How to Use a Photo Booth for Entertainment Venue Marketing

Whether you run an escape room, karaoke bar, axe-throwing arena, miniature golf course, haunted house, apple orchard, pumpkin patch, or something else entirely, you know the importance of driving traffic to your venue.

Maybe your escape room attendance has been stagnant or you’re looking to fill quieter timeslots at your haunted house. Maybe your entertainment venue is seasonal and you want to make the most out of a shorter opening period.

Whatever the case, entertainment venue marketing is key to driving new customers through your doors. We’ll show you how to do it with photo booths.

The Marketing Landscape

Many traditional advertising channels aren’t viable for entertainment venues. Not only are paid ads on Google or Facebook expensive enough to demolish any profits, digital ads are increasingly ignored by today’s consumers.

Social media

If you’re posting aimlessly on social media and not reaching your audience, you could be wasting your time.

For a long time, social media was a largely free and effective way to get the word out about your business and engage with customers. In recent years, social media companies have heavily throttled what you can reach for free.

They want you to pay for exposure, and the price to play is increasing rapidly. Facebook organic reach for top brands is at an all-time low with less than 0.07% of a page’s fans engaging with the average organic post! And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better anytime soon.

The days of free social media marketing for businesses are mostly over. If you have a big budget and are willing to spend hundreds of dollars per post to reach people, it might be a viable channel.

But if you’re an entertainment venue trying to get the word out on social media, we recommend a new approach to your marketing strategy that will bring in new customers and enable you to connect with them after their visit.

A better marketing strategy

When it comes to effective and profitable marketing strategies, word-of-mouth is the holy grail. It holds the potential for unparalleled profitability but is also the most challenging to pull off.

To fuel word-of-mouth, start by offering exceptional experiences that naturally compel your customers to talk about your business, especially with their online connections. A simple request to sign up for a newsletter rarely does the trick.

But if you offer them a fun, interactive, and genuine experience in your entertainment venue, it’s a different story.

That’s where a digital photo booth comes in.

How to use a photo booth

When your customers use a photo booth to capture a moment, you have the perfect opportunity to engage with them and ask for their information. Plus, the photo booth gives them a reason to want to share their contact information.

Think about it—people love to post about their experiences in your entertainment venue, like when they solve a difficult puzzle in the escape room, get an adrenaline rush in a haunted house, or throw a bullseye at the axe-throwing arena.

A photo booth allows your customers to share the fun with their friends and capture exactly what they’re doing at your venue.

Word-of-mouth marketing

With user-generated content from your photo booth, you’re getting word-of-mouth marketing at its finest. Customers are doing the work for you, and their friends are seeing it in their feed.

You’ve got a powerful social proof of other people having fun, sharing it and expressing how much they enjoyed your venue. This creates a loop where even more people want to come and experience it too—which leads to more customers and even more user-generated content.

In fact, a Nielsen study found that 92% of consumers trust earned media, like recommendations from friends and family, more than any other form of marketing.

Branded photos

When you use Simple Booth to run a photo booth, customers will be sharing with your hashtag, allow you to repost to your business’s social media account, tag the user, and fill your feed with exciting and relevant content.

This is a powerful way to increase your social media reach without having to pay for ads.

Example Facebook post caption:

“Congratulations to [User] for earning the high score at our escape room! They used our photo booth to capture the memory. We love it when you tag us so we can see photos from your great experiences. Comment below if you’ve played our escape rooms before!”

This kind of content creates a personal connection, taps into the user’s FOMO, and often leads to more customers commenting to say they’ve played before, which builds trust with the page visitors that you’re a top quality establishment.

You can feature your customers and create a fun, engaging social media presence without having to rely on organic social media reach or paying for ads.

Highly shareable

Plus, when you integrate your photo booth with Simple Booth HALO® App, the customer immediately gets the option to email or text themselves their photo. The instant gratification is a hit that helps participants to share right away.

Every photo and video can also be branded to your business and prominently include your logo.

As a result, your branded photo gets shared around and stays on your customers’ camera roll for them to find again later. We call this “digital word-of-mouth marketing.”

Learn more about how you can increase your social media reach with a photo booth.

Follow-up

The contact information you capture from customers when you use Simple Booth helps you get feedback and can be used for follow-up, like contacting them to offer a promotion and encourage them to return for another visit or for a seasonal promotion.

You can also use it to request a Google review, which can help your business rank higher in local search results and attract more new customers.

Did you know that 76% of consumers read reviews for local businesses?

If you use Simple Booth for your photo booth, it will be a memorable interaction that customers look forward to and remember.

More efficient marketing

A photo booth is a fun and exciting way to capture your customers’ attention while they’re having a great time at your venue. You don’t have to rely so heavily on social media and digital ads for your marketing success.

The photo booth is a memorable moment and you’ll capture more contact information than you would with a boring old paper sign up sheet or mediocre, lackluster tablet survey.

It keeps things fun and interactive while you gather valuable information to build your business. It’s the best of both worlds.