Haunted House Startup

The Business Behind The Screams!

Haunted House MarketingStartup

How to Start a Haunted House Part 7

Grant Brott

Market Review

In this section we will cover the market review. This will cover the following material:

  • Target Customer
    • Buyer Persona Profiles

Through this material you will define your customer base which will help you to focus more on your actual customers and will provide you with the information required to make your marketing efforts more engaging for them.

Target Customer

You do not need to spend a ton of money or perform expensive market research to find helpful information to help grow your business. We will gather a bunch of useful information for your business in the following steps through some easy to implement steps.

Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a description of a particular customer that comes to your event to purchase your products or services. Often you will see the mistake made where people tell you that you have to pin down your marketing to one ideal customer and you then market to that customer. Rarely will you have one type of customer so that is where buyer persona’s come into play and you will find you probably have at least 2-3 of them but some may have as many as a dozen. Say your a haunt that has multiple attractions, maybe there is one that is more child friendly like a 3D paint attraction and then another that is a gore attraction. You will have multiple buyer persona’s here because now you have an attraction that parents with children are going to come to but not to the gore attraction so you would need to know the information on not only the parent with a younger child but also the teen or couple with older children that will want to come through the gore attraction so right there you have at least 2 buyer persona’s that you could potential target with different marketing efforts.

Another example of common buyer persona’s that most people are familiar with are the soccer mom and the NASCAR dad. In these examples you may have someone similar to a NASCAR dad that would go to your gore attraction whereas the soccer mom and her troop of children would go to the child friendly attraction. So there are many persona’s and we will dig into it more now.

Defining Buyer Persona


You define a buyer persona by conducting research over time. Often times you may have access to some of this information already. If you do not you will be able to use different resources you will have setup for your haunt business to gather the required data. First off your website can have analytics software installed that will give you some useful data over time but also through the website you could collect emails which you could use to send out a survey to collect the required information. Being a haunt another great opportunity is to offer a sticker of your haunt logo to customers at the ticket area if they answer a few quick questions or do it on the exit area to ensure no slow down of business on the front end.

Some of the questions you are looking to gather are the following:

  • Gender
  • Education
  • Income
  • Marital Status
  • Occupation
  • Employment Status

You may also want to find out if they have children with them or if they had to get a babysitter. This could lead to offering a child friendly attraction the kids could go through with a tour guide or solo if enough actors were there to have eyes on at all times so that the adults could go through the adult attraction at the same time.

With all this information you can create biographies of typical customers. Maybe a common persona is married females between the age of 25-34 with children.

Are you getting the idea how this could be useful for your marketing efforts. If you have an attraction that would appeal to this crowd you may want to alter your marketing message to better grab their attention. This information will allow you to be in a better position to understand the needs of each group and help you to better craft a marketing message and plan around them that will get them engaged and to your attraction.

Action Step:

Start coming up with your buyer persona’s. Keep in mind that this information will need to be updated as you begin to gather data through email, surveys and other sources such as just talking with your customers. Facebook is a great way to gather information from your direct following. Do not underestimate the power of this when doing your marketing plan it can make the difference from between a Rock Star marketing plan and just an average plan.

Up next:

In the next section we will dig into determining your strengths and weaknesses compared to your competition and come up with some competitor profiles.