Five Tips on Marketing Your Escape Room

‍FIVE TIPS on Marketing Your Escape Room‍

Are you new to the escape room business, or just looking to grow? We’ve got the tips for you! After over a decade of experience in the Location Based Entertainment Industry, working with businesses just like yours all over North America, we have narrowed down FIVE Tips For Marketing Your Escape Room.

Tip #1: Social Media 

Social Media is your friend when marketing your escape room business. This is one of the most underutilised concepts in the industry. When I say social media, I don’t just mean making a Facebook page and posting on it once a month. I mean actually having a strategy for your social media use, finding the right platform whether Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or whatever you find right for your business and demographic. Creating good engaging organic content and utilising targeted ads to stand out from your competitors, get your customers attention, and ultimately make more money.

We have written a couple blogs about how to use best use social media for your Location Based Entertainment Business, check them out here:

How to Build a Brand People Actually Want to Follow

Paid vs Organic Social Media

Tip #2: Google Business Profile & Google Ads

Google is your friend, as simple as that. In your escape room business you should be creating, optimising, and always updating your Google Business Account. It’s extremely easy and free SEO for your business and making sure you get found. Having an up to date Google Business Listing that has great high quality pictures, accurately describes your business, properly links your website, phone number, address, and really any details that a customer might be looking for makes you stand out. When someone searches “Escape Rooms” on Google, every escape room nearby will show up in a list, making your Google Business Listing high quality will easily make you stand out from the start and attract more people to click on yours. And that’s before we get into paid Google!

Google Ads are a whole new beast that I HIGHLY recommend for Escape Rooms. Most importantly, Google Search Ads. If you have a lot of competition, Google Search Ads are a surefire way that you come out on top, literally, your result will be the top result that comes up when people are searching for what to do. On top of that with escape rooms we have a really big benefit of the types of people searching for escape rooms are already warm buyers, they’re looking for something to do and ready to buy. It’s not something like buying a car where someone may search around for months and check out every dealership in their area, when they’re searching for escape rooms they are ready to book, having your business pop up first with a high quality search ad makes you the most clickable and ready to receive their money!

Tip #3: Community Involvement

At the heart of any city you may open is an Escape Room, any location based entertainment business can easily become a staple in a community with the right strategy. We have an amazing benefit over any other industry around, people come to our business to have fun, they relate positive times with their friends and family to our business. I don’t think people can say the same about the last place they bought an appliance. You need to use this to your advantage! Being involved in your community not only gets your name out there, but it gets people talking about you more, and wanting to support you. Are you wanting to target kids birthday parties for your business, sponsor a local kids sporting team. This is something that only costs between $250-$500 per season depending on your local organisations, and it gets eyes on your logo at least weekly every season. If you target this right and get the right age range for your sponsorship, you can guarantee when it comes around to parents of those players looking for somewhere to host their kids birthday party, you can bet they’re going to think of you first. 

Beyond this there’s so many different opportunities, giving gift certificates or prize packs to local charity groups. It doesn’t cost you much, but they will promote the heck out of your business, it’ll look great on you, and it’s a much funner prize for these charity groups to raffle off. I mean who wouldn’t want to try to win the super fun time at your escape room when it’s being compared to the local tire shop or chiropractor who also donated.

Being part of your community gives you excellent free exposure, very positive PR, and keeps you on people's minds.

Tip #4: High Quality Easy to Use Website

Your website is the centre of all things marketing, everything you do is driving people there. You need to make sure that you have a great website ready to accept them. What’s the point of spending all this money on Social Media Ads, Google Ads, or really any marketing spend if you’re sending them to a shitty website that doesn’t do its job. When I say high quality I don’t mean complex, honestly the simpler the better. Your website needs to get the point across, match the theme/branding of your business and escape room, and have an easy to use automated booking system. 

One of the most important things aside from an easy to use automated booking system that your website needs to have, is great SEO. We touched in Tip #2 about Google Ads, those are great at boosting your SEO, but an extra bonus you can have is if your website already has amazing SEO built into it. 

Check out a couple articles we’ve written on these topics:

5 Reasons You NEED an Automated Booking System

SEO vs Social Media in Location Based Entertainment

Tip #5: Email Marketing

Email marketing is crucial to the success of your Escape Room. One differentiating factor for Escape Rooms compared to other types of Location Based Entertainment is the replayability. Unfortunately in escape rooms we don’t have a ton of it, you can build an amazing room but once someone comes in and solves all the puzzles there’s a pretty low chance they’re going to come back to solve the same puzzles again. Doesn’t really have the same click anymore. But over the course of your business you’re going to eventually put in new rooms, change them up, redo, or whatever your tactic is. Now imagine when you launch that new room if you had a ready list of every customer who has previously come through your doors and loved your other escape rooms? Surprise, you can have that with email marketing. Getting an email from every customer who comes through your door is crucial to your success, there’s an old business statistic that it is 5x harder to acquire a new customer than retain an old one. Play your benefits, those are already your customers you just need to show them why they should come back.

There’s easy ways that you can collect emails from your customers, just as simple as including an email sign up in your waiver and on your booking platform can automatically grow your email list with minimal effort.

We’ve written an articles about this, check it out here:

Why you NEED to Start Building an Email List ASAP

Bonus Tips

Printed Flyers
Ew who still uses print media in this day and age? Yeah I agree, but in our experience we have had a lot of success distributing flyers to organisations looking for fun stuff to do. Corporations looking for team building exercises, schools looking for field trips, churches looking for social outings, get these printed at your local print centre and they cost you next to nothing, and could work to fill up your slower times.

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Press

No I don’t mean newspaper ads, this isn’t 1995. Utilise the press to announce big things, grand openings, events, cool stories about what you’re doing. As much as news stations love talking about the bad things in our communities, they also love sharing the positives. Create well written press releases and just send them out over anything, there’s a chance they’ll get picked up and then you’ll be famous! Look ma’ you made it! 

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One warning with working with the press, they control the story. We have had times where clients have had information promoted wrong, or stuff goes out too late, whatever it is. But just remember the balls in their court, they’re going to do their best, but they do make mistakes and unlike ads you control, it’s hard to change once it’s out there.

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Business Listing Services

The sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Trip Advisor, and your city is bound to have a couple of their own, get listed on those. Claim your profile and make sure that all the information on it is up to date and accurate. It’s a great resource for SEO making sure that there’s as many things in your search terms pointing your way. Now I wouldn’t really recommend paying for those services, in my experience I have found your ad budget goes a lot further in the other methods we listed above. But beware, all those platforms have really aggressive sales people who are going to try to get you to give them money.

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Collaborate with local businesses

One of the great benefits that you have as an escape room is you’re a cool and fun business. Businesses will want to work with you! We have found a lot of success working with businesses like breweries and pubs that have a similar demographic of young people looking to get out of the house. Find a way to make a mutually beneficial partnership with them!

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