What does your group do for advertising? The group I'm with is trying to get some solid advertising out and I'm looking for ideas of stuff that works.

We have a website and blog with our info on it. Flyers are in local businesses. We've recently designed a rack card to put in area welcome centers and we've also made a business card type thing to hand out.

One thing I was thinking is radio advertising, how has this worked for others?

Any other good advertising ideas?

Ah, this is a great question.

Who are you trying to attract? What is your market?

At the Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum we have come to realize our market is families with young children. Railfans either already know about us, or will find us, so we cancelled classified ads in railfan publications.

Marketing:

Rack cards, paid distribution in locations for tourists.
Web site, optimized for searches we want (railroad, scenic, museum, etc.)
Listing ourselves in every event/activity listing we can find on the internet. This is labor intensive!
Selected tourist publications distributed at visitor centers.
Public service announcements, press releases, interviews, etc., to generate free media.

TV is too expensive.

We used radio for Polar Express with some success. Radio is very segmented. You can get grandparents or parents, but not necessarily both, on any one station. However, most radio conglomerates have several stations in every market and you can get a package deal to reach your target audience.

Find out where parents take their kids to play, and get brochures there.

We tried Group On, and got a bunch of people to attend. Not quite the right market for us, young urban professionals. But you cannot really lose money with Group On, you just get half of your normal ticket price.

Take a look at your website stats and see what sites visitors are coming from, and what searches are finding your site. That may give you some clues as to your market.

You need to give people a reason to come back - events and special programs - and then market them.

School group visits can be a source of income, but you have to market to teachers. This requires someone to interpret the state education standards into stuff we understand and can provide to the students.

Facility rentals - weddings! If you can do weddings in the museum or on a train get listed in wedding websites or with wedding planners.

Depends on your size. If your annual income is $50 million, then you buy TV ads, buy newspaper ads, buy ____ ads. The operative words are BUY and ADVERTISING. And lots and lots and lots of it. Over and over. You don't buy 1 TV ad... you buy at least 300 so it's repeated often enough to start to stick. Nobody pays attention to ads.

If your annual income is $50 thousand, then you operate in a totally different way. This cannot be emphasized enough. You can't afford to use paid-advertising the way the big boys do. Obviously a Superbowl ad would be a net financial lose, well, the same can be said of virtually all paid advertising. In fact, for a small shop, ADVERTISING is a dirty word. It's a dangerous word because it distracts you from all the other ways to publicize your business. Seriously. The first thing you must do is ZERO your advertising budget. And then vow to find the numerous ways to get promoted for free/cheap.

20 years ago, Clay, a volunteer at your same museum, gave me a book called "Guerrilla Marketing". It just made me go "Holy WOW" and it really opened my mind to what was possible then. It's a different world now, as the Internet has reshaped people's attention, but if I recall, the writer of that book has kept it updated.

Don't get me wrong, there are places you have to spend a buck. For instance, brochures. No way to be in this business without them, and a professional 4-color job does have a greater level of credibility for little more cost. And beyond that, the per unit costs gets a lot more favorable when you print 20,000 or more. DO NOT order quantities of 500 from VistaPrint. In fact, no small organization should do business with VistaPrint at all. They're not competitive on large jobs, and too "boutiquey", too easy a place to spend a lot of money to very little net effect.

That aside, there are very few places where a significant cash outlay is required. FOCUS ON FREE. There's plenty to do in "Free".

Recognize something very important. Every publicity technique takes TIME. I have heard the claim that "The free methods take time from volunteers which we don't have, so we pay." That is not true -- hiring people also takes time. You have to
get the campaign approved,
find them,
talk to them,
tell them what you want,
approve it,
check that it ran,
open the mail,
get the invoice,
confer with someone about that,
approve it,
get the treasurer to pay it,
account the expense in the books,
assess ad performance,
then wrap it up in a report to your Board.
You don't notice it because it's mostly interrupt-driven or hitched onto other things (like bookkeeping). But it takes just as much time in the end as a free method. What's the difference between spending 2 hours (in total) dealing with a newspaper advertising person... and spending 2 hours (in total) talking to a reporter about a story on your railroad? Hint: about nine hundred and forty bucks!

And which do you think is more effective.

OK then.........is your assumption about your target market based on just who showed up, or did you develop your product for the purpose of attracting just that target market? If you specifically sought it out as part of the original concept and business plan, developed the product and marketing mix for it, and got it as planned, congrats on a job well done. If based on just starting to do something and seeing who liked it, you are doing as bad a job as most of the rest of us, and can blame your success on luck.

I like plans better than luck, not that I'd ever turn luck down........plans just seem to have a way of making luck likelier.

Anyhow, to GroupOn: what product can you design for the market they target that will still make you money at the special rate? Seems like you have found a new market by accident - no sense deciding not to exploit it just because it isn't who you thought you were working for. I don't know if young singles in Maine prefer moose hunting, disco or wine and cheese, but surely there's something you can add to just a short train ride that will appeal.

Even McDonald's has figured out that they can appeal to more than lovers of just cheeseburgers and fries. No reason we can't vary our product line to attract a wider series of market segments if we try.

dave

We recently completed a Groupon deal, and although our redemption period has not ended, we have already learned a lot about Groupon and our clientele.

You don't get 50% of your regular fare when you use Groupon. Groupon takes half of what the customer is charged. If your regular ticket is $10, Groupon charges the customer $5 and takes $2.50 of that minus the credit card fees. You get $2.40.

We always knew our primary audience was women with small children. Our number one web referral for the past several years has been a "Mommy Blog" hosted by a local TV News station. Groupon confirmed who our audience is.

What Groupon also did, is expose us to a large number of new customers. Over 250,000 subscribers in our local area got a link to our website. We had one month's worth of web traffic in one day when we were featured on Groupon. We sold over 3000 tickets in less than two days. Since our Groupon promotion, 30% of our full price ticket sales can be directly attributed to Groupon. Although we sold tickets at a significantly reduced rate, we did not pay out of pocket for the exposure.

The stats Groupon provides is invaluable. Consider the graphic below (if I attached it properly):

[attachment=0]GRP01.jpg[/attachment]

This tells us our primary consumer is female and where they live. We have been asking ourselves, does our website appeal to women looking for activities for their children? Or does it appeal to us, to railfans? Are we directing our traditional marketing efforts to the right locations; towns where our target market can be found?

I'm not saying the Groupon is right for you; your mileage may vary. But it is a compelling option that has awakend our board of directors into discussing marketing in new ways.

Caveat Emptor,
Mike MacLean
President, New Hope Valley Railway
http://www.nhvry.org

Sounds like if you're running your trains empty, Groupon is a great thing.
Has anyone had problems with Groupon overwhelming your capacity?
How did you handle that?

Assuming you are getting that business already, I'd take it as a sign that you are. Adding to a market you are already penetrating could lead to more penetration; alternatively, focussing your marketing efforts on markets that aren't as responsive might broaden and enlarge the base.

Comes to mind: broadening your efforts to attract the daddy market; exploiting the mommy market in communities that are providing less of the audience; finding other markets not defined as mommy or daddy and figuring out how to reach out to them.

The temptation is to pile resources onto what is already working - sometimes those things are working as well as they can and resources might be better spent on things that aren't working as well to bring back a better return.

Robert, capacity isn't the issue - the first and last trains have lots of room, those in between are pretty well filling up nicely. If GroupOn not only broadened the base but also filled those less popular trips, excellent. I'd rather grow than reduce trips, but there are lots of variables in terms of scheduling, events, programming and product that can be tweaked and I know Mike is working on it all.

I'm impressed with just the feedback GroupOn is providing - that's worth money right there.

dave

Make sure local and state tourist promotion agencies know what your museum/attraction offers. Those connections can leverage your promotion by reaching a wider customer base.

Sloan

State welcome centers!!! Most will carry your brochures for free. Most, you send to a central location and they distribute to all welcome centers for you. And their appetite for brochures is staggering. Remember I was talking about 20k brochures? They'll use a good fraction.

To find your states, try searching in Yahoo/Google: [your state here] welcome center brochure distribution.

Also talk to your local Chambers of Commerce, especially if you're in a tourist area. There are also companies which will do the same for pay, and shop them around because some are surprisingly reasonable.

I also hope you have volunteers hand-carrying stacks of brochures into your small local businesses, such as antique shops, restaurants, regional hobby shops and the like. "Can I put some of these out on your counter?" The critical path here is the volunteer's time. You want to leave as many brochures as possible, so the volunteer doesn't have to come back anytime soon. Rack cards also help with that, because they're deceptively thin.

The current "state of the art" for brochures seems to be a 4x9" rack card on cardstock, full color both sides. Figure 4 cents each. There isn't much savings going to B&W. The 3 or 4-fold brochures are more expensive by a fair bit, even in B&W, because of coating and folding.

This is very interesting information and illustrates just how important it is to keep up with the rapid innovations of the digital age. It also validates some of my own thoughts about deep but targeted discounts. Every empty seat is unsold production and a missed opportunity to tell our stories and fulfill our missions.

Alan Maples

Last year, I made a road trip around the nation, and one thing I noticed was the lack of obvious road signs with direction and distance for several museums. Often the current signs are confusing. I found very few for Mid-Continent Railway, and the highway signs for Danbury led us on a wild goose chase until I simply had to give up.
Just my experience. Brochures in motels helped a great deal. Just my experience, yours may differ.

DOT sanctioned highway signs cost money. I can imagine that a 'complete' set of signs on the Interstate and all state highways passing through town could add up to some serious bucks. We used to have a pair of small white-on-blue signs for the turn-off from the nearby state highway, but one year many years ago when they upped the annual fee, we decided not to pay. The DOT had them down within a few days.

The PA Trolley Museum seems to have good signage leading travelers from the Interstate to their front door. I wonder how much that cost them, both the original installation and annual fees?