vrCAVE Marketing: Creating Campaigns

Using your audience and platforms to create effective marketing campaigns

Summary

This guide assumes that you’ve got a good idea of your customer personas and the platforms available to you, either through the previous two documents, or through your own research.

Here, we’ll be talking about using an understanding of your customer to execute marketing campaigns on various platforms. We’ll be focusing on a smaller number of marketing avenues than we discussed earlier, but we encourage you to use the same techniques to develop messaging applicable as necessary to any additional avenues you do pursue.

We’ll also talk about some common offers that successful location-based VR businesses use to keep their audience coming in and coming back.

Table of contents

In-Person: Tips for your Physical Location

Before we even get to developing content and messaging for actual marketing campaigns, it’s worth taking some time to think about how VR is represented in your physical location. After all, it’s photos and videos from here that you’ll use in your campaigns, and it’s in-person conversations you have and behaviors you observe in your customers that will ultimately drive your results.

Is VR the Focus or One of Many Attractions?

vrCAVE is installed in many different types of businesses. Sometimes:

  • vrCAVE is the only experience provided at all
  • vrCAVE is one of a small number of VR experiences at a dedicated VR arcade
  • vrCAVE is one of many VR experiences at a dedicated VR arcade
  • vrCAVE is the only VR experience offered at a location with one other type of entertainment (eg. escape rooms businesses)
  • vrCAVE is one of several VR experiences offered by a business with a small number of other experiences
  • vrCAVE is one of many attractions, VR and otherwise, offered by a mid-to-large sized FEC

Regardless of your business, we always recommend positioning vrCAVE as a draw in and of itself. 45-minute escape rooms are well-suited to attract people to your business in the first place — then while they’re there, they may play a round of mini-golf, buy some snacks, etc.

Of course, if you have other draws, a VR escape room could be that bonus activity or a reason to come back. A group could come for a round of bowling expecting to try some other things out over an evening, see people playing VR in a big public space, and then decide to play. On the other hand, a group is typically only going to do one escape room at a time, so if they book a physical room, you’d usually have more success getting a rebooking for the VR rather than getting them in right away.

Where Is Your VR Arena/Room?

The most effective way to get people to try VR is to demystify it and create curiosity. If you’re able to put your VR in a public or semi-public place rather than a fully closed-off room down a corridor, it can help in this regard. People seeing other people in VR sends them a message that yes, it’s something they can do, while also making them curious about what’s got these people so excited inside the headsets.

For many businesses though, a dedicated room makes the most practical sense. Even in this case, you could try having a live camera feed playing in your lobby, or even offer groups that are just finishing their own activity a quick peek into the room.

How Are You Introducing People to VR?

As suggested above, the most effective thing you can do is to have a way for people to see others playing life. If you can’t, or if you just want to go further, add more information about VR to places customers have to walk through, or may even be waiting around in for a while, such as your lobby.

vrCAVE provides screenshots and logos in different orientations you may want to get printed as posters. We also have game trailers you can play on loops that feature plenty of clips of people playing the games.

How Are You Talking About VR?

When people are hesitant about VR, the reason is often that they don’t think it’s for them, or in the case of escape rooms perhaps, that they’re not going to have the same experience as a physical room.

” VR isn’t for me”

vrCAVE designs all its rooms with a strong focus on providing a diversity of puzzles and roles for people of all ages and abilities. In any given game, there are tasks for people who want to explore, figure things out, experiment, delegate and organize — everything you might expect in a normal escape room. And for those games with faster paced action, we similarly build these tasks as social puzzles. If someone sees the ballista in Dragon Tower for instance and says “I can’t aim!” you can let them know that they could be on reload or shield duty.

” VR escape rooms aren’t as good as physical rooms”

vrCAVE doesn’t try to replace a physical room experience, but uses VR to offer themes and tasks that aren’t possible in a physical room. While you won’t get the tactile feel of a combination lock, for instance, you’ll be able to solve puzzles in zero gravity, see how actions in the past affect the future, or deal with a dragon flying through the sky.

Offer a Quick Demo

If you’re not busy, and you have a group that’s finished their current activity early, why not give them a quick taste of a vrCAVE game in Demo Mode? Whether they’re skeptical of VR or not, you can put your customers in a room for five minutes before it counts as a vrCAVE play and let them get a hands-on feel for the immersive quality of the experience.

Common Offers

Many business owners will use price discounts or other incentives to help drive customer engagement, especially at times they expect to have trouble. No matter what else you do, it’s always going to be harder to get bookings at some times rather than others.

With an entertainment business, Friday - Sunday is obviously your peak time for bookings. Some businesses may close altogether on a Monday or a Tuesday, most will operate on limited hours on weekdays generally, but regardless, you’ll want to fill those slots as well as you can.

If you’re operating just fine at your regular pricing? No, you won’t want to give out discounts just because. But if not, tailor your offers to where you need to see action.

Peak Pricing / Weekday Discounts

The most direct thing you can do is just charge less on weekdays. This can happen in several ways.

If you find yourself completely fully booked on weekends, so much that you have more interest than you can actually support, you have a few options:

  • If you’re also experiencing high demand generally and you have the space, you could open an additional VR arena
  • Drive some of those customers to weekdays by:
    • Implementing a compelling weekday discount, or
    • Increasing your weekend pricing

Which one will work best depends on the situation. Do you think the VR escape rooms are specifically what your customers are wanting? You’ll see a segment go for the weekday pricing. But if it’s more a case of they’re just looking for things to do on the weekend, they’ll just go somewhere else.

If you don’t think a weekend price increase is needed, or if you’re seeing difficulty generally, try for a weekday discount. The difference here is you’re directly promoting a deal, which may be more successful

Launch Discounts

Time-limited discounts can create some urgency: a feeling that the person needs to buy now or they’ll miss out. The catch is they work best when paired with something which feels like it justifies it.

A new game launch (or your initial launch with vrCAVE!) could come with a discount for the first week or two. You might try it for any booking, or just the new game. The justification is just that it’s new. The novelty is enough.

Themed Days / Games

If you’re having trouble on one particular day you could try just a discount on that day in particular. You might try this as a test of weekday pricing for instance. Instead of Monday - Thursday, you could do “10% off Tuesdays” and see how it goes.

Some locations also pair this with a particular game, either because they’re not seeing it get much attention otherwise, or just to use the theme to justify the discount. Perhaps you run Manor of Escape at a discount on a Friday the 13th or as Halloween approaches, and have staff dress up.

Birthday Discounts

A very successful campaign can be built around birthdays. Give people a week or so around their birthday, and say that if they’re close enough, they get a special deal. That can especially work for families with kids with upcoming birthdays, or it could spur a group of friends to plan something around one of them. It could be a straight money off or percentage deal, or you could say “Birthday person gets in free with three friends” or something like that. Just make sure you track them so someone doesn’t do it twice in the period!

You can either promote this generally, or if you have a mailing list and have access to their birthday date plus a CRM with automated emails, you could also send an email to the contact a month or so before their birthday, and another closer to the date.

Walk-In Specials

There’s obviously huge advantages of digital bookings, but many locations do see a lot of walk-in traffic — or could potentially see a lot of walk-in traffic if they’re located on a main street, in a mall, etc.

The problem is, if someone’s not already planned it, it might take some convincing for them to suddenly take the hour out of their day to do a VR escape room. That’s where a walk-in special comes in.

Ideally you want to balance things so that people do still book — for which they get the guarantee that their slot is waiting for them. But if you do it right, you can successfully fill some holes in your schedule for which you’d otherwise be getting nothing.

Stamp Cards

One way to drive some repeat business is with a stamp card program. Hand out physical cards to your customers and give them a stamp with every game they play. You could have a specific stamp for each individual game, or you could include some of the other attractions you have. The idea is they get a really good deal once they’ve played through a high number of games. So if you’ve got seven games, you could say play six, get the seventh free to really encourage people to come back over and over.

Repeat Booking

People typically come out of a VR escape room really excited, whether they succeeded or not. It’s a time of heightened emotion, and you can try directing that excitement into another booking. Many businesses will offer a discount if a group that’s just played one game books again on the spot. You’re capturing that excitement and having it face that sense of urgency of the time-limited offer — once they walk out that door, that’s it, they can’t get the deal any more.

Contests/Free Events

We’ll talk more about this in other sections, but a very occasional straight up giveaway can be quite successful. You want to balance the reach you expect the contest will have and the number of people who it’ll naturally draw in over time to your business as paying customers, with the cost of providing a free play for someone.

A free giveaway could drive people to your email list, so while you might give one freebie every couple of months to one group, you would expect to get say, 10 bookings from your regular newsletters in that same time because it drove a couple hundred people to sign up. That could make it quite worth it.

You could also hand out free play coupons for individuals. The catch of course is that you need at least two people in a group, so you’ll still be able to charge for who they bring with them.

How to Decide on Your Discounts

It’s up to you to determine how much you can afford to offer off the base price. You want to make sure that a discount is driving business you wouldn’t otherwise get — not just giving people who would have paid full price anyway a discount. But there are different ways of doing discounts that could be applied to any of the above, each of which might tap in to a different type of person in a different way:

  • Discounts per player — 2 players pay the base price, a third gets everyone 5% off, a fourth gets everyone 10% off, etc. Encourages more people in the same game
  • Free player — the birthday person, or just one of the group, so long as they have a full group for instance. This one can feel great, even to a group that might choose to average that free player saving over the rest of them. It can feel more tangible than a percentage.
  • Percentage off — very easy to communicate 5% or 10% off, but might not feel too exciting until you get to 20%+. That said, don’t sleep on those smaller numbers, because not everything does need to be exciting. Having an easy-to-get 10% will make that occasional 20% even more compelling.
  • Money off — just a straight dollar amount off a price as opposed to a percentage. Whether you pick a number or a percentage really depends on the particulars of your pricing. “5% off” won’t sound exciting, but “$5 off” might.
  • Bonus game — it’s very common for a vrCAVE partner to put a group into Laserbots if they finish their main game with time to spare. You could choose to actually promote this as a way to both assure the group that they’ll get the full 45 minutes in VR, and to raise the stakes a little!

You may have experience with your other attractions on what sorts of discounts play well with your market. If you’re unsure of a discount, take the idea that you’ll offer discounts into account when you create your pricing model in the first place. And always note down how your offers are actually performing and be ready to change if they’re not working for you. If nobody’s picking one up, it’s probably not compelling enough. If you’re swamped and have to turn people away? Great — but next time you can try a lighter deal.

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Search Engine Optimization

SEO is always changing, but one thing will continue to be true: when a user enters a search query, the search engine wants to return what it thinks is the most relevant result.

Search Engine Optimization is designing and maintaining your website to make sure that when someone is looking for something to do in your town, you show up in the results. And when someone is searching to do VR in your town, you’re at the top.

There are technical and content-based things to keep in mind. Here, we’ll cover the most important content-based points. You will want to speak to your web developer about the more technical aspects, but in short, your site should run fast, efficient, equally well on desktop as on mobile, and be easy to navigate.

Keyword Research

Before you get too far into your content, you’ll want to do some keyword research. This will primarily help you with search engines, and will involve your ads and website written content.

You want to capture somebody searching on Google for things to do. You can use Google Keyword planner (https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/) to help, but think about the things people who could be your customer would be searching for. Examples:

“Virtual reality in [town name]”

“VR games for groups”

“Indoor activities in [town name]”

“[town name] escape rooms”

“VR arcade”

“New escape rooms”

“Things to do in [town name]”

You can then put these things into Keyword Planner and get some information on the number of searches people in your area do. Think up as many as you can and use Keyword Planner to understand which will be the most important.

Generally, the shorter and broader your keywords and phrases are, the higher search volume they will have. It’s important to target these, but also to keep in mind that you are likely to get a big mix of people in there. Many people searching “virtual reality” for instance, are looking for info on buying a headset for home.

Longer, more specific keywords will have a much smaller volume, but will be a lot more relevant. “Virtual reality escape rooms” will cut a lot of those people looking for a home headset out, but of course, those you are left with are likely to be looking for exactly what you’re selling.

It’s worth having both in there because you can’t predict all the ways someone might word their search phrase when they are in the market for VR escape rooms. Someone may put “virtual reality [town name]” as their phrase, and Google could match that to your “virtual reality” keyword, and it could well be someone looking to book. Either way, be as specific as you can in your ads, posts, and website about what you’re offering to cut down on irrelevant traffic. And if you’re seeing a lot of traffic coming in for a keyword and nobody’s converting, you can remove it from your list.

How to Use Your Keywords

You might have a lot of keywords that look good, but pick a few that seem the most important. In many cases, this is going to be some variety of “VR in [town name]” and “VR escape rooms”. These are the ones that are going to be in place in as many ads and as many pages as you can. It’s even better if they’re in your website’s headers, as this signals to search engines that this text is more important than the rest.

Beyond that, look at what else there is, both in terms of those high traffic broad terms and lower traffic, but more focused longer phrases. See where else you can fit them in across the rest of your site and your text.

In all cases, however, try to keep your text feeling natural. If your page is stuffing keywords at absolutely every opportunity, especially when they’re not relevant, search engines will penalize that.

Quick SEO Tips

  • Try to be consistent with header use. The biggest size (H1), should ideally be used once on a page and it should succinctly get across the purpose of the page. The next size down (H2) should delineate and describe sections on the page. H3 should be about subsections in your sections, etc.
    • Ask yourself, if someone only had access to the headers on your page, is that enough to tell them what the page is about, even if they don’t have the details?
  • Images have optional fields called alt-text. These help people using screen readers understand what’s on the page, and they’re also scanned by search engines. Website builders will typically give the option of adding this. This text is normally visible when you hover your mouse on an image (it’s not a caption that’s always visible). Sites are ranked higher when their images have alt-text, so try to add them. Be descriptive of the image, and if relevant, try to connect it to a keyword.
  • Keep your paragraphs relatively short, and if you’ve got more than three or four in a row, consider if it’s time for a header to separate them. This keeps your site more readable.
  • Make sure your location is in at least a few headers
  • Have a frequently asked questions page or section. This will be useful to your readers, but also to search engines, as you’re answering questions people may be directly searching. Talk about how to get there, how pricing works, who can play, how VR works, how you avoid motion sickness, etc.
  • Make sure your site looks good both on desktop and mobile. If you’re putting out a poor mobile experience, you’ll likely see traffic suffer.
  • Whenever you’re writing a header, think about if a keyword is relevant. Whenever you’re looking at a paragraph of text, see if you can insert a few keywords or phrases
    • The caveat to this is it’s still valuable to leave keywords out if you’ve got a really good slogan, for instance, or if your text is beginning to feel too artificial. You need to convince search engines that your page is the right place, but you also have to convince humans to make the decision to book.

Organic Facebook/Social Media Posting

While organic social media reach is limited, it’s still worth posting regularly to a Facebook page and an Instagram account. People who do stumble upon your page, either naturally or because of ads, will often scan through the page to see how active you are, what sorts of things people post, etc.

A very successful escape room technique is to have printed signs people can hold up for a photo after a room. You might not want to post all of them as they’ll drown out your other content, but you could do a few a week (and do send all photos to the groups so they can share too!). You could also use it as a way to drive mailing list signups (in accordance with any relevant anti-spam legislation of course). If you have the resources to email them the photo, that can be the draw for the signup.

Recently, vrCAVE staff visited a local escape room that had a fun twist on this. They took two Polaroid photos. One we got to stick up on the wall in their location next to everyone else’s, which really promotes how much business they’re getting! The other we got to take with us, so we have a physical reminder of the experience rather than a digital image we may or may not even open.

Great images and videos are essential for Instagram, and still very important for Facebook. Short clips posted with permission of people enjoying the games, often drive a fair amount of engagement and interest. You’re showing people that people are having a good time, which helps persuade them that they will too.

You can of course also run special promotions for social media followers as a draw to follow the account, or can do giveaways. The caveat here is that Facebook does have rules about this:

Administration of a Promotion

Promotions may be administered on Pages, Groups, Events, or within apps on Facebook. Personal Timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries”, and “tag your friends in this post to enter” are not permitted).

https://www.facebook.com/policies_center/pages_groups_events

Engage with people who comment, at least those who leave more than a couple of words. If someone says something nice about your business on social media, give them a thanks, and share the post.

As a loose rule, organic posting works far better when you’re not pitching the business in every post. Try to get a balance of no more than 20% of your posts being a direct pitch, and think of the other 80% as more an opportunity to develop community and just show how fun the games are.

Here are a few ideas for social media posting:

  • Behind the scenes of a new room setup, testing, etc.
  • Announcement of a new game launching
  • Video or photos of people playing the games
  • Direct customer testimonials
  • Game trailers
  • Special deals
  • Special local guests or events
  • Polls (Which is your favorite game, which have you played, etc.)

If a post does happen to take off or you have some extra confidence in its importance, you can always pay to boost it as well.

As for how often you should post? If you have the resources, you could do one per day, especially if you do choose to post group photos. At least try to post once per week.

A Note on TikTok

Many business owners in this space are wondering how applicable TikTok is. We are hearing our partners beginning to take the platform seriously, but it’s unclear how well it’s been working for them just yet.

Content production for TikTok is more time-intensive. But being an entertainment venue, the potential to capture some exciting moments is definitely there, and plenty of people in audiences you’re trying to target are there.

Obviously, you will need video. But the latest few generations of smartphones are probably good enough to do the job, even if you’ve got a dark space. Think about investing in a phone-compatible tripod and a ring light to give yourself the option of recording speaking directly to the camera in good quality, but you can likely get away with holding a phone with your hand for the action shots.

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There are lots of options on Google Ads. We’ll talk briefly about Search, Display, and YouTube.

These ads will appear at the top of search results, when they are deemed relevant to the query.

Google ranks your ads both by content and your bid. It’s the combination of both that will get you listed. A large company may have a high bid on “virtual reality”, but the query is “virtual reality escape rooms in [your town]”, it won’t matter if you have a lower budget, because Google is likely to understand that your site is far more related to the search.

So, it’s crucial with Google Search ads that you get your keywords aligned with your web content, and aligned with what people are searching for. That will enable you to compete on the big keywords.

Besides your location and keyword targeting, there’s also the content of your ad to consider.

Google has extremely strict character limits on headlines and descriptions, the two main components of an ad. You only have 30 and 90 characters respectively, so you have to make them count.

They do, however, allow up to 15 headline options and 4 descriptions. You should write something for each of these, because Google will then automatically choose what it thinks will be the best option for any individual query.

With our ad setup here for instance, you can see we’ve filled the ad strength ring up to Excellent. We did this by hitting all the check marks to the right of it, and you can see a preview of the ad under that.

You don’t necessarily have to get all the way to Excellent. The ad strength rating is ultimately an estimate, and sometimes for what you’re advertising, there just aren’t enough ways to hit everything on the checklist. There are certainly times when an ad ranked “Good” will outperform one ranked “Excellent”, but still try to get it all the way up if you can.

Google Display / YouTube

If you only do one type of Google Ad, you should try search. If you’d like to explore more, there’s Google Display. This will allow you to place your ads on websites in the Google Ads network. You can choose the type of placement, the types of sites — even individual sites. Not all website will be available of course, because some are not in the network, but there are lots to choose from.

You can, for example, pick tourism-related sites for people with an interest in your area, if you’re looking for tourists. You could pick gaming websites if you’re going for a younger, gamer crowd.

YouTube is similar. You can run your video ads on types of channels, at the start of or in the middle of videos.

These ads are much more passive than search, because with search the user has much more buying intent — they’re directly trying to find your company or your competitors. With these, you’re catching them as they’re reading or watching other content that they’re trying to give their attention to. It’s best to have a more brand awareness mindset when running ads like this.

A Note on Bing

Even if you’ve never been to Bing, it is an option. Bing has similar search and display options to Google (but no YouTube, of course). They have their own network of search partners and sites that host display ads. If you’re seeing a lot of success with Google and want to get even more, you might want to check it out.

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Facebook/Instagram Ads

These are some more hands-on directions to creating ads in Facebook, including some sample ads you could start with.

Boosting Posts

Doing a post boost is the easiest option to get started with Facebook ads. Putting a bit of money behind a post will guarantee it reaches a lot more people. If you’re confident in a post, or you see one actually getting some organic traction, you can give it that extra nudge.

The drawback here is your typical post of a funny clip or a customer testimonial is likely to get some engagement on the post itself, but you’re not always going to see direct action like people booking a session themselves. It’s a more passive form of advertising, more about increasing your visibility. This is fine to do, but the real results from this will come longer term and it will be harder to judge the effectiveness.

Regular Ads

In contrast, a regular Facebook ad should be a direct sell. It’s something you’ll typically want to commit to for at least a few weeks, if not months or indefinitely. The goal of these ads is to explicitly get bookings, and you will want to build your success to the point that you can be confident that your spend is making you money directly.

Ads and campaigns are arranged in this hierarchy:

Campaign > Ad Group > Ads

So you can run multiple ads in an ad group, and multiple ads per campaign. There are different settings for each level.

Campaign Level

The main choice here is the campaign objective. In many cases, Conversion is the best choice.

Ad Group Level

The major decisions here are the conversion events, the budget, and the audience. Based on what you’ve learned about your target demographic, you will be able to pick your options here.

Ad Level

Here’s what the interface looks like for standalone ads:

This is one of our ads, so the text is all focused on business owners. There are several content bits you’ll want to select and fill in for Facebook ads.

Media

The first is the media. Facebook will accept images and videos. You can use the ones we have available, you can edit them to have your own logo, or you could use your own. Generally, video works better.

Facebook will try to make your media fit all available placements. You may have to upload multiple options to fit everything, but you can still run ads if they don’t fit all of them. vrCAVE now supplies our videos in 16:9, 1:1, and 4:5 formats, which should allow you to run in all placements without having anything cut off.

Primary Text

Primary text is what people see as the “post” of the ad. It will get cut off after a few lines, so get the most important stuff first. People can expand this, so you can still put more information in. This would usually be the longest part of the ad.

Headline

The headline acts as the title of the link part of the post. It should be succinct and descriptive.

Description

This goes under the headline and should relate to the page that you’re sending people to. Again, this one will get cut off, so the most important part can be first. People won’t be able to expand this.

You can check out previews of your ad next to these options:

To help you get started, here is content for two sample ads you could try running. Obviously, feel free to change them as you see fit.

General Ad

Media : General vrCAVE video

Primary Text :

You’ve never done anything like this before! Virtual reality escape rooms at [Company Name] take you to fantastic new worlds. The same thrilling escape experience and mind-bending puzzle solving — in scenarios you never dreamed possible!

-Full freedom VR: no controls, no wires — just walk around and reach out!

-Intuitive and accessible: no VR experience required!

-Bring a group! You can’t get this at home!!

Get your friends and book now!

Headline Text:

Virtual reality escape rooms for groups now open!

Description Text:

Book your VR escape experience and get ready for the next step in escape rooms!

Manor of Escape Ad

Media: Manor of Escape Trailer

Primary Text:

The scariest VR escape room yet! Enter a mysterious manor to investigate reports of dangerous experimentation — and get out before the mad count himself finds you!

-Full freedom VR: no controls, no wires — just walk around and reach out!

-Intuitive and accessible: no VR experience required!

-Totally immerse yourself in fear: in VR, the scares are everywhere you look!

Grab your bravest (or most scareable!) friends and book now!

Headline Text:

Thrilling horror VR escape room for groups of 2-4!

Description Text:

Book the spookiest interactive experience in [Your Town] today.

View A Competitor’s Ads!

With Facebook, if a page is running ads, you can actually see them. If you’re on a competitor’s Facebook page, scroll down to Page Transparency on the right side. You may need to find this under the About tab if you don’t see it there.

Click See all. Here is an example of what you’ll see. If they’re running ads, it will say so, and you can click “Go to Ad Library”.

You won’t be able to see their targeting options or know if their ad is successful, but you’ll be able to see what they’re running, which can give you some helpful context.

If none of your immediate competition are running anything? That means you can really own that space.

Mailing Lists

Use mailing lists to let your customers know when something new is happening. There are two broad methods of sending email to your list.

One-time Campaigns

These campaigns are sent out once around particular dates in the calendar. This is best used when the content of the email is timely: a new game launch, or a special event you’re running. Often you’ll want to send these to just everybody, but there might be times you want to segment. If you’re running an event geared toward young adult couples for instance, you might want to exclude families, if you’re tracking that information.

Why not just send everything to everyone? People remain on your mailing list until they choose to unsubscribe. The less relevant the emails are to them, the more likely an email is to trigger them to leave. If you’re running a late night event focused on couples, parents looking for family activities are very unlikely to book that. So, leave them out and reduce the chance of the unsubscribe.

That said, many partners operate mailing lists without that level of detail. If that’s the case, try to make most of your emails appealing to your general audience so that even if you’re promoting that couples date night event, you’re also sending a reminder of your family deal.

Ideas for a one-time send (single emails or campaigns of multiple emails):

  • A monthly newsletter that catches people up on all upcoming events
  • An email focused around one single upcoming event
  • An email announcement of a new game launch
  • An announcement of a new deal you’re offering
  • An email talking about a new collaboration with another local organization

Automated Campaigns

An automated campaign goes out according to when certain conditions are met. This is more complicated to set up than one-time campaigns and relies on having access to certain information, but they can be quite powerful.

  • If you have the customer’s birthday (or if they booked a birthday party before on a date you recorded), send them an email a few weeks ahead about any birthday offers you have, and then another a few days before
  • If you’re able to communicate booking dates with your mailing list software, you could set up an automated message that reminds them of everything they need to know before arrival. You can also use that email to promote your other attractions and try to upsell them. You can send them a reminder the day of, and you can send a third email afterwards asking how it went, reminding them they can post a review, etc. However, you may want to take care to disable that if you know a particular booking did not go well, or send an alternate that asks for internal feedback rather than a review.
    • As a general note, somebody who had a bad time but is asked for direct feedback will be less likely to go straight to a negative review, because they may feel like they have been listened to
  • If you’re able to tell when somebody hasn’t been back for a few months, you might send them a reminder email, or say “We haven’t seen you in a while! We wanted to share an exclusive discount”. This can help them feel valued.
  • You might want to send a series of emails to all new users welcoming them to the list, the club, or whatever you’re calling it. You could set it up so they get an email every week or month that goes over some aspect of your business you want everyone to see over time

General Email Marketing Tips

  • Before you start writing, ask yourself if this email is about multiple things or about one thing
    • You usually get better results if the email is about one thing, or one thing with a couple of small reminders. However, for something a regular newsletter or similar, it’s more accepted to have multiple topics
    • If your email is mainly about one thing, your goal is to get them to do that one thing, and the email should be focused around it. If you’re talking about a new game release for instance, the email should be about getting a booking for the new game. Make sure all your links go to a page where they can quickly do that.
  • In general, all emails should have links to allow the reader to do what you’re looking for them to do. Deliver these links as calls to action both in the body of your text and as buttons.
    • As a rule of thumb, make sure there’s a link visible within the first paragraph or two, so that a link is always visible when the email is opened
  • Use images!
  • Don’t send too often. More than once a day is definitely too much. Once or twice a week is probably okay. Keep in mind that if you do have automated campaigns set up, you run the risk of conflict whether that’s a one-time send or multiple automated campaigns.
    • To get around this, many mailing lists will allow you to say “send on the next [Day of Week]”, so you could set up your birthday reminders to always go out on Tuesdays, and your welcome sequence to only go out on Thursdays. Then you know that you’re always safe to send a one-time email on a Saturday.
  • Email campaigns contain multiple emails. It’s usually fine to send around three emails around a particular promotion. If you go higher than that, you might risk coming across as spammy

A/B Testing

Finally, we’ll talk about A/B testing. This is the best method to improve your marketing approach over time, because you produce tangible results that you can learn from.

  • An A/B test says one group of your contacts or viewers is A, the other is B. These groups should be even in size.
  • A will receive something different to B.
  • When the experiment ends, you compare results.
  • If you achieved more of your goals in one group compared to the other, you can take that difference and say “this works better”
  • An A/B test can run the test on some percentage of the total, then send the rest of the contacts the winning version to achieve better results in the same campaign
  • An A/B test can include all of the total, with the learnings being brought forward to the next campaign.

As an example, you have 2000 contacts. 500 of them are labeled A, 500 are labeled B. You send A a version of an email with one subject line, and B a version with another subject line. A has a 20% open rate, while B has a 30% open rate. The remaining 1000 contacts now all get the version B got, and will likely match that 30% open rate.

As another example, you might have two versions of an ad running for one month, with an equal budget. One (A) has one video, the other (B) has a different video. At the end of the month, you see that A got a 10% clickthrough rate, while B only got a 5% clickthrough rate. You might then choose to run version A indefinitely, confident that it performed better than B. Or you might choose to start a new test, where B’s video is used for both, but you change your text.

Depending on the platforms you’re using, you may be able to run these tests with built-in features without having to worry about managing them, or you may want to do it manually.

Whichever it is, be sure to try to run A/B tests whenever you can. The real power of digital marketing is unlocked because you know quickly what’s performing and what isn’t. Over time, you can run many tests, always picking the winner to bring forward.

Over time, you’ll see better email open rates, better ad click rates, and ultimately, more bookings based of the time and resources you’re putting into your marketing.

Even when you’ve done 10+ tests and you think you’ve got a winning ad? Keep testing. Trends and tastes change, and what worked well in the past might become stale from users having seen it too much, or from them simply expecting something else.

What Not To Do

Common strategies that don’t tend to work.

Don’t rely entirely on organic posting and SEO

While an organic customer is cheaper than one earned through an advertisement most establishments cannot rely upon the numbers to be there.

You do want a site that ranks well organically. Your ad won’t always be shown for a relevant search, and being in the top results is always important. Plus, a site with content search engines deem relevant for an organic spot is a site with content search engines will likely deem relevant to an ad using those keywords.

And you do want to post organically on social media. You probably don’t want to spend your budget promoting every post after all, and every post helps your page look more active, dynamic, and interesting.

But ultimately, exposure on platforms, whether social media or search, comes through both the organic and paid avenues. The smaller you are and the less organic reach you get, the more proportionally you’ll need to get via paid means.

Don’t set up one ad and forget about it

It’s common for a company to set up an ad and let it run with the same content and the same budget for months.

Not only is this a potentially huge waste of money in most cases, but you’re also missing out on the real power of ads: being able to learn from your results. Pick a time period that works best for you (weekly, monthly, etc.), and be sure to be running at least two versions of your ads as an A/B test. Review your versions for your time period, and iterate towards what works best.

Don’t neglect to define your audience

Even if you don’t set up a full set of persona profiles as outlined above, not properly considering your audience is a big mistake that can lead to lost sales as people make the assumption that your business is not for them. If you go too specific, perhaps overly focusing on a gamer aesthetic, you might miss out on families. But if you go too broad, you’ll see a lot of irrelevant web traffic or will be wasting your spend and time on people who aren’t good customer matches.

Your target audience should guide everything from your in-store visual identity, to your website, to your advertisements and posts. You can and should target multiple market segments, just be aware of what they are, how you’ll refine them over time, and how your messaging speaks to them.

Don’t be afraid to try something new — or try something again

Many major avenues of advertising do work for many vrCAVE customers. That’s not to say everything will work for you, but it does mean that everything with a meaningful chance of success is worth a try. Some customers ran a Facebook campaign, for example, in the past, but didn’t see results.

That doesn’t mean Facebook is a bad way to get leads, because many of our customers do find good success. It could just mean that the message was wrong, the ad format was wrong, or it wasn’t set up effectively.

Don’t spread yourself too thin

If you’re just getting started, it might feel like you need to do everything at once. If you don’t have the resources to do every platform you’re looking at well, just pick the most important to start. For most customers, that will be Google Ads and Facebook/Instagram.

Some customers find a lot of success outsourcing their marketing to an intern or an agency. An intern might come cheap, but you’ll still have relatively few resources. An agency will often be pricey, but if you find the right one, the results can be more than worth it. If you do go that route, find an agency that can speak to the entertainment industry and ideally, can show you past success with it.

Don’t forget to make the VR Escape Rooms easy to find on your site!

The number one barrier to VR bookings are when businesses don’t make it visible and appealing on their site. A picture of the logo and the name of the game are often not enough. We’ve made text, screenshots, and trailers all available, and we recommend using as much as you can – or writing your own descriptions and getting your own footage.

In most cases, we would recommend at least a sizable section on your front page to talk about the VR escape rooms. We then suggest at minimum have one separate page dedicated to the games, with as much material on the page as you can get. If it works better with the rest of your site, it may be better to have one page per game (this is often a good fit for Escape Room sites that typically have one page per physical room, for instance).

Don’t assume people know how VR works

Unless you’re specifically a VR arcade, you can’t assume that a visitor to your site actually understands VR or has done it before. You don’t need to have an entire technical presentation, but you should be careful about explaining. “Free roam” is a great shorthand once somebody gets the concept, but taking the time to explain that means they “move around without cables, completely free” paints a much clearer image of what they should expect.

Similarly, it’s a great idea to explain how simple the process is. “Good for all ages (above 12). These games are designed for anyone to pick up and play — no VR or gaming experience required!” can do a lot to reassure someone that they’ll have a good time.

Don’t forget pictures of humans!

People often respond well to pictures of people. It makes something feel more relatable — if they’ve never done it before but they see a picture of someone they can relate to demographically doing it, it will send the message “yes, this is for you.” It’s tempting to just use the awesome screenshots and in-game footage, but don’t discount the value of having pictures of people having a great time — whether in the headset, headset on their forehead, or fully post-game shots.

Don’t forget the FAQ page!

Having an FAQ page is highly recommended for two reasons. First, it’s often genuinely helpful content that actually answers common questions and keeps people on the site, nudging them toward making the decision to buy. The second is that it’s great for SEO.

Have a mix of questions about virtual reality, escape rooms, your other attractions or options, corporate events and birthday party bookings, your location, hours, how to get there, and so on. Align the question with keywords someone might type into a search engine when you can, and keep the answers to 2-3 sentences if possible. You’ve probably got a good sense of the questions you typically hear in your location (and make sure to continue making note as new questions arise!), but also think of the questions that go unasked because they never made it into the location in the first place. Someone who assumes they’re too old, for instance, might be encouraged by a question like “What ages is VR fun for?” and an answer like “Typically, anyone over 12! We regularly see families and groups with teens, young adults, parents, and grandparents having a blast!”