programs that can help you do this. Keep in mind that some sites will charge you to use their ticketing software
The ticketing process can be intimidating, but Stride Events makes it easy. And the best part is, it’s completely free for you to use! Stride events lets you create an event page on our site, where people can go to easily purchase tickets. We’ll help you set up your ticketing and promote your event for you.
Selling Tickets In-Person
Whether or not you are selling tickets online, letting people buy tickets at the door can help increase your sales. In-person ticket sales provide a flexible option for your customers. Some people are more comfortable buying tickets in person, or simply didn’t plan in advance. In addition, anyone who finds your event when they’re driving past can stop and buy a ticket on the spot.
In-person ticket sales also let you interact with your customers and provide customer service. Seeing a friendly face can be a big incentive for people to come back to your haunt.
Set Ticket Prices
When setting ticket prices, it’s good to research similar haunts and get a sense of the usual rates. You want tickets to be cheap enough to draw people in, but you also need to make a profit on your sales.
Calculate how many tickets you would need to sell in order to break even. This will give you an idea of whether your current prices are too low and give you a goal for how many tickets to sell.
Use Discounts to Promote Your Haunt
You can use discounts and deals to encourage more online sales.
Early bird discounts will help you get more advanced sales and create a sense of urgency for people to buy tickets online.
You can also increase prices for certain days. For example, you can make weekend prices more expensive. This way, people can buy cheaper tickets on slower days, or spend more on a busy night. This will help spread out your ticket sales and increase your revenue.
If your haunt has multiple intensity levels available, you can vary ticket prices on a tier base. You can charge more for higher intensity while making lower intensity tickets cheaper.
Consider whether you want to use group discounts or promo codes. Group discounts can bring more people in through large families, youth groups, or date nights. You can also create promo codes to give certain people discounts, such as your actors or sponsors.
Start Marketing Early
The more people who know about your haunt, the more people are likely to come. You’ll need to start promoting your event early in order to build up hype and start selling tickets. You should start advertising at least three or four months before your haunt opens.
The best marketing comes from word of mouth, but it’s going to take some work on your part to start getting people talking about your haunt. Here are some ways to promote your haunt.
Use Social Media
Social media is a great way to spread the word about your haunt. You can use Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or any other platform to create engaging content and draw people in.
The earlier you start posting content to your account, the better. You can share progress updates while you’re building your haunt, and even get feedback from people to find out what they’re most excited about. Take behind the scenes videos and photos of your actors practicing or getting ready. You could even put together a timelapse of an actor getting into their costume.
You can create other content as well to engage your audience. Try making spooky skits or sharing Halloween jokes to get people into the mood of the season. Having a variety of content helps get people excited, and shows them how much work you’re putting into creating an unforgettable experience.
Stride Events gives you additional tools to promote your haunt through social media. You can set up a referral program to get more participants, and encourage attendees to share your event online by offering a social discount.
Host Contests or Giveaways
Contests and giveaways are great ways to get people to participate in your haunt even before it’s open. You can put these together online through your social media, or have in-person events around your community.
Host a costume contest to get people into the Halloween spirit and hype them up for your haunt. You can offer free tickets to the person with the best costume to get people excited. This is a fun event that will get people talking about your haunt during the entire spooky season.
Put together giveaways to help spread the word. The requirements for your giveaway are completely up to you. You can ask participants to follow and share your social media page or comment on one of your posts in order to enter. The simpler the requirements are, the more people are likely to enter your giveaway. Set a clear deadline, and then randomly choose at least one contestant to win a free ticket or discount to your haunt. This is a great way to get people excited to come to your haunt, and start spreading the word.
Partner with Local Businesses
Getting the community involved can help promote your event and even get you sponsorships. Get in contact with local businesses for sponsorships or donations in exchange for exposure at your event.
You can also organize promotions and marketing campaigns through local businesses to get their customers involved. Offer exclusive discounts for customers of certain businesses so that they’ll help advertise your haunt.
Host Community Events
If the people close to your event are excited for your haunt, they can help spread the word farther. You could host a Halloween fundraiser to draw people in and help you get funds. You can also put together low-cost activities such as pumpkin carving sessions or bake-offs to get the community involved.
Evaluate and Prepare for Next Year
Once your event is over, you’ll want to review everything that happened and evaluate your success. This will help you determine what you can improve or what needs to change in order for your next year to be even better.
Collect Feedback from Your Participants
Getting feedback from your attendees is one of the best ways to know how good your haunt was.
You can use surveys or social media discussions to get insights and find out what worked and what didn’t. Stride Events offers an easy and streamlined way to send a post-event survey to all of your participants. You can view and respond to all of the reviews of your event on our site.
You can also encourage guests to share their thoughts or even photos from your event online. This helps give you feedback, while also giving you more exposure.
Evaluate Success
Right after your event is the best time to review your success and plan for next year. Attendance numbers, guest satisfaction, and community hype are all factors of your success to consider.
Once you calculate your profit and expenses, you’ll be able to determine the financial success of your haunt. Decide where you could adjust costs for next time so that you can increase your profit.
Make clear goals for how you’ll improve your haunt. Most importantly, write down your successes and failures so that you remember them next year. Take note of your most successful promotional tactics so that you can use them again.
