marketing your haunt to gen z audiences

Scott Simmons is the Creative Director of Needs More Fog, an experiential design and media production company for haunted attractions and immersive experiences. He has been designing, producing, and marketing large-scale haunted attractions since 1999 and remains Creative and Marketing Director for all ScareHouse branded attractions.

The way young people decide where to spend their entertainment dollars has fundamentally changed.

For years, haunted attractions relied on a straightforward marketing model. Like low for 10 months out of the year and then unleash a flood of marketing content everywhere in the fall:

• Static ads or promoted videos on social media

• Display ads on google

• Big billboards

• Radio ads

• Cable TV spot

• Flyers at a Spirit Halloween (if you were lucky enough to have local managers willing to bend corporate rules)

• A decent website with decent photos

Then word of mouth did the rest.

Gen X tended to be skeptical, independent decision-makers. If they heard about something cool, they’d intentionally go seek out more information. “I heard about this place. Let me look it up.” They were spontaneous, but self-directed.

Millennials were really the first generation heavily motivated by digital culture. They became much more open to trying new experiences and were often motivated by sharing those experiences afterward. Think Blair Witch-era internet mystery mixed with “we absolutely need to post photos from tonight.”

For both groups, traditional marketing still worked reasonably well. You could plant an idea earlier in the week and trust people would remember. Now? Not so much.

Gen Z Doesn’t Discover Haunted Attractions the Same Way

Gen Z (guests born between 1997 and 2012) doesn’t discover experiences through search and display ads the way previous generations did. They are skeptical of anything that feels overly produced, can detect AI artwork in nanoseconds, and have a very real sense of “stranger danger” if they can’t get a sense of who’s actually producing the event that’s clearly trying to sell them something.

Previous generations were willing to take a risk and buy a ticket for your attraction based on a few flashy ads and impressions, Gen Z and Gen A still needs all that to discover your attraction — but they also need much, more more content and enagement and word-of-mouth to seriously consider you as an option for this weekend.

If you want to elevate your attraction from optional to mandatory you need to quickly rethink your marketing strategy:

1. Stop treating social media like a flyer

Interact, engage and let people see the real people who make the haunt happen. This means:

• Real scares and crowds (not employees acting like customers, we can always tell)

• Behind-the-scenes moments and stories from you and your LOCAL staff.

• Guests having fun laughing, drinking, goofing off.

If you’re marketing is static, but also one-note, it’s going to fade into the background. Don’t just show the scares, show the whole experience. Not everything you post has to be terrifying.

Give your guests content to share and/or collaborate on content with real social currency.

2. Market in real time

If your attraction is active tonight, people should see that tonight. Recency is the real relevance to young audiences. Don’t keep showing the same flips and images from your archives, share what’s happening RIGHT NOW in your reels and stores.

3. Make your concept instantly understandable

Gen Z especially dislikes confusing or overly complicated event messaging. If somebody can’t immediately explain what your thing is, what makes it different, and why it’s easy to get tickets and get in the door … you’re losing ground to streaming and doordash fast.

4. Show the humans behind the attraction

Let audiences meet the creators, actors, makeup artists, weird scenic painters, and chaotic personalities behind your attraction. Help guests understand you’re not yet another faceless corporation cashing in on the scare economy (which is, ahem, boooooming)

Be authentic and genunine, share your passion for the haunt and let your own staff speaking honestly about why they love doing what they do. Younger generations place tremendous value on finding out who they’re supporting with their money, local audiences feel pride at supporting their hometown haunters.

5. never, ever take your foot off the pedal

There often comes a moment, usually going into the big October weekends, when you might feel like you’ve done every possible thing to get noticed. The data reveals tens of thousands of clicks and impressions, forgotten friends are texting you for tickets after your recent media coverage, and you start seriously wondering if maybe you’ve done too much? Are we at risk of over-exposure and overwhelming guests?

The very moment when you and the core members of your staff start feeling as if your haunt is completely dominating and overhwhelming social media, traditional media, word-of-mouth, and more is usually the point at which your event is … just sorta kinda popping up on the radar for the thousands of people who don’t actually work at your attraction.

Content matters, authenticity matter, and - obviously - the quality of your attraction matters.

But that was last season, or even last week. What are you planning to do each and every day between now and October 31st to make your event undeniable and unmissable? And once you truly see the needle move and attendance starts rising, do you have a strategy to keep that momentum going?

Marketing and online content is often one of the first things haunted attraction owners neglect as the season gets busy and the day-to-day challenges mount, and I’m here to tell you that generating current and engaging content on a DAILY basis in October (and much more on days of operation) has never been more vital to the survival of your attraction.

At Needs More Fog, we help haunted attractions and immersive entertainment brands rethink content strategy, guest engagement, social media, and experiential design for today’s audiences—not the audiences of 2012.

Whether you need a stronger October campaign, cinematic video content, a more shareable guest experience, or an honest outside perspective, we should talk.

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