The yearly growth in the Escape Room market globally has been impressive over the past decade. As with all markets, eventually the growth curve comes down to earth, and the frenzy for new customers becomes reality. Offering a high quality, unique and differentiated experience, strong marketing and sales techniques, and being a few steps ahead of regional competitors will be the new benchmark.
We believe that Escape Rooms attract new customers by dramatically expanding their use of Social Media. By allowing satisfied customers to “tell the story”, your venue captures “earned media” without spending big money through advertising with the Social Media gorillas – Google, Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and others.
This post and several ahead dive into a specific subject – the “Group Photo” that is often taken after an escape room venture concludes. As this experience tends to be a team effort, the camaraderie and esprit de corps runs high, and this group photo is one of the few opportunities to achieve social awareness, social virality and social endorsement. Clearly, the potential social virality via a Group Photo could also apply to photos that capture their experience during the challenge as well.
The Escape Room industry faces one of the greatest challenges in “spreading the word”. The massive social buzz has been a huge blessing to an industry that otherwise would not have the financial means to promote the disenfranchised network of diverse venues. But how is it possible to get a consumer telescope focused on your space in the social nebula?
In our research we have found the most successful venues create a photo-op for all participants, win or lose, save the planet or blow it up. We have also discovered that the photo experience requires a substantial amount of payroll and time that not only reveals itself as a financial burden but often the most dreaded employee obligation.
Many of your clients take their own photos before and after their team event. It’s common for Escape Room businesses to facilitate a photo-op; but what happens after that? Do you know if and where the time and effort to capture that moment transcend into conversation or social media?
The group photo is a perfect opportunity for your venue to leave your customers with a powerful memory. As you will see from the remainder of this chapter, the commemorative photo is merely the beginning of how you can impact your business for months and years to come.
When a group navigates through an escape room challenge, it draws on their collective cooperation, fortitude, intelligence, insights and courage to succeed. Generally, this group of people is temporal – thrown together for the purposes of the experience ahead of them. It may be a team within a company having an offsite team building exercise. It might be a close group of personal friends that all attended a local university.
From a marketing 101 perspective it is CRITICAL to identify the “Common Thread”. Finding that common thread is the cornerstone of the culture behind your business. The common thread is that the escape room industry manufactures a bonding experience for people to use their differences to come together. This unity experience is the foundation of what any marketing expert would advise you to promote. If you can promote that you can put a team of oddballs together in a room for an hour, and they still leave laughing with a smile, you will have succeeded in Marketing 101.
