Top 7 Escape Room Marketing Ideas To Boost Your Business
The escape room industry is one of the fastest-growing industries both in the US and all over the world. While this means opening and running an escape room business is definitely a lucrative one, the competition is now also very tight.
Thus, while certainly your escape room design and the innovative ideas you’ve put into designing the games are definitely important, you also need a proper marketing plan so you can attract enough customers to enjoy your games.
In this guide, we’ll discuss some of the best escape room marketing ideas you can use right away that will help you attract more customers and beat your competitors, and without further ado, let us begin.
Top Escape Room Marketing Ideas In 2021
- Optimize Your Google Maps Listing
Since your escape room is a brick-and-mortar business targeting local customers, we have to consider how people learn about local business nowadays.
At the moment, there are two main ways people learn about local businesses: social media, for example, when a place was reviewed by influencers, and via Google search.
We’d want to maximize our business’s presence when people search for queries like “escape room near me”, “escape room in (your city name)”, “entertainment near me”, and so on, and Google pulls results from Google Maps for these types of keywords.
For this purpose, our objective is to rank on Google Maps’ top 3 results for relevant keywords, which we can achieve in four key steps:
- Claiming and verifying Google My Business listing
- Optimizing your Google My Business listing by providing accurate and complete information
- Build local citations by listing your business in online directories relevant to your location
- Encourage your customers to leave (positive) reviews in your Google Maps listing and other review sites
2. Have a Professional Website
In this digital age, your website is akin to your digital storefront and can make or break your chances of winning more customers. Yes, social media is important (more on this below), but people will also browse your website before they’ll decide whether your escape room is worth visiting.
Feature a lot of attractive images and photos to showcase what your escape room is about, and make sure your website is as easy to navigate and use as possible.
Focus on optimizing the following:
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly, test on as many devices as possible
- Make sure it loads fast. According to Google, 50% of visitors will leave a website that loads in more than 3 seconds
- Develop high-quality content, make sure it is optimized for readability and free from grammatical error and typos
- Optimize your website for SEO
3. Improve Your Social Media Presence
Chances are, your escape room’s target audience is actively using social media, and it would only make sense to optimize your social media presence.
We can generally divide social media marketing into three different categories:
- Organic: that is, building your social media followers and organically reaching out to them.
- Paid: most social media platforms offer paid options to advertise on their networks. Advertising your escape room with targeted Facebook Ads, for example, can help amplify your reach.
- Influencers: work with relevant influencers in your area that can help promote your escape room business.
While growing your own organic following is the most cost-effective approach, it can take a long time before you can build a significant amount of followers. This is why it’s important to get the balance right between the three.
4. Discounts and Deals
The age-old tactic of offering discounts, gift cards, and freebies is still very effective in businesses like an escape room.
Modern customers are getting smarter and are actively looking for the best possible price at all times. This is how you can attract them to visit your business. Nowadays, there are various platforms where you can offer vouchers and discount coupons, but you might want to implement booking limits to ensure profitability.
You should especially use this tactic to fill rooms during low-demand days and months.
5. Easy-to-Use and Accessible Online Reservation
Attracting new clients is already hard enough, and the last thing you’d want is for them to abandon your business just because it’s hard to book your escape room.
Escape room booking software can help you in implementing an online booking system in place easily, even if you don’t have any programming knowledge.
With Bookeo you’ll gain access to various features to improve your escape room’s service quality, including:
- Send automatic notifications and reminders to your clients to reduce missed appointments
- Provide a seamless way for your clients to book your service on any device (including mobile devices)
- Notify staff with automatic email and text notifications for new, rescheduled, or canceled appointments
- Customize your appointment calendar with color-coding, and customize your business hours as required.
6. Build Valuable Partnerships
Don’t hesitate to join your local community to build partnerships with other businesses, even those that might not be directly related to the escape room industry.
The idea is to build mutual relationships with other businesses and create valuable partnerships where you can offer each other’s products or services. For example, you can partner up with local tour agents so they’ll bring tourists to your escape room as a part of their tour.
This can help amplify your reach, and as you can see, it’s okay to partner up with businesses that are not directly related to your niche.
Conclusion
The key to successfully marketing your escape room business is to understand who your target audience is and their behavior. The better your escape room suits their preferences, the more you’ll attract them.
Consistently providing great experiences is the key to growing your escape room business. However, while your games and props are the cores of your escape room’s customer experience, don’t forget the service side of things: you’ll still need to provide consistent service excellence to keep customers delighted.
