The Target Market for Escape Rooms and How to Convert Them

As an Escape Room business owner, you know your target market is important. But who is your target market? And, how do you convert them into customers? This blog post will answer those questions and give you some tips to help you reach your target market.

We will cover the two target markets every escape room needs to understand and what strategies are used to turn them into paying customers. The two target markets are:

• High Intent Escapers
• People Looking For Things To Do

We utilize two marketing strategies to convert these target markets into bookings!

Target Market #1: High Intent Escapers

The escape room industry is vast and shows no signs of slowing down. This has created a lot of people who are always looking for escape rooms to complete.

This target market is all about showing up at the right time when these folks decide they want to complete an escape room.

Best Escape Room Marketing Strategies To Attract This Audience

Let's dive into the strategies and channels we utilize to convert high-intent escapers into paying customers.

These channels and strategies are about converting your geographic region's demand into bookings!

Google Ads

The channel we always suggest every escape room start with is Google Ads. It's essentially the phone book of marketing channels.

Whenever someone types anything remotely high intent into Google, your escape room should show up. You can achieve this over time with SEO (we will cover that below), but Google Ads can effectively be tuned to generate an incredible return.

Here is an escape room in Phoenix that we help run. Just three of our campaigns have passed a quarter million in conversion value with ROAS well above 9x.

For escape rooms, Google Ads is the essential tool for driving bookings.

These campaigns can provide valuable data to help you improve your marketing strategy. For example, we can see who else is bidding on the keywords in your area, which lets us understand what kind of marketing push your competitors are doing.

This data can be extremely valuable in helping you fine-tune your marketing approach to maximize results.

High Intent Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads

Traditionally, Meta (formerly Facebook) advertising is considered a passive channel. Until May of 2022, we have consistently utilized Meta ads as an awareness platform, but we have recently seen an incredible return on ad spend with our high-intent audience.

Conversion Meta ads are incredibly profitable for this audience, and we highly recommend utilizing the Meta platform right now.

 

Google Business

The high intent capture king! Google Business (formerly Google My Business) shows up when this audience searches for escape rooms!

Google Business is essential for Escape Room businesses for a number of reasons.

First, it helps to improve visibility in search results. When potential customers search for escape room businesses in their area, a listing on Google Business can help your business to stand out.

Second, it allows you to provide accurate and up-to-date information about your business, such as your opening hours, contact details, and directions. This is especially important for escape rooms that are located in hard-to-find places.

Third, Google Business reviews can give your business some much-needed social proof. Positive reviews can help to build trust and credibility with potential customers.

In the screenshot below you can see that Google places an entire map and Google Business listings above the "first" organic search!

Google Business offers several features that can be useful for businesses, such as the ability to create a virtual tour or upload photos. It's incredible how much engagement Google drives to this platform when properly set up.

Here are some Google Business data from an escape room we work with for you to benchmark your room against:

SEO

To capture this high intent target market, it's essential to ensure your website is optimized for search engines. This means that your website will show up higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), capturing the searcher even when your Google Ads budget is out for the day.

One of the best ways to optimize your website for search engines is to include keywords and phrases relevant to your business in your website content. You can also use keyword-rich titles and descriptions for your webpages and make sure that your website is linked to other websites with high authority.

SEO is so important for escape room businesses. When you optimize your website, Google can deliver it to the right people at the right time. If the information on your website is misconfigured, then Google can't match you with the high intent target audience.

Some more data from an escape room we work with:

Target Market #2: People Looking For Things To Do

We often hear from escape room owners that they wish they could step in front of people who are searching for adjacent industries or activities and convince them to come to try an escape room. That group of people they are describing is our second target market.

We call this target market the "People Looking For Things To Do" group.

These folks are lower intent and looking for something their friend group or family can do over the weekend.

This market is a bit colder, and just throwing your website in front of them is ineffective. A slightly more technical escape room marketing strategy is needed.

Best Escape Room Marketing Strategies To Attract This Audience

We need to implement a slightly more technical strategy to convert this audience.

The official term is an "Omnichannel" strategy. That's a fancy way of saying we will use multiple advertising channels and techniques to "warm" up a customer before converting them. We will do this with an awareness campaign, email opt-ins, re-marketing, and email marketing.

These strategies also build your email list, making your business more valuable if you choose to sell your business down the road.

Omnichannel Escape Room Marketing Strategy

Pictured below is a representation of the omnichannel escape room marketing strategy and how all the channels play into each other. Let's break down a few pieces of this strategy below.

Escape room awareness campaign with email capture

The first part of this strategy is all about advertising to a broad but geographically specific audience with something that will make people in this initial audience who are looking for things to do "raise their hand" or click.

In the strategy pictured above, we are advertising an article called "The 5 Best Halloween Activities in OC".

Our escape room will be the #1 choice, naturally! That's not to say this will be overly pushy, though. It will be a neutral introduction and will include other activities to do. After a few seconds, a pop-up will display an offer for a discount code in exchange for their email address.

"Might as well get the discount now in case we choose to do this later" is what they think to themselves as they give up their email.

Email automation is used to send them the coupon code, and then we initiate the "excite email series."

The excite email series

Now that we have their email address, we will set them up to receive three more follow-up emails that we call the "excite email series."

Over the next three weeks, they will receive an email reminding them about the escape room and how incredible it is… oh, and don't forget about the coupon!

After the automation is complete, they will be placed onto the regular weekly email marketing, so we always stay top of mind.

Escape room re-marketing ads

Have you ever investigated a product, and then that brand or product followed you for a little bit? That is exactly what we are going to do to this audience.

That person told us they are looking for things to do this fall - now, let's stay top of mind even if they didn't give up their email address.

This strategy utilizes re-marketing advertising from Meta and Google Display networks to follow this audience and increase the brand touch points.

Re-marketing ads are an invaluable tool when trying to convert the "things to do" target market.

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We can confidently outline these two target markets and show the results in each channel because we are running these campaigns today in escape rooms across the country.

We are so confident in our strategies and tactics that our base package has a 5x ROAS guarantee. We set up these strategies and make $5 for every $1 you put into the ads, or we refund every cent out of your pocket.

If you feel like you could be doing more for your escape room marketing, we would love to connect with you!

Growing escape rooms is not only our passion - but our expertise!