*** For the best possible viewing experience please view this case study on a desktop computer ***

Hi, my name is Alex Berland and I am the CEO/ CMO and co-founder of Conjured Media. Thank you for taking the time to look over our 2021 Case Study. This case study will cover the campaigns we have run with Schmitts Farm Haunt located in New York and Warehouse31 located in Alabama. We begin with our first year in 2017 and go through the Valentine’s season of 2021. This is the second case study we have released and we plan on releasing a new one annually.  This case study will walk you through what being a full service client of ours is like (we like to think of our clients as partners) and the incredible results we have gotten for our partners over the past 4 years.

One of the most important decisions a haunt owner can make is who they decide to entrust with the responsibility of becoming their marketing partner. Here at Conjured Media, a foundational principle of ours is transparency. By releasing this information to the haunt industry we hope to show what we can do for our partners rather than just talk about it. Additionally, we hope that having this information available to the industry will allow others to learn and grow as a result. A rising tide floats all boats.

Feel free to contact myself directly or Conjured Media if you have any additional questions or have any feedback. I would love to hear from you! The privacy of our partners and their data is our number one priority. As such, we do not release specific numbers, just the ratios and percentages that demonstrate performance when given approval to do so by our partners. We greatly appreciate Schmitts Farm Haunt and Warehouse31’s partnership and willingness to participate in this case study.

We get it, you’re busy and you’ve got stuff to do. Feel free to jump to the “Results” section.

Conjured Media is your full-service marketing and creative partner. We have revolutionized haunted attraction advertising and are dedicated to supercharging your haunt’s growth.

Many haunt owners miss huge growth opportunities by choosing DIY marketing or working with agencies that are using dated or unreliable methods. Don’t be one of them! Our proven process of merging killer creative content with actionable data will take your growth to a whole new level.

The Conjured Media Creative Team builds a story to engage and immerse your potential guests in your haunt experience. Immersion=Sales! Our data collection and analysis system reveals which strategies, ads, and audiences are working, and which aren’t. We target your most engaged fans in real time, maximizing your return on ad spend.

Conjured Media is your partner; we’re invested in your success. We value transparency and accountability. We provide you with easy-to-understand status reports and will be there whenever you need us—even if it’s at 11:00 p.m. on your busiest night.

Schmitts Farm Haunt is located on the F&W Schmitt Farm property on Long Island, New York. In the 1970s the farm began hosting its seasonal fall festival with pumpkin picking and children’s entertainment. In 1994, as a way of diversifying their fall activities, they started the first professional haunted attraction on Long Island in a small greenhouse. After 26 years of operating, Schmitts Farm Haunt has grown into one of the largest haunted attractions on Long Island.

Attractions:

• The Haunt – 10,000 sq foot barn featuring 30+ scenes and 60+ actors.
• The Haunted Corn Trail – 1 sq acre corn trail with 20+ actors.

*Every season both attractions are taken down and rebuilt from the ground up. No two seasons are ever the same.

The Long Island area is a competitive market with 4 additional major haunts, 11 minor haunts and 10 escape rooms within a 35 mile radius. Being adjacent to New York City, Schmitts also competes with 2 major haunts located in Manhattan.

In late August 2017, the Schmitts Farm Haunt owners reached out to us to discuss the possibility of working with a full service agency for the first time. After being in business for nearly 23 years, 2016 was one of the worst haunt seasons they had. In the past, they had invested heavily in traditional advertising like billboards, newspapers, radio and tv. They had no confidence that these methods were actually bringing guests in and they wanted to give digital marketing a try. They were tired of dealing with multiple brokers and wanted to have one point of contact to handle everything for them. Above all, they wanted accountability in their marketing partner and wanted to see proof of results. Although skeptical at first, they decided to give Conjured Media a chance.

After being in the community for decades, the mind set at Schmitts was that everyone in the Long Island market knew about them. They were hopeful that they would be able to turn their business around, but major growth was not something they thought would be possible. After two seasons of shocking growth, the owners decided that in year three they were content with maintaining the levels they were already at, so we planned with that goal in mind.

Warehouse31 began in Florida in 2009 and moved to Alabama in 2013, quickly becoming one of Alabama’s premiere haunts. In 2019 they were ranked as the #2 must see haunt in Alabama by TheScareFactor.com. Every Year Warehouse31 puts on a Fall show and a Bloody Valentine’s Day show.

Attractions:

• Rigamortis – The Main Haunt with 60 scenes and 55 actors
• 3D Experience – an interactive 3D walkthrough with 15 scenes and 20 actors

Warehouse31 is just outside the Birmingham area. This is a competitive market with 4 additional major haunts and 9 minor haunts within a 60 mile radius.

Warehouse31 contacted us after receiving a marketing package that we mailed out to them in the summer of 2019. In their early years, they saw great success with their Fall and Bloody Valentine’s Day events. However, both events soon started to decline. In an effort to get their numbers up, they worked with a series of local, full-service agencies running digital, print and radio campaigns. Unfortunately, nothing was working. They felt that the local agencies didn’t understand haunts (or how to effectively market them) and that they didn’t receive the attention they deserved. They were just another client in a long list. Conjured Media, being a smaller, specialized, haunt-focused agency was exactly the partner the Warehouse31 team was looking for. Despite their initial reservations, due to negative past experiences and the fact that we are located in New York, they recognized that we had a clear understanding of their needs and could get the job done.

The Warehouse31 team wanted to first see a reversal of their downward trend. They felt cautious investing too much in their first year, but they felt that if we achieved that goal for them they would have more confidence moving forward.

The Conjured Media Method is a five part process to generate massive growth for our haunt partners. We have meticulously crafted this process over the past four years working with Schmitts Farm haunt and Warehouse31, achieving great results executing it. The Conjured Media method can be applied anywhere in the country, in any market conditions and will generate growth.

The first step of any successful campaign is to learn as much as possible about the haunt and the local market. This allows us to assemble a full understanding of what is in front of us and how best to sell new and returning guests. We evaluate everything from the history of the haunt, how the haunt operates, who attends, what the local market demographics are, and what the local competition is like (both haunt and non-haunt related events.) We also look at what data is currently available like past sales, social media audiences, email lists, phone number lists, and past marketing campaigns/ads and their results. Schmitts Farm Haunt started off as almost a completely blank slate. We didn’t have much data to use, with the exception of yearly revenue totals and of course, their current brand recognition. Warehouse31 had a lot more to work with such as email lists, text lists, and a few years of online ticketing data.

Next, the Conjured Media Creative Team crafts a story filled with engaging characters and spine chilling moments that instantly captivate your audience, leaving them wanting more. We tell this story using Hollywood-style cinematic videos, professional still photography, effective and clear graphic design, and other proven marketing tools. Our high quality, immersive creative gets attention by cutting through the typical “noise” on social media and other platforms—supercharging your sales. These creative elements work together across all of your platforms, captivating your audience and keeping your haunt fresh in their minds long after they interact with the creative. We make sure your haunt stands out from the competition.

Using the story as a bridge, we seamlessly guide your audience from online to your haunt. Once on site at your haunt, the story continues and the true immersion begins. We work with our haunt partners to help them effectively integrate the characters and story lines into their haunts.

With the research and story completed, we have everything we need to create your custom marketing strategy. The foundation of any marketing campaign is the ability to track results. Data is power. The better you understand your guests and how they interact with your business, the greater your ability to keep them coming back each season. We integrate tracking pixels, promo codes, and automation tools to create powerful data insights. Finding the best performing ads is just the beginning. We leverage data to discover new markets, boost guest lifetime value, reduce guest acquisition costs, generate email and SMS leads, and much more.

Then we adapt our proven methods to your unique strategy and begin to test how your ads perform, creating actionable data.

Finally, we analyze the data to identify the best performing ads and channels in real time. We leverage each platform’s algorithms and use them to our advantage by shifting ad spend towards the high performers, generating massive ROAS (Return On Ad Spend.)

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Schmitts Farm Haunt

Warehouse31

Schmitts Farm Haunt

Warehouse31

Schmitts Farm Haunt

Warehouse31

Chatbots are messenger bots that connect with your Facebook, website and (coming soon) Instagram. We make interacting with your chatbot fun and immersive by crafting it to be in the voices of your characters. We integrate your chatbot with Facebook ads to supercharge your ad campaign. As your guests interact with your chatbot, they share their phone number and email address in exchange for a discount code. We automatically feed this information into your email service to continue nurturing your guests across numerous platforms.

Chatbots are also great for answering the standard questions guests ask each season. We embed the chatbot on your website and your Facebook account so guests can quickly have their questions answered without the need for anyone on your team to be bogged down.

Digital ads are where you start the conversation with your guests. They are the first touch you have with new guests, and the best tool to re-engage your returning guests. First impressions are everything in the digital ads game. We design our digital ads to harness the full power of our high quality creative to create immersion from the first touch until your guests enter the doors to your haunt.

Being a marketing partner to our clients goes way beyond making great creative and impactful ads. We want to see your haunt grow and succeed. As such, consulting services are included in all of our full service packages. You get to leverage The Conjured Media Team’s extensive knowledge of haunts and how to grow them to make your show thrive.

Special Events

We have implemented special events on the calendar to boost attendance on off nights.

Ticket Strategy – Pricing and Promotions

We work with our haunt partners to dial in a ticket pricing structure that will maximize their revenue and lead to more sales. We couple that with promotions that have been successfully tested and proven to sell more tickets.

One of our most successful promotions is selling 4 packs of Combo tickets for a reduced price. (Usually $5 off per ticket.) This promotion incentivizes greater attendance by increasing the average group size.

On-Site Installations

At Schmitts Farm Haunt we worked with them to set up a photobooth where people can take their pictures and then download them for free in exchange for their email address via our website or chatbot. This helps grow the email list and brings guests back year after year.

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When analyzing the performance of any marketing campaign, it is important to understand the limitations of tracking. Most data is limited to what can be obtained from online sales. While at the door promo codes can provide additional information, they are not nearly as precise as pixel tracking. For example, if your haunt has 40% of tickets being sold online and 60% of tickets being sold at the door, the data we will be looking at will be focused on those 40% of online sales.

We know, of course, that our marketing campaigns are bringing people to the haunt that are paying at the door. To account for this we create “extrapolations,” where we take the data from online sales and apply it to those at the door sales to help fill in those gaps. Extrapolations are not just random guesses; they are anything but.

We do have new methods that we are working on such as utilizing Facebook and Instagram offline conversions to be able to track at the door sales as precisely as online sales.

One of the advantages to having your tracking set up correctly is that platforms like Facebook, Google, and Instagram will tell you how much revenue their ads generated, called “Purchase Value.” We take the purchase value for each channel and compare that to the total revenue generated for online sales, giving us a percentage. We then apply that same percentage to the total revenue generated for at the door sales, leaving us an extrapolated “At The Door Purchase Value.” Next, we add the Online Purchase Value and the At The Door Purchase Value to get the “Extrapolated Purchase Value.” Lastly, we divide that number by that channel’s ad spend to get the “Extrapolated ROAS.” This leaves us with a solid understanding that the actual ROAS from both online and at the door sales is somewhere between the Online ROAS and the Extrapolated ROAS.

The 2020 season, as we all know, was heavily affected by COVID-19. In light of the uncertainty, we worked with Both Schmitts Farm Haunt and Warehouse31 to implement a marketing strategy that was flexible and contained multiple contingencies that we could quickly pivot to depending on regulations and attendance.

Rain is one of those things in the haunt industry that any seasoned haunt owner will tell you just comes with the territory.

What we have seen is that Schmitts Farm Haunt is particularly affected by rain as one of their attractions is the outdoor Haunted Corntrail.

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Warehouse31 is completely indoors and one of their nearest competitors, one of the largest haunts in the market, is outdoors only. As such, they are not affected much by rain, yet still offer a virtual Queue line and waiting in your car on rainy nights.

One of the great debates of the haunt industry is whether to do more focused, digital campaigns or more diverse campaigns that include traditional media like radio, billboards, print etc. Our answer to this question is that for the large majority of haunts, focused digital campaigns are the best choice.

To start, it’s important to preface that all marketing “works.” There is a reason why Coca-Cola will spend millions of dollars to put up billboards everywhere on the planet, even though everyone already knows who they are. What we have to do first is define what “works” means for you and your haunt vrs. what “works” means for Coca-Cola. For you and your haunt, the top objective you have is to bring people down to your show in the limited time you are open. You may only have 4-8 weeks to advertise your haunt. You need to be investing in channels that can maximize your exposure in that short amount of time. Digital ads have the ability to scale quicker in a short amount of time than traditional ads.

The next criteria we use to look at what “works” is through tracking results. What we have learned from the past four years of working with our haunt partners is that while a promotion may be amazing, the vast majority of guests won’t take advantage of it. With traditional advertising, you have a very limited amount of data with which to track results. You may only have a report a radio station sends you of how many listeners you have reached or a piece of paper with how many people said a special code at the door. You may only have a collection of fliers and newspaper ads with promo codes on them to count at the end of the night. With traditional ads you are missing out on a huge amount of data.

With digital ads across Facebook, Instagram, Google, Snapchat etc. we can track how many people have seen and interacted with those ads and how much revenue was generated from each ad through online ticket sales. We also have promo code data to compare that to, giving us even greater insights into what is working and what is not. From this data, we have learned that if we were only tracking promo codes, some of our best performing ads would have appeared like losers. With digital ads, we are able to use retargeting to send guests that interact with these ads a follow up ad with content, or an offer to entice them to purchase tickets. This works extremely well! Additionally, as we are running digital ads we are also collecting lead info (emails and phone numbers) that we can then use to bring guests back for special events or next season. We create a powerful data infrastructure over the course of the haunt season that goes way beyond what is capable with traditional media. It is also important to note that you have the benefits of these tech companies investing billions of dollars into their platforms and algorithms with the sole purpose of getting your ads to the right people. There is no algorithm for what newspaper gets delivered to a person’s house.

Lastly, the final criteria we look at what “works” is through budget. Of course, Coca-Cola has plenty of money to spend on generating brand awareness and nurturing their relationship with you over the decades. Most haunts do not have budgets that warrant the goal of perpetual brand awareness. It is important to realize that while we love haunts, and that they are constantly on our minds, the average haunt guest only thinks of haunts during the haunt season. The haunt is a fun outing with their friends. Your more dedicated fans will know they had a great time at YOUR haunt specifically, but the average guest will just know they had a great time at the local haunt or the haunt “their friend brought them to.” Brand awareness is important and something we can build over time, but the penetration just isn’t there to justify that goal over the primary goal, which is sales.

Every digital ad platform has what’s called a “learning phase.” This means that the algorithm has to serve your ads and record the results over a certain number of conversions in order to dial in the best recipients for your ads. This is one of the main reasons why campaigns that diversify your ad spend over too many channels don’t generate results. While the theory that more channels are more touch points to reach your guests is true on the surface, it is only true in practice if the budget is there to support that goal. We find through our data that concentrated campaigns that focus on specific, digital channels are what generate results for our haunt partners.

Schmitts Farm Haunt Revenue Fall 2017 – Fall 2020

Warehouse31 Revenue Fall 2019 – Fall 2020

Warehouse31 Revenue Bloody Valentine’s 2020 – Bloody Valentine’s 2021

Schmitts Farm Haunt Tickets Fall 2017 – Fall 2020

Schmitts was starting to hit capacity on their busiest nights in 2017 and 2018. For the 2019 season, the owners made the decision that they would switch their goal to maintaining their numbers rather than achieving more growth. As such, ticket prices were raised and the emphasis was placed on selling more Combo tickets to decrease attendance slightly but make more revenue.

Warehouse31 Tickets Fall 2019 – Fall 2020

Warehouse31 Tickets Bloody Valentine’s 2020 – Bloody Valentine’s 2021

Online tickets have other advantages than just being better for tracking. They make checking guests in and processing them easier and more efficient.

One of our most successful promotions is selling 4 packs of Combo tickets for a reduced price (usually $5 off per ticket.) This promotion incentivizes greater attendance by increasing the average group size.

Schmitts Farm Haunt

In 2017, there were three Thursdays, all of which had poor attendance. It was decided to only do one Thursday in 2018, the final Thursday of the season, which would be the Lights Out Night. That Thursday increased ticket sales 2X from the best performing Thursday in 2017.

Warehouse31

In 2019 Warehouse31 was looking to implement a lights out night to drive attendance on one of their Wednesdays, a traditionally poorly performing day. Lights Out Lantern Night produced a 43% increase in revenue and a 40% increase in ticket sales vs. that Wednesday the previous year.

Schmitts Farm Haunt Promo Codes Fall 2017 – Fall 2020

Promo Codes with discounts at the door can be a touchy subject, as some haunt owners feel that they are giving away too much and that they have the potential to be abused. What we have shown with Schmitts is that when guests are presented with an offer they will actually value, the revenue generated vs. the revenue lost by the discount was 6X. We believe accepting promo codes at the door helps conversions.

While there is always a natural curve of attendance being larger closer to Halloween, there are simple, tangible efforts that can be done to bring guests to the haunt earlier in the season. Why bring guests earlier in the season? One benefit is filling out dates that have more room to accommodate an increase in attendance vs. the busy final Saturdays of the season. Additionally, this also helps alleviate the pressure of losing one of the final dates due to rain as you are spreading attendance out rather than packing it into a few days.

At both Schmitts Farm Haunt and Warehouse31 we created a discount that was greater than the standard discount to entice guests to come at designated early dates. The most successful way for distributing this offer was when guests entered the chatbot, they were offered the chance to get a greater discount if they chose one of the earlier dates. Additionally this offer was blasted out to the email list.

Schmitts Farm Haunt Fall

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Warehouse31 Fall

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Warehouse31 Bloody Valentine’s

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Facebook ROAS & Extrapolated ROAS

Facebook ROAS & Extrapolated ROAS

Schmitts Farm Haunt Fall

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Warehouse31 Fall

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Warehouse31 Bloody Valentine’s

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20.3X ROAS

8.59X ROAS

Instagram ROAS & Extrapolated ROAS

Schmitts Farm Haunt Fall

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Warehouse31 Fall

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8.89X ROAS

11.22X ROAS

*When reporting we like to separate stories into their own category because story ads are a fundamentally different experience from the traditional ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Stories ROAS & Extrapolated ROAS

Schmitts Farm Haunt Fall

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Warehouse31 Fall

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14.72X ROAS

Google Ads – Search ROAS & Extrapolated ROAS

Schmitts Farm Haunt Fall

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Warehouse31 Fall

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Schmitts Farm Haunt Google Ads – Video Budget Fall 2017 – Fall 2019

Schmitts Farm Haunt Google Ads – Video Average CPM Fall 2017 – Fall 2019

Schmitts Farm Haunt Google Ads – Video Impressions Fall 2017 – Fall 2019

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In 2019 we ran hiring ads on Facebook and Instagram for Schmitts Farm Haunt. Those ads brought in 35% of new hires.

What does all of this mean for you? If you are a haunt owner looking to grow your haunt using innovative, data proven methods, it is in your best interest to partner with us. With our combined skill set and passion for this business, Conjured Media will work tirelessly to prove to you that you made the right choice in choosing us.