Room Escape Artist

For a few years there has been a simmering trend amongst escape room company marketing:

Sharing videos of guests doing dumb, silly, or embarrassing things.

I find myself wondering if this is a good idea?

Doing It For the Algorithm

Bad looks, rage, and humiliation perform well on social media… because people are cool.

And if you want attention, making fun of your paying customers isn’t the worst way to get attention. But is it going to sell more tickets?

When you’re running a business it’s easy to focus on numbers. Likes, shares, views, impressions, and followers are all easy numbers to compare your status from last month to this month… but for a local, ticket-sales-based business all of those social media numbers are at best vanity metrics if they aren’t directly selling tickets.

Developing and executing a unique marketing strategy that fits your brand isn’t easy. Huge companies spend massive budgets on this, and often only to modest success. We’ve certainly had more than our fair share of failed experiments or ideas that we didn’t have the time or energy to fulfill on.

What’s Your Message?

At the end of the day, you should still ask yourself, “what will a consumer of this content conclude about our business, owners, employees, and product?”

If you’re literally roasting your paying guests on your social media feed… what does that say to a potential customer who is on the fence about playing your games, or even playing escape rooms in general?

A person who doesn’t want to look foolish in front of their family or friends is going to see your videos as confirmation that escape rooms are cruel places where humiliation is a part of the experience.

Doing This Better

At RECON 24 in Los Angeles and on Reality Escape Pod, escape room owner Christine Barger (13th Basement) talked about this exact issue.

She has found tremendous success in social media marketing and has even, on occasion, posted videos of guests having a silly moment. The critical differences in what Christine has done are as follows:

• She gets the guest’s consent.
• Makes sure they are in on the joke.
• She tags the guest’s account if they want this.

Do what works for you, but I’d place a bet that roasting your paying customers in an attempt to appease faceless silicon gods that will never care about your work is a bad way to build a customer base that respects and appreciates you.