No matter what industry you’re in, marketing can be challenging.
As an escape room business, you can’t expect your service to sell itself. You must be prepared to spend time and money putting your brand out there — be it through paid ads, newsletters, SEO, and more.
The good news is modern businesses no longer need entire marketing departments to survive. Thanks to the internet, there’s no shortage of software to help small businesses and multinational companies alike.
From apps that schedule posts on your Instagram profile to software that creates stunning promotional posters, here are some of the best digital tools you need to reach your marketing goals and run a successful escape room business.
For Content Creation
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Canva
Visuals have a significant impact on your online marketing efforts. After all, pictures can grab someone’s attention much faster than plain text. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a trained designer to make eye-catching graphics for your escape room business.
Canva is a graphic design platform that lets you create social media posters, edit promotional videos, and design logos and other brand assets. They’ve got thousands of templates that even those with zero design knowledge can use.
Price: Free for basic features, Canva Pro for $12.99 per month for up to 5 users
Image credit: Yogita from SEOORB
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Inshot
Video marketing is rapidly on the rise, as you can see in the undeniable popularity of TikTok and YouTube. Likewise, you don’t have to be a videographer to get started.
For instance, you can use apps like Inshot, which is a useful and intuitive tool that allows you to import, trim, and edit clips. You can even add music, filters, and text to spruce it up — whether you’re making a video ad for your escape room or a landing page video for your website.
Price: Free Forever (In-app Upgrades)
Image credit: Inshot
For Project Management
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Trello
Trello is a brainstorming and project management platform that uses Kanban boards. But because it’s pretty flexible, you can use it for anything, such as: planning your escape room marketing strategy, tracking launches and events, building content calendars for social media, planning your new builds, and more.
Price: Free for small teams, Premium memberships available for $5 to $17.50 per user/month
Image credit: Trello
For Analytics
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Google Analytics
From the start, Google Analytics should be part of your digital marketing arsenal. This powerful tool will equip you with useful data to inform your escape room marketing efforts.
For starters, it lets you analyze your website traffic and see where it comes from. It might be from a specific campaign, your Facebook page, or your newsletter. With that in mind, you can adjust your strategy accordingly and fix what needs to be improved.
Price: Free
Image credit: Yogita From SEO ORB
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Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile, formerly known as Google My Business is an underused and overlooked marketing tool for small businesses. It allows you to create a free business listing on Google, which can help your business be found by customers. You can also use Google My Business to manage your business’s online presence, including adding photos and posts to your Profile, that show up directly on the Search Engine Results page.
Google provides a hoard of other features in the tool that show you what types of search terms are triggering your business listing, how many people visit your website, call or request directions from your business listing.
Price: Free Forever
Image credit: Yogita From SEO ORB
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Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps website owners monitor their website’s presence in Google search results.
The console provides website owners with insights about their website’s visibility and how their website is performing in Google search results. Additionally, the console can help website owners identify and fix issues with their website that may be impacting their website’s visibility in Google search results.
One caveat, you may need a bit of technical knowledge to set it up. Or ask your web dev.
Price: Free Forever
Image credit: Someone At SEO ORB
For Market Research & Business Intelligence
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BuzzSumo
Knowing your escape room target market is crucial. But if you want to dig even deeper and see what content performs best for your audience, then check out BuzzSumo. This platform helps you discover escape room market trends, find content opportunities, and monitor your competition.
For example, you might find that Harry Potter is trending once again among Millennials. How can you apply this to your escape room business? Through a themed game night? A wizard-inspired contest? What would make your market pay attention?
With BuzzSumo, you won’t just be taking leaps of faith when planning marketing projects — you’ll produce relevant stuff your market actually cares about.
You can use a 30 Day Trial to do your research. That’s more than enough to build out campaigns to last a few months.
Price: 30 Day FREE Trial, Premium memberships from $99 to $299 per month
Image credit: BuzzSumo
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Google Alerts
Google Alert is a free service offered by Google that allows you to monitor brand mentions and spy on your competitors. You can set up alerts to notify you via email whenever your brand or a competitor is mentioned online.
Google Alerts can help you stay on top of what’s being said about your business and keep tabs on your competition.
Set-up is as easy as 1-2-3. Type a keyword that you would like to monitor, E.g., your brand name or a competitor’s name. Set the frequency in Google Alerts that you would select to receive updates. That’s it.
This way, you can always be one step ahead of the competition.
– If someone posts about your brand, you can take immediate action.
– If someone posts about a competitor brand, you can immediately understand their strategy and deploy it for your brand.
Price: FREE Forever
Image credit: Google Alerts
For SEO
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Keywords Everywhere
Looking for a quick and easy way to do keyword research? Check out Keywords Everywhere, a FREE Chrome extension that provides keyword data in real-time as you browse the web.
With Keywords Everywhere, you can see how often a keyword is searched on Google, Bing, and YouTube, as well as its related average monthly search volume and cost-per-click.
The tool gives you accurate monthly search volume data, competition data, and CPC data for any keyword you enter.
Price: Free Plan (Additional features available on affordable credits)
Image credit: Piyush From SEO ORB
For Email Marketing
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Active Campaign
For escape room businesses, email marketing is an invaluable channel for generating leads, sharing exclusive content, and sending customer deals.
If you want to get started, Active Campaign is perhaps the most popular email marketing tool you can try. Despite being virtually free, it comes with robust features — including an easy drag-and-drop builder, autoresponders, segmentation tools, and analytics.
Price: Free, Premium Plans available.
Image credit: Autogrow.co
For social media management
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Buffer
Social media management is more than just posting on Instagram and calling it a day. To build your escape room’s social media presence, you need to plan engaging posts, routinely communicate with followers, and analyze which campaigns are most effective.
For this reason, social media management can be quite time-consuming, but tools like Buffer simplify and automate the process for you.
With a central platform for all social media channels, Buffer is perfect for managing various accounts — including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. It lets you schedule posts in advance, track messages, and find the top hashtags. All in one dashboard.
Price: Very Limited FREE Plan (will need paid sub to take advantage of its features)
Image credit: Buffer
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Meta Business Suite (Formerly Facebook BS)
Similar to Buffer, Meta Business Suite is a social media management platform that allows businesses to manage their Facebook and Instagram accounts from within Facebook’s native platform.
This makes it easy for businesses to keep track of all their social media activity in one place and makes it easy to post and schedule content.
It is a great alternative to Buffer if you only want to manage Facebook and Instagram accounts for your business.
Price: Free Forever.
Image credit: Facebook.com
Miscellaneous Tools
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Google Page Speed Insights
Google Page Speed Insights is a tool that can help you optimize your website for a better user experience. It analyzes your website and provides feedback on how to improve performance based on user experience best practices.
Benchmark, your website’s performance with this tool. It will give you a good idea about your site experience. If the numbers don’t look promising, then it’s best to get in touch with a developer who can help you speed optimize your website.
Price: Forever Free
Image credit: Google Page Speed Insights
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OptinMonster
Optinmonster is a powerful lead generation tool that helps you grow your email list quickly and easily.
With Optinmonster, you can create stunning opt-in forms that are responsive and look great on any device. Plus, Optinmonster includes powerful features like exit intent technology and A/B testing to help you get the most out of your opt-ins.
Sorry, I cheated. This is the only tool in the entire list that isn’t free, and I am a bit biased towards it due to its insane targeting capabilities and gamified features. Here’s a guide I wrote recently on using Pop-ups strategically for your escape room website.
Price: Starts at $9/ and go up to $49/m
Image credit: Piyush from SEO ORB
Starting and growing your escape room business isn’t easy, but you can make it less overwhelming with the right strategy and tools.
Indeed, the success of many businesses today can definitely be traced back to these apps, and this list doesn’t even scratch the surface of what else is out there. But if you’re looking for a good place to start, these tools are reliable and simple enough to use, whatever your marketing background is.
Want us to do the legwork for you? Our tried-and-tested growth acceleration framework is designed for entrepreneurs and businesses like YOU.