vrCAVE Marketing Guide: Understand Your Customers

Table of contents

• vrCAVE Marketing Guide: Understand Your Customers
  • Customers
  • The Customer’s Problem
  • Competition in Location-Based Entertainment
  • The Marketing and Sales Funnel
  • Customer Personas
    • Example: Parents with teenagers
    • Example: Corporate booking
  • Building a Persona
    • Example: Parent
  • What if You’re a New Business?
  • Takeaways

Customers

Your customers will love VR escape rooms the same way they’ll love your laser tag, physical escape rooms, or other existing attractions. As with marketing anything, you have to make it easy for them to try it — and you may find that with VR comes the additional challenge that some people are hesitant because they’ve never tried any kind of VR before.

But chances are, your average escape room customer had never been challenged to escape from a locked room before they first tried an escape room. Or they never thought it’d be fun to be shot with paint before they tried paintball for the first time. Or they thought throwing axes at wood was too dangerous before they found themself at an axe-throwing centre.

There’s a lot that can convince someone to try something for the first time, and it’s good to be aware of as many of them as possible:

• It inherently looks or sounds fun to them right away
• A friend told them about their experience
• They watched someone else do it and now they’re interested
  • They may have watched someone do it while they’re doing something else in your venue
  • They may have watched someone do it in a video you post online
  • They may have watched someone they don’t know but trust (ie. influencer) do it
• They’re searching for an activity online and because you have great SEO and/or local reviews, you come up near the top of the results
• They feel like the experience is novel, exclusive, and will give them status/something to talk about to their friends
• They become aware of a sense that there’s a buzz about something and they don’t want to miss out
• There’s a great deal on right now, so why not?
• You or your staff make a great case to walk-in traffic
• Some specific piece of marketing is persuasive (possibly employing the above)

The Customer’s Problem

People pay for things because they solve a problem they’re experiencing. Just because you’re selling entertainment doesn’t change that. It’s just that instead of buying a screwdriver because they have to unscrew something, what they’re trying to resolve are less tangible, but still very real.

• They’re bored and want to do something with their friends
• They want to cheer up a friend or give a gift
• They’re trying to book a party or other activity for their friends/kids
• They’re trying to book a corporate event

In all of these situations, doing nothing results in unpleasant consequences. They stay bored and they don’t see their friends. Their kids don’t have a fun birthday. Or they get kicked off the company party planning committee.

You don’t need to call out these specific things when you’re promoting yourself, but by keeping them (and more!) in mind, it helps you get into the minds of your customers. Promotion works best when you’re thinking about what motivates people. What are they trying to solve, and why are you the best solution?

Competition in Location-Based Entertainment

What is fairly unique with entertainment products and services is the competition is, fully understood, incredibly broad.

If you need to get a screw out of something, you need a screwdriver. You might have a preferred brand based on quality or affordability, but there’s really only one solution with multiple vendors competing on providing the best option.

Let’s say you run a VR arcade in a town with one other VR arcade. Of course, you have direct competition, and there might be various reasons why someone might choose yours over the other:

• Better price
• Better selection of games
• Better location
• Better customer service
• Better online reviews

Factors like these are all important and will influence customer decisions, but the thing to keep in mind is these are going to make the biggest difference furthest down the customer funnel — when the person has already essentially decided they want to do VR and it’s a case of deciding whether they’ll go with you or your competitor.

But the root problem you’re looking to solve is essentially “I need to do something with my time.” This means you’re in competition with more or less everything. Why should anyone come to your VR arcade when they’re thinking things like:

• “Netflix is right here and I’m feeling lazy”
• “I should get the guys together and hit the bars”
• “The kids really want to go to Disneyworld this year and I can only afford so much”

You can’t win everyone (unless you can fit a convincing Disneyworld simulation in your headset?), but if you understand your competition — all your competition — and what drives people to them, you’ll win more of them.

The Marketing and Sales Funnel

There are various models for marketing and sales funnels. If you’re not already using one, you can start with a simple three-step version. Customers go through three stages as they get closer to their buying decision. What makes this useful is you can think about what kind of messaging will help people in each stage get to the next.

Awareness — people become aware of a problem they’re experiencing

Consideration — people start researching how to resolve it

Decision — they know how they want to solve it, they just need to decide on the right provider

Awareness

In most cases, in the real world, for location-based entertainment, people aren’t generally sticking around in the Awareness stage very long, because figuring out what to do with our time is an ongoing problem most of us are always thinking about.

But put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer, Dave. We’ll start from scratch and say Dave has no idea what to do with his time. He’s single, just switched jobs and has gone from a schedule that gave him very little time to one where he’s got evenings and weekends off every week. He spends a couple of weeks just watching Netflix at home and ordering pizza, but it feels like there’s something missing. He’s in the Awareness stage. He exits this stage when he understands he should take some action. It might also be prompted by things like, he realizes it’s his brother’s birthday soon, or a friend reaches out to hang out but they don’t talk about what to do. It may also just be that he’s decided he’s bored with the same routine. Basically, it’s the understanding that he should do something, whether for an occasion or not.

Consideration

Once Dave’s decided he should do something, he’ll start researching his options. These days, most people are going to Google first, but there are other ways people find out about things. Word of mouth is very powerful — a good recommendation from a friend might come to mind. People will also be more aware as they’re going about their day — they might be more receptive to advertising online, they might see a billboard, they might pay attention more to a radio ad. They will try to find out about all the options they’re looking at and figure out what to do. Often in a funnel, you’d say they exit this stage when they decide what their solution is, but with how broad location-based entertainment is, there’s a good chance that rather than deciding VR is their activity, they’ve shortlisted your business alongside a couple of different activities.

Decision

In the final stage, Dave’s got a couple of options in mind, and he’s trying to finalize the decision. He’ll be weighing specifics from each business against the others. He may have three VR places in mind and is trying to figure out which game specifically, or he might be looking at your VR offering versus a paintball game versus a night at the movie theater. He may be looking at multiple activities (it’s not unusual for friends to meet up for dinner before or after some other social activity), where proximity might also be a bonus. He’ll probably be talking to his friends to see what they’d want to do, and we’re looking at a group decision. Once the decision is made, they’ll make the booking and Dave will either become your customer or not.

Funnel Progression

In some businesses, it’s not uncommon to get contact information for people in the early stages of the funnel, allowing you to send them information to help move them through it. With something like location-based entertainment, you probably won’t have that, so you won’t be able to know accurately how many people are in each stage.

That said, you can assume that there are fewer people in each stage as they progress, because some will always just choose something else. And after somebody does become a customer and you do have them in your system, you can start to operate by understanding that they return to Awareness at some point, and can go through the funnel again — with the advantage that they’re less likely to fall out of each stage because they’ve already had a good time.

All this has implications for what messaging you will come up with according to where people are and what they’re looking to find out. We get more into that in our How To Win Your Customers document. For now, just be aware that people will respond differently according to how far they’ve gone along through the funnel.

Customer Personas

One of the most useful things you can do as you get started is to think about the types of people that use your service (or if you’re new, that you expect will use your service). What type of person someone is changes how they’ll move through the funnel and change how they make their decisions.

We have found that the types of customers VR businesses get vary from area to area, so there’s no one right answer. Some areas find that gamers are not as interested as they expected, whereas for others, they’re a prime audience. Some find more success with parents with pre-teens and teenagers. Some find great success with tourists, whereas others, even in places with high tourist traffic, do much better with locals.

Look at your town and see what sort of entertainment businesses are already there and how they promote themselves. Think about who comes to your town and what guides them when they’re there.

Before you come up with your marketing and your messaging, you need to consider who it is you’re selling to. You might find it best to think about your top three to four target demographics. Then, think about what’s going on in their minds, and think about those points on the last page. What need are you addressing, what pressures are they facing, and what do you think would best convince them to try VR (or anything else you have!). What sorts of things would get them in the funnel, what guides their research, and what drives their final decision?

Example: Parents with teenagers

Let’s say you have two parents and two teenagers. These parents are looking for opportunities to do things as a family. It could be a teen just won an award and they want to celebrate. It could be one is about to go off to college and they’re looking to do as much as possible while they can. It could just be that they like to do things together on the weekends, or maybe it’s someone’s birthday. In any case, their need is an activity to do together, they want to make sure it’s going to be something they’re all going to enjoy.

If they end up engaging with your marketing, whether that’s the website, a physical flier, or anything else, they want to immediately see pictures of families and teens. If they only see younger kids for instance, they may worry that the activity isn’t good for teens — they’ll feel like they’ve wasted their money if their kid walks away from something unimpressed. So they’ll also want to have some assurance that their teens are going to enjoy it — maybe their teens would value being the first of their friends to try a fun new technology.

All of this could suggest a few lines of messaging in the marketing:

• Letting them know family rates are available
• Letting them know the suggested age range
• Testimonials from someone between the ages of 13-18
• A focus on the idea that you can be the first to try this amazing new thing
• Speaking to a concrete need, ie. “Take your kids somewhere exciting this weekend”

Example: Corporate booking

Here, you’re dealing with a different set of needs. This could be anyone from a formal manager, to HR, to an informal office party planner with a budget. The need here could be anything from a celebration of a company milestone, a sense that something must be done to boost team morale, or it could even be part of a longer formal team building plan. You’ve also got a new pressure to think about: if the booker books a bad event, they will worry that will reflect badly on them. They don’t want to be in a situation where they’ve cost the company money on a waste of time because they made a bad decision.

They will likely be willing to look around a bit to find info on corporate bookings as it’s more the convention, so you don’t have to put messaging up front and centre, but you will want to make it easy to find. They will also expect better pricing than individual if they’re coming in with a sizeable group, and they’ll need to make sure that when they arrive, there is no wait as they could be on company time. The more information you have available, the better the chances are of getting the business as they’ll be able to easily evaluate if it’s worth their time. When the competition has everything public, even a simple phone call could be enough of a barrier to have someone make the easier decision elsewhere.

• Letting them know corporate rates are available (minimum number of people? Minimum number of bookings?
• More logistical information: do you have a private room they can sit down in? Should they be there 15 minutes early to get organized?
• Enough information to assure them, in contrast to the parents, that the activities are suitable for older adults. You might want to focus on simplicity, ease of use
• Assurance that the event will do what they’re looking for — at least on your corporate event page, have relevant imagery and testimonials. Make sure on the general parts of your site you balance images of childrens with a few images of adults as well.

Building a Persona

There are many ways you may want to build up a persona, but the idea is essentially, you think of a type of customer as an individual that represents an average of that customer type. Some people find it helpful to give them an individual name and write a fictional but representative bio. That’s fine as long as you keep in mind that there will be many individuals within this customer segment that do not fit every point you create, but it’s also fine to write it up a bit more generically.

The point of the exercise is to help you tailor your messaging and efforts by allowing you to ask yourself, “would this engage this person?”

Example: Parent

Name : Melissa

Age : 42

Bio : Melissa is married to her husband and has two kids, aged 15 and 17. She works a 9-5 office job while her husband travels a lot for his sales job. She wants to make the most of the weekends he’s home, and is often competing with phones and video games for her kids’ attention.

Need : Weekend activities that are easy to do as a family

Where does she go to find information : She will typically do a Google search on her phone to find activities in a pinch, but she also asks her other parent friends what they’ve been up to, and has subscribed to a couple of local influencers’ events newsletters. She’ll also passively browse social media and likes to share family photos, though she’s not necessarily looking to buy anything when doing so.

What motivates her to buy : Melissa’s family is well-off enough that they can afford a few premium entertainment options, but she is very aware of the value she expects. After COVID, she’s more inclined to remain a little cautious, and appreciates the opportunity to do events that feel more private. More than anything, she wants to make sure that her children enjoy the activities, and will ask them what they think before she commits.

You could add many other bits of information, again, depending on how much you think it will help you. Income level could be useful, languages spoken may be relevant in some areas. Tailor a persona profile to what you think is most important, but you should always include the need, where they go to get information, and what motivates them to buy.

You can now create a marketing plan, because you know what you’ve got to account for:

• Melissa will search Google, so make sure your website is optimized for your local area and offerings. Think about the language she will use to search and conduct keyword research.
• Melissa will ask other parents what they think. Think of every customer you do get as a possible evangelist — what do you need to do to make sure that people walk out of their experience with you willing to recommend you? On top of delivering a great experience, are you keeping yourself top of mind with a mailing list?
• Melissa doesn’t particularly use traditional media to find events, but follows some influencers or local event accounts to get ideas. Getting a coupon code and working out a deal for an influencer to share it with their own mailing list or followers could be a good source of interest.
• Because Melissa uses social media and will search Google, both of these are viable places to run ads if you want to reach her.
• Testimonials from children around the age of her own kids will help convince her to book as it will offer assurance that her own kids will like it too. Photos and videos will also help on this point.
• Because time is limited, Melissa will likely appreciate efficiency. Can you promise that her session will start when she books it? If there’s an unexpected delay, do you have other activities they could be doing in the meantime to keep them busy?
• Because she will run the idea by her kids, you’ve not only got to convince her, you have to convince the kids too. You might even want to do a whole separate profile for them, but you’ll at least know that you’ll want to make it look cool and not too “kiddy”. The last thing a teen wants is to feel like they’re being forced to do something aimed at pre-teens.

Do at least a profile like this for each of your main three customer segments.

What if You’re a New Business?

Many VR businesses are, understandably, quite new! So you might be wondering how you build your personas, or even how you figure out roughly who you’re targeting in the first place?

If you are getting walk-in or booking traffic, keep notes on the types of people you actually see in your location. It may be helpful to take a week or two and note down the types of people that come through and try to find a pattern.

• Are they families?
• Are they high schoolers? College students?
• Male? Female?
• Work colleagues?
• Can you glean a sense of what their interests might be?

If you want to go deeper, you could consider running a survey, however, without any incentive you may not get many entries. You might run it as a contest with a free session as a random giveaway, or you might offer them 10% off their next booking. Here, you can ask a bit more, but I would encourage you to keep it to 10 questions or fewer that are very easy to answer, ideally just boxes they could check. I would also mix in some questions about the experiences so it’s not all just asking for personal information. You will also want to be careful about collecting information from minors depending on your local laws.

Example Questions:

• How much did you enjoy the VR game(s) you just played? Scale of 1-5
• What’s your age?
• How many children do you have?
• Which of these are you interested in? Check all that apply:
  • Video games
  • Escape rooms
  • Local events
  • Etc.
• What made you decide to try VR?
  • Already love VR
  • Recommended by a friend
  • Saw videos online
  • Etc.

This could also be a great place to give them an option to sign up to your newsletter as well! Have a checkbox next to a message like:

• I’d like to receive updates on new games and special offers via email

With your results, you should be able to start putting together a good idea of 3 personas. If you’re really having trouble on this point, as another option you could visit a competitor at peak time and look to get a sense of who they’re targeting, as well as examine their own messaging and trying to understand who they’re trying to reach.

As you’re starting new, you’ll want to pay a lot of attention to what sorts of people are booking, walking in, and following your Facebook page. Keep in mind as well that it’s useful to be aware of everyone in a group, but even more important to be aware of who makes the booking as they’re likely the decision-maker.

If you’re having a lot of trouble with this, there are approaches you can take with ad targeting to help discover your personas more experimentally. We’ll get into that in other documents.

Takeaways

This document has hopefully given you a lot to think about if you haven’t already defined your audience — or if you have, has helped understand it deeper. You might want to run through a few exercises to make sure you have a good understanding of who your audience is. In summary, we recommend:

• Come up with all the reasons you can think of that might influence a person of any persona or funnel stage toward a VR booking or walk-in. Write them down.
• Use sticky notes, an online sticky note tool, or just a document, to visually categorize all those reasons. Some might belong to multiple stages or personas, but seeing it can help you make connections.
• Run a survey or check out a comparable competitor to get some rough ideas on your customer persona based on actual real-world circumstances
• Create three persona bio write-ups you think best apply to your business using the data and ideas from the above points
• Consider how each of these personas might flow through the three stages of the tunnel
  • What prompts them to become aware of their problem?
  • What solutions in your town might they come up with?
  • What will guide their final decision?

All this will be important as you move onto the next questions: what do you use to reach people, and how do you develop, test, and iterate winning campaigns?