Quoted from pookycade:Based on everything written here I am going the social media route. We are posting more and trying to increase our presence. We shall see how that does.
I am also taking out a few targeted ads in weekly that tourists tend to frequent. Perhaps a wasted effort, but will be curious to see if we can boost the out of town ratio and if so where that gets generated from.
One of the cool things about "boosting" events and targeted ads on Facebook is they tell you exactly how many people click through to your post and break down the price per click. The also give you a lot of demographic info on those people, so you start to get a feel for who your audience is. For our pinball and arcade show I used targeted keywords like: pinball, arcade, videogame, games, playstation, xbox, jukebox, coin op and sometimes branch out into geek culture more because a lot of the people that like D&D, Magic the Gathering, gaming, etc. also like arcade games and pinball. I've found our demographics are both men and women with most falling between the ages of 25-50, but I usually target 18-65. Anyway, even if you don't see a big payoff instantly, it's cheap, you gain some demographic info, and it spreads the word and brings people to your Facebook page, where they may like it and start seeing your social media posts.