SUCCESS STORY

ESCAPE ROOM SUCCESS WITH SOCIAL FLASH MEDIA

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.

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The Highlights

Introduction

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 success story is about a premier Escape Room venue, LOCKOUT AUSTIN, located in Austin, Texas. 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.

The Challenges of LOCKOUT AUSTIN and the ER industry:

LOCKOUT AUSTIN has a booming Escape Room business. Austin is a competitive market for Escape Rooms, but it is also a booming town with a very large progressive young population. This highly competitive environment creates a challenge that is common to many Escape Rooms around the country and world.

Escape Rooms need to stay on top of the buzz against large corporate competitors with larger marketing budgets such as movie theaters, bowling alleys and gaming venues. LOCKOUT AUSTIN has maintained a very creative approach to marketing by creating branded group photos. They have created customized and elaborate frames for each room adventure and in the case of groups that “won”, they integrated the finish time in the photo. This labor-intensive method is very common in Escape Rooms and Social Flash Media believed they had a complete solution.

There were several challenges with their group photo effort:

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

    How it Works

    1. After a group completes its Escape Room effort, they gather for a group photo.
    2. Select the room theme from the SFM App, then the frame of success/fail is chosen.
    3. Employees take the photos using the Social Flash MOBILE App on a standard iPad (or iPhone).
    4. The photos are sent to the customers via email or text
    5. Behind the scenes, the selection of the photo frame determines the entire promotion that follows through social media.

    How it works (Elaborated)

    When you take a photo with Social Flash MOBILE, you can see the people and the branded border/frame in real-time so it’s always a custom fit.

    LOCKOUT AUSTIN no longer struggled with editing every frame on every photo. They no longer needed an editing suite on a computer, nor did they have to upload photos to a Facebook retrieval page. They no longer had to question if the guests took the time to search for their photos, much less if the photos were making it to social channels and if any traffic was being driven to the LOCKOUT AUSTIN web site.

    After the staff member takes the photos, the customers can send the photo directly to their smart phone or email. Their email or phone number is entered via the iPad (by the staff or the customer on a secondary sharing station), and with the click of a button these photos are routed through the Social Flash Media Marketing Platform and a link to their personal landing page is sent to the customer. The photographer, full of enthusiasm, mentions that sharing these photos on Facebook or Twitter is easy, fun and quick.

    Select Team Room

    Select Success/Fail Path

    Customer Actions:

    The customer receives the photo link on their smart phone.  Depending upon the promotion settings, the customer could be asked if they wanted to be included on the mailing list for monthly updates or watch a short promotional video before continuing to their photo(s).  When they arrive at their photo page, the customer is presented with the choice of sharing the photo image immediately to their Facebook or Twitter personal account.  This is, once again, initiated with a simple click of the appropriate button.

    When the photo image is posted, it also contains key SFM enabled traceable information, so the business can track how successful the post was in terms of engagement (Likes, Comments and Shares).  The post also contains a link that drives members of their social media circles to “Book a Room Now”.

    All of this traffic is tracked and visible for the client and can be modified by the client.

    Why it Works

    LOCKOUT AUSTIN has a booming Escape Room business. Austin is a competitive market for Escape Rooms, but it is also a booming town with a very large progressive young population. This highly competitive environment creates a challenge that is common to many Escape Rooms around the country and world.

    Escape Rooms need to stay on top of the buzz against large corporate competitors with larger marketing budgets such as movie theaters, bowling alleys and gaming venues. LOCKOUT AUSTIN has maintained a very creative approach to marketing by creating branded group photos. They have created customized and elaborate frames for each room adventure and in the case of groups that “won”, they integrated the finish time in the photo. This labor-intensive method is very common in Escape Rooms and Social Flash Media believed they had a complete solution.

    There were several challenges with their group photo effort:
     

    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.

      The Results

      LOCKOUT AUSTIN used the Social Flash MOBILE to take more than 630 photos in one month. This translates to 20 photos each business day. Customers voluntarily sent more than 950 branded photos to themselves.

      1. As you can see from the analytics below, 146 of those photos were shared on Facebook and another 15 shared on Twitter (25% of all photos taken were shared on social media), creating more than 3,400 brand engagements for the month and more than 730 clicks to the LOCKOUT AUSTIN web page.

         

        2. This translated to the following – for every group photo taken, more than one person clicked over to the LOCKOUT AUSTIN website. Many of these were friends of their current customers, most of which are prospective new customers to their venue. With Social Flash Media’s MOBILE offering, they began converting their customers into product ambassadors and leveraging their personal social network.

        3. With an average of 38 Facebook friends and using simple math, at the most basic level the customer posts generated an estimated 30,000 impressions. Given there were more than 3,400 engagements (Likes, Comments, Shares) on Facebook, then these shared photos found their way into personal social networks of the friends of their friends, and so on.

      Testimonial

      “We just could not go back to the way we used to do this, now that we started using Social Flash Media’s solution.”

      Karen Kuhn

      Manager, LOCKOUT AUSTIN

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