our experience
Born From Baseball And Retro-Pinball
We understand your world because we also own, operate and market experienced-based businesses. For more than ten years we have run a minor-league baseball stadium and two retro-arcade and pinball museums.
Clipper Magazine Stadium
Lancaster, PA
The problem
The glitz and glamor and fireworks of a ballpark dim a little in the heart of an owner when you struggle to keep 6000+ people in seats 2-4 nights per week, rain or shine. After a while, running ads on TV, radio, and outdoor made our consumers numb. They assumed the stadium would always be packed when just the opposite was true. Running more and more media worked against us and discounting began to cut into our profits. Many weeknights were rough!
The solution
The answer was more social media, less local media – but it took us a few years to figure out what worked consistently. We needed to use highly-targeted advertising to appeal to very specific types of people and not saturate the general public. Going to park had to be a new, fresh idea again. We started telling different stories by age group and by activities/amenities yet we still managed an inclusive community for all our fans. The biggest key was to leverage Facebook’s interests and behavior targeting for cold traffic and to use re-targeting ads to talk to everyone else. Social is our biggest channel now.
Silverball Museum Arcade
Asbury Park, NJ and Delray, FL
The problem
Silverball Museum on the boardwalk in Asbury Park was a first-of-its-kind and a cult hit almost from day one. The big challenges came when we opened in Delray Beach, FL bigger and better with food, drinks and live entertainment. We had to cover all those costs when almost half of every year is tourist-free. For two years we sold “deals” online, advertised in magazines, and did almost anything to reach the locals – including trying social ads (but at a tiny budget we thought was a lot). We struggled many months of each year.
The solution
Following the ballpark, we started looking at our ad spend differently. We committed to spending $1000 instead of $300 and the results floored us. We began to advertise more outside of our local area – up to an hour away – and saw consistent average ticket sales of $33 (two tickets) with a cost-per-acquisition of $5-$7. Talk about a return on ad spend! We learned what creative worked and which messaging connected. Social is not TV and we proved it paid to better-describe what it’s really like here for first-timers of different age groups. Best, we now sell hard on social at holidays as gifts.
Visit Silverball Museums in Delray Beach, FL and Asbury Park, NJ