Launching a new escape game - A marketing guide - Part 2
Welcome back to the second part to “How to launch a new escape game”. In case you stumbled across this blog first I recommend reading Part 1 first.
Marketing channels
There are plenty of places where you can advertise your new room so much so that it can get quite quickly overwhelming to pick the right ones and to decide how much emphasis to put on each of them.
I’ll aim for a comprehensive list of marketing channels you can use and we’ll go in order of importance. Different channels are good for different topics we just identified in Part 1 so use them accordingly.
In a launch campaign the main focus is on existing customers as they are your hottest leads to make another booking. They’ve been to your escape room already and had an amazing escape room experience so getting them to book again should be a walk in the park.
💡 I only recommend using your new room to attract new customers if it’s very different somehow from everything else on the market.
Marketing is all about saying the right thing to the right person at the right time and your different marketing channels should enforce each other rather than fly solo. We will take them one by one but always think of them as a whole too.
Your location
Your location is a living and breathing place with customers coming and going all the time. Customers are there to play your games so they definitely have the attention span to hear about a brand new experience opening up soon. You can raise awareness for your new experience in a passive and an active way.
Passive marketing
With passive marketing you don’t actively point out the new game you simply start working the message into the back of your customers’ mind. A few must dos:
Add a poster of the new game in your waiting area at key points.
Place flyers on the tables they can read while they are waiting for their GM to pick them up. You can even go as far as placing some posters in the toilets.
If the new room is en route to the existing rooms then make sure there is at least a sign that advertises the fact that there is a new room being constructed there.
These will also work as conversation starters for your active marketing.
Active marketing
This is when you actively bring up the new room while customers are at your location and this is where your GMs come into play. They have two touch points to mention the new experience: during the meet and greet and after the experience during the debrief.
I don’t recommend pushing the new game too much before they’ve even played but a quick mention shouldn’t be too intrusive. But once they’re done with their escape game the GMs should absolutely mention the other rooms and the one being constructed right now.
💡 Don’t just leave your hosts to their own devices, I recommend workshopping and brainstorming with your team to figure out the best way to drop those few lines about the new game and why they should book it.
Your website
Your website is your shopfront so as soon as you have confirmed the new experience internally you should put up a subpage for the new game. The basics you should have there from the get go:
A very basic story description
An expected launch date if you have one. Be as specific as you can at the time and keep updating the date.
A poster for the room
An email sign up form to get a reminder when the game can be booked
Don’t worry if any of the above changes over time, the goal here is to expose people as early as possible to the fact that there is a new game coming laying the groundwork for future bookings. You can even put up progress photos there to make this almost a Kickstarter like progress page.
One of my clients’ subpage for a new a game
Your website will go through many changes during the campaign so identify the pages that will be updated. Most commonly you’ll have to keep an eye on:
your home page,
booking page,
the room subpage,
and the FAQ page.
Identify key points on your timeline when the website needs to change, for example when you start looking for test teams, when bookings open, when you get the first reviews for the room and so on.
Automated emails
Your email comms with your customers are a great place for advertising the new game as well. The emails you should keep in mind are:
Booking confirmation
Booking reminder
Team photo
Asking for a review
The first two of these are before the experience so a casual mention of the new experience should suffice. The latter two might be blended into one in your business but regardless you should advertise the new room in them.
Keep updating the wording in these emails as the campaign progresses. When you are in the coming soon stage for example a quick mention and a link to the subpage is enough. When you are recruiting test teams then update the text, and so on and so forth.
Newsletters
You have collected hundreds and thousands of emails over the years and this is the moment when you can utilise them to their fullest. (💡Pssst, you should use them throughout the year as well) The rule of thumb here is to send a newsletter each time you have something to say but I recommend a minimum of 1 per week while the campaign is running. Don’t be shy and send one email altogether, people want to hear about your new experience.
A good method to minimise unsubscribes - which will happen no matter what you do so don’t be disheartened by that - is to use a sandwich method. Let me explain. You should rotate two types of newsletters:
Content emails
Sales emails
Content emails
They can be a quick update on the room’s progress, recruiting test teams, competition announcements, etc. These emails can still mention sales but the emphasis is on something different so your audience won’t feel like all they hear from you is “Buy!!!”
Sales emails
They are hyper focused on encouraging people to book. You can still lighten them up with an interesting blog you’ve put up or a funny story about building the new experience but you can also keep these very short and to the point.
Last but not least try to use segments in your audience. As I mentioned earlier this will greatly come down to how organised your customer data is and what data points you’re collecting.
Segmenting example
Let’s say you are building a 18+ horror room but you also have family friendly games and you also record which teams are families with young children. Now to this segment you can send a slightly different newsletter that talks about dropping the kids off and enjoying a grown ups only experience. The person reading this will feel like you understand their situation and the email talks to them directly.
Even if you don’t categorise your customers by group type you can easily use built in segments like location in Mailchimp. Why use your email credits for someone who is not even in the area anymore. If you want to learn more check out my mini course about newsletters.
Blog
Blogs are a great way to direct traffic to your website. You can post on socials about them, you can insert them into your newsletters and last but not least they’ll help your overall SEO standing with Google. Win-win-win.
One thing to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t expect quick incoming traffic from your blog, it takes Google up to 6 months to properly index your blogs and slowly build traffic. Apart from this though it’s a great way to “lure” your customers on your website from socials and their inboxes. Once they are there you should have a call to action to direct them to the new game’s subpage for example.
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Socials
When it comes to socials it’s really important that you nail down with each post what exactly you are hoping to achieve. It’s easy to get disheartened if you don’t get a lot of likes on something but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
💡 Let’s say you tell people to check out the subpage of your new game. That’s a clicking through type of post so you shouldn’t expect likes on something like that, measure its success based on how many people actually clicked through.
The type of posts (or a combination of them) you should be putting up using your talking points are:
Voting: ask your customers to vote on something like which puppet creeps them out more in your horror room.
Comments: ask for input on something like which paint you should use for a prop.
Tagging: You can continuously ask them with all your posts to tag someone they would like to take to your new room.
Reactions: Regularly put up progress pictures and videos that they can simply like.
💡 Whenever people tag or comment on your posts, make sure that you interact with them, don’t just let a “I would love to try this” comment sitting there without your response how much you are looking forward to see them escape.
We didn’t spend anything to get this many interactions, simply directed traffic to this post from other marketing channels.
Socials can easily get overwhelming as you would feel like I need to post about this on Facebook, Insta, TikTok, Twitter and I should put up some videos on YouTube. I know how that feels but be realistic with your energy and time. If you have a team of marketers by all means go for all channels, but you probably wouldn't be reading this article if you did so just pick a couple that you can focus on and do a good job with. Less is more in this case.
Budget
You might also wonder ”Should I burn through some serious budget?” and the short answer is not necessarily. It depends on how engaged your audience is, if they are super engaged you might even get away without putting a single dollar towards it.
💡 I do recommend pushing some of the key posts like the opening announcement with your hard earned money. Focus on your existing audience though, this isn’t necessarily the moment to win new customers.
ER Facebook groups
There are plenty of escape room specific groups on Facebook, the biggest enthusiast group has almost 30,000 members. However, that specific one doesn’t let you to post about any upcoming games you might have. So why am I even mentioning this then? Because you should look up the enthusiast group for your local area and join.
Localised facebook groups usually have relaxed rules around announcing new rooms, since it isn’t a global audience but people specifically interested in that particular area it makes more sense to let owners share news and updates about their new games. If you are uncertain, just ask the admins, in my experience they are super nice people.
Over 800 people interested specifically in Ontario based escape rooms.
Even though enthusiasts usually only take up about 5-10% of your customer base, they have an extremely important role to play in our industry. They are the fandom who will spread the word about a great game like wildfire. Use this opportunity wisely though, they usually only let you post once about a new game so my advice is to hold off on that while you are ironing out the kinks of your new room to make sure it will impress.
ER bloggers
Escape rooms and review sites serve two purposes during your launch campaign. It helps you build social proof if a good review comes from a respected ER reviewer and it also helps you to expose your game to their readers which has the potential to drive new customers.
Most people blogging and “professionally” reviewing escape rooms are doing this as a side hustle so in my experience most of the time they will be happy to write a review in exchange for a free game.
Review hubs:
UK focused: Escape the Review (Review aggregator)
US focused: Room Escape Artist and EscapeTheRoomers
A few things to note here:
Reach out pro-actively to reviewers in your area, don’t just wait for them to find you.
Make sure you’re on site while they are playing and have a chat with them.
This depends on how confident you are in your testing phase but I would recommend to hold off on ER reviewers until the early kinks of the room are ironed out. But keep in mind that it might take weeks to organise a review team as they will have other commitments.
💡 As a bonus, you can offer a special code for their readers for a small discount. This will help you to easily track the customers coming from their blogs making it easier to decide which ones to pick next time.
Influencers
Influencers such as ‘things to do’ bloggers, lifestyle YouTube channels or Insta accounts can drive a great amount of customers to you if it’s done right. But just because someone has a tremendous amount of followers that doesn’t mean you’ll benefit from a collaboration.
Here is a checklist to help you make a call on this:
Do they make sense for you? When you are scrolling through their content ask yourself if your new escape room game would make sense to be among the content. If you think it would be out of place, so will their followers and they won’t engage.
What’s their follower to engagement ratio? For example an insta account with 10k followers sounds great but if you can only see a few likes on their content that’s a red flag and you should avoid them.
Are they local enough for you? The internet is a big place so someone reviewing London experiences for example is an easy yes for a London based ER, but someone based in London reviewing experiences in whole Europe including London will have a following interested in traveling Europe so it’s not worth the effort. Ask for their data on where their followers are located and don’t engage if they can’t provide it.
Should I pay for this?
So you found someone who ticks all the boxes above but they’re asking for money to post about you to their followers and you wonder if it’s worth it. Whether you should pay for this or not is very simple: Ask them to provide click throughs on content from similar collabs in the past and apply your conversion rate. If it at least covers the cost of the ad opportunity you can go ahead, otherwise it’s a hard pass.
💡 For the most part though I would suggest to go for micro influencers (up to 10k followers) since they are usually at the stage where they are just happy to post about you in exchange for a free game or two. Make sure you organise their visit for the quieter times in your schedule and you are also present during their game.
Paid opportunities
There are a tremendous amount of places where you can burn through your ad budget so I’m not even going to attempt to list them here.
If you have a few thousand customers under your belt you could entirely skip on paid ads for the new room as that should be plenty to fill up the room for the first few months. Not to mention that you have income traffic set up anyway. I recommend simply putting all your efforts into reaching your existing audience through the channels above.
The budget you have should go towards the following places in this order:
Key posts on socials to reach your existing followers
Any ad opportunities you bought in the past and did well for ROI
Marketers will be more than happy to take your money so be careful and always calculate ROI before going ahead with anything that’s paid for. With this being said you should make sure to update all your existing listings and running ads.
💡If you have a generic video ad running on facebook for example make sure you update your total capacity and the number of games people can play.
Setting your campaign target
Last but absolutely not least let's talk about setting a target for your escape room launch campaign. You might say that your goal is to get as many bookings as possible, which is great but that’s not a goal, that’s a wish. A clear target set ahead of time will aid you tremendously to see if what you’re doing is working or not.
Since a target will come down to your specific business based on many factors such as the loyalty and size of your audience I’m not even going to try to attempt to give you an estimate. I can help you figure out your specific target but one thing I can say for certain: Following the structure in this two part blog you will recoup your investment waaaay quicker than if you didn’t do any of this.
The minimum you are looking to get out of a well structured marketing campaign is that the new room outdoes the existing rooms for a few months and adds about the same amount of revenue to the whole in the long run as your other rooms. If you don’t run a launch campaign what might easily happen is that you end up just adding capacity stretching your already incoming customers over more rooms which can easily lead to staffing issues for example.
Summary
I know all of this might feel overwhelming and I get it. When you are building a new room you already have a lot on your mind and marketing is the easiest one to put on the backburner. But don’t! A well structured launch campaign is exactly what will make the months and years of hard work pay off both emotionally and financially in the end.
Be realistic with your resources, both time and manpower wise. Stretching yourself too thin will result in a campaign that’s not consistent and is all over the place. So just keep in mind that less is actually more and make sure that what you do, you do really well and you don’t compromise in the end for a couple of emails and a single Facebook post to announce your new game.
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