The Escape Room Market has grown dramatically in North America and globally over the past 5 years. Most estimates put the global escape room market at over 8,500 venues of which perhaps as many as 2,500 are in North America. This story focuses on the escape room success story of LOCKOUT AUSTIN.
LOCKOUT AUSTIN was looking for an effective way to connect its group photo session more efficiently to social channels driving earned media and customer loyalty. This success story is about them. While the venue is incredibly successful, they realize they must constantly seek new ways to become more efficient and to bolster their branding through social media awareness.
There were several challenges with their group photo effort:
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- COMPLEX PROCESS AND LABOR INTENSIVE — While the group photo frames were creative, elaborate, branded and room-specific, the process of creating them was more manual. This involved taking the photo and then subsequently framing and branding it on the iPad, uploading the photo in a day-specific folder on Facebook and then hoping many hours later the customer would search all the photos, locate theirs, download it and perhaps share it on social media. This was a labor and time-intensive process subject to variation due to the duration and complexity, with limited odds of success.
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- CUSTOMERS DREADED THE PHOTO SEARCH – Hours after the customer completed their incredible experience at LOCKOUT AUSTIN they had to go to the Facebook Page to search for their photo and then share it. They were missing the positive energy and enthusiasm at the key moment in time and all convenience and most of the impulsiveness to share the experience was certainly lost.
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- INABILITY TO MEASURE IMPACT — From a measurement and analysis perspective, there was no way to measure the subsequent brand and social engagement that occurred with these customized photos. The photos lacked tracking or embedded URL links that could be used to direct interested parties to key website connection point.
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- COMPLEXITY AND TIME DISSUADED MULTIPLE PHOTOS — Due to the time-intensity and complexity, the staff was limited to taking a single group photo. Often, subsets of the larger group wanted their own photos and were not able to obtain the additional photos.
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- LIMITED MECHANISM TO BOOST REVIEWS –The venue wanted to boost the number of reviews it had on Trip Advisor. If it could capture these “brand ambassadors” that were posting these group photos to Facebook or Twitter, they would likely be positively biased. Helping guide those customers into a read-to-complete review form on Trip Advisor could be powerful.
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- FACEBOOK CHANGED THE GAME RADICALLY – Historically LOCKOUT AUSTIN relied on posting photos to its Facebook page and then hoping the photos would get re-shared into the news stream of followers. Facebook launched a bombshell to the advertising industry by shifting the news stream focus towards posts from family and friends and away from business page posts in 2018. This will reduce the social engagement rate for their method dramatically.
For many Escape Room venues, one of the challenges is that the content must be very visual, professional looking and memorable. Escape rooms are competing for attention against more than 300 million photos every day to Facebook. For LOCKOUT AUSTIN, their group photos were exciting, and they made extensive use of props, but they still lacked social tracking and instant photo re-sharing.
To read the full Success Story, Click HERE.
