TransWorld 2023 Convention - Our Favorite Escape Room Booths and Most Asked Questions

Our second year at TransWorld 2023 was a huge success! Thank you to all our clients and guests who stopped by our booth. It was a bunch of fun!

Over the course of the four days, we got asked some awesome questions about escape room marketing we want to share with everyone!

Also - seeing our favorite industry partners in person is always a great time! See below for our favorite escape room partner booths that were at TransWorld 2023!

Frequent Questions Asked by Escape Room Owners at TransWorld 2023

Is Blogging Worth It For Escape Rooms? 

In a world of infinite budget and infinite time, the answer would be an absolute yes. The more words on your website that speak to your target market give Google and other search engines more information to parse.

However, we have found that most escape room owners do not have infinite money and time. Paying someone to do blogging is often expensive because of the labor involved, and the payoff is not always straightforward. Even if you have time, the marginal benefit might not be worth it.

Let's go a little deeper.

Escape rooms are local, brick-and-mortar businesses. Therefore, Google is acting like a true phone book for escape room businesses because of this. Google wants to present the searcher with good results to people searching with intent.

Generally, most searchers on Google are looking for what your rooms offer, hours, pricing, and booking. These items should be on the primary part of your website for Google to index. Not the blog.

If they are typing into Google "things to do" - Yelp and Trip Advisor dominate those search results. It's going to be very difficult to outrank them. This is where Google Ads is generally the better investment.

If someone is telling you that even if no one sees the blogs, Google just requires it on the backend - these people are using information from 2012. Google's prime directive is to serve content that adds value to humans.

There is technical SEO on the primary part of your website that gives structured data to Google's bots. This is the background information that Google requires. However, it's tough to sell this as a monthly service since it takes about 2 hours of labor once to do it right. Not a monthly subscription.

When does blogging make sense? After all, you are reading a blog right now!

Blogs make the most sense when you need to build trust with an audience well before you ever talk with them.

In our case, we need to build trust with escape room owners and prove that we are legit way before we ever talk to each other. Hence - blogging is extremely worth it for us.

For escape rooms? It's always hard to put a definite answer on marketing answers, but we would wager that the marginal cost it takes to pay someone to blog does not outweigh the marginal gain in revenue.

If the people you are paying are not local and don't know your local market (not just escape rooms) very well, I can be confident in saying blogging does not make much sense.

Is Organic Social Posting Worth it?

Organic social posting is when someone posts an image or video to Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok with zero paid to spend behind it.

Organic posting is absolutely worth it... if you are authentic and show that you are physically in the location. This makes it very hard for marketing agencies to sell a plan that works well.

Our recommendation is to have a manager or yourself run the social platforms and be as authentic as possible. If that is not an option, set up something like escapekit.co and have the system auto-post to these channels for you.

Paying a marketing agency that is not local to do organic posting is VERY difficult to find an ROI.

Spending money on ads through social platforms makes more sense since you can track the revenue - but please do not fall for a sales pitch from a marketing agency so they can post generic photos to your social channels.

Should I Spend Money on Taking Down Bad Reviews?

No. The only action you should take after getting a bad review is to take the criticism and improve upon it.

"But this was not a real review" or "This was from before we bought the business." Respond to the review letting them know you are not sure what this is from. Others will see the response and understand.

If you are absolutely sure you want to spend money on bad reviews - our advice is to take that entire budget and spend it on incentive programs for your employees to get more five-star reviews.

Give them $20 every time their name is mentioned in a five-star review. You will be really impressed by how quickly your ratings will go up and how much better your service will be.

We know how hard a bad review can feel - please try to move on from it and ignore it. Chances are you have hundreds of five-star reviews that your brain is ignoring. Those are the true representation of your escape room and what people truly care about.

Our Favorite Escape Room Booths

One of the best parts of TransWorld is getting to see our partners showing off their goods!

We focus on earning revenue through marketing for our escape rooms - that means keeping a network of extremely high-quality partners ready for referral when an escape room needs a boost!

Check out our favorite booths from TransWorld 2023!

Resova Booking System

Website: www.Resova.com

Escape Room Labs

Website: https://escaperoomprops.ca/

Escape Theory

Website: https://escape-theory.com/

Spooky Mirror

Website: https://spookymirror.com/

Fotaflo

Website: https://www.fotaflo.com/