4 Ways to Market an Escape Room Online
Learn how to gain a competitive edge for your escape room with four key marketing strategies: content marketing, local SEO, organic SEO, and social media marketing.
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insights from 149,000+ hours of recreation marketing experience
Escape rooms are the most fun people can have solving a problem together.
You encourage groups of friends to deduce information from a set of clues to solve complex puzzles, and help them earn a wave of satisfaction when they’ve figured it all out.
As a result, you’re in high demand.
Many escape rooms haven’t adopted Internet marketing, though. But the few that have are currently enjoying a massive competitive edge over those that haven’t — one that encourages their growth and reduces the revenue of their competitors.
So how can your escape room gain that edge?
Keep reading to learn the four best marketing strategies you can use for your escape room. And give us a call at 888-601-5359 to learn how our digital marketing services can grow your business.
1. Content marketing
Content marketing is the practice of creating blogs, articles, infographics, videos, and other online products that provide value to your target audience.
For escape rooms, that could be anything from a blog post explaining inductive thinking skills, a testimonial page about how great your escape room is, or a 30-second video overview of your escape room.
The sky is the limit with content. Every new content piece is a new opportunity for your business to show up in Google search results and attract new customers.
With that in mind, it’s no wonder content marketing is the cornerstone of so many business’s marketing strategies.
But for some reason, it’s scarce in the escape room industry – and that’s where your escape room has a major opportunity.
When you launch a content marketing plan, you’re placing yourself another step ahead of your competitors every day.
On top of that, every item you publish gives you the chance to earn new customers. So you’re not just showing up on Google — you’re actively earning new customers with everything you make!
But there’s a catch to content marketing. It only achieves its fullest potential when you have a long-term strategy for it in place.
That means you won’t get explosive results overnight. Instead, you’ll earn slow and steady results over the course of the next year or so.
That’s the preferable way to grow a business, anyway. Explosive growth isn’t sustainable, which you’ve probably seen with flash-in-the-pan fads of the past.
Explosive growth is a nice way to make a quick buck. But it’s not a sustainable plan for a business to grow.
With content marketing, your business starts the climb to success from the bottom up. It might take time, research, refinement, and a lot of patience, but the end results are well worth the trouble.
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2. Local SEO
Local SEO is the process of adding your company’s name, address, and phone number to your website and online directories.
With local SEO, you can show up in a variety of places in search engine results pages (SERPs). This gives your site more visibility online, and it encourages search engine users to click through to your website.
The main bonus of local SEO is the extra information you get to show search engine users whenever they look up keywords related to your industry.
So it’s not just your website that can show up in search results — you can also earn placement for company photos, your location in Google Maps, your Google Reviews rating, your address, your hours of operation, and your phone number.
That’s a ton of information all in one spot. Even better, it can take up a lot of space at the top of search results, so you can gain an edge over your competitors.
This is especially true on mobile devices, where you can take up the entire screen with your local SEO listing.
So when you list yourself with local SEO outlets — especially Google Business Profile — you have the potential to saturate search results for terms related to your escape room.
That means whenever someone looks up escape rooms, they’ll see your business first.
That’s an incredible edge for any company.
Local SEO’s results are instant, too. Once you sign up for a directory and fill out all the needed information, Google takes care of the rest.
It’s free, it’s fast, and it works.
3. SEO
Organic SEO is the process of improving your website to make it easier for Google and users to read, contextualize, and understand.
Most of the time, organic SEO refers to improving your rankings in Google’s search results for specific keywords and phrases related to your business.
In theory, the links are organized according to trustworthiness and quality.
While Google’s algorithm isn’t perfect, consumers feel an inherent trust toward Google because it’s completely objective. The algorithm doesn’t have opinions or biases, and is designed to deliver the highest quality results to their users.
That means you can passively earn trust (and customers) for your escape room by showing up in organic search results.
High rankings also draw traffic to your site, where you can engage your visitors with content to convert them into customers.
That process can take a lot of different forms. But the most common looks something like this:
- Earn traffic from Google
- Engage that traffic with content specific to their Google search
- Encourage them to contact you when they’re done with your page
- Get them to pay for a time to use your escape room
These four steps are easier said than done, but they’re crucial to the marketing success of your escape room.
In fact, this process plays a major role in a company’s overall success — especially when you’re a small company like an escape room.
To start, you can capitalize on organic SEO by targeting high-value keywords like “escape room in [your city],” “escape room pricing,” and similar searches.
These are all searches someone would perform if they were interested in visiting an escape room. As a result, they’re qualified to become a lead and customer for your business.
These types of specific searches are called long-tail keywords, and they reflect purchasing intent on behalf of the user.
Essentially, someone using a long search term knows specifically what they want, so they’re more likely to buy. Users may search for these terms less often than terms like “escape room,” but shorter keywords don’t reflect user intent.
That means it’s best for your escape room to target lots of long-tail keywords that attract high-intent users.
They may not get as much traffic to your site, but they’ll get more qualified users on your site to convert into paying customers.
4. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is the practice of engaging your potential customers on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms your consumers use every day.
Today, most people think of Facebook and Twitter when they think of social media marketing. That’s because these are two of the largest networks that let you earn a following, engage that following, and respond to customer questions.
But social media marketing is also a prime promotional tool for site content, customer contests, and other ideas that could boost your public image.
Social media also lets your escape room customers post reviews about your business. Then, you can either thank them for the compliment or reply to their criticisms.
Either way, you’re showing your customer base that you’re an active presence online that cares about their customers.
In the end, that builds trust between you and your followers. That trust can quickly turn into a relationship that encourages repeat customers month after month.
WebFX is the leading provider of performance-based Internet marketing in the United States. We started working with escape rooms a few years ago, right as they started becoming popular.
As a result, we know what helps escape rooms get more customers online. We’ve used these four strategies to great success throughout the country, and now we’ll do the same for you.
Contact us today to create a marketing strategy for your escape room!
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Our website isn’t driving enough traffic
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