10 Things to Look for in an Audience Engagement Platform & Partner.

Extending your visitors' experience beyond their physical visit is crucial for fostering long-term engagement and loyalty. While popularised in retail, Audience Engagement Platforms (AEPs) are rapidly transforming the visitor attractions sector, enabling extended experiences and supporting sustainability efforts.

A modern AEP is a Software as a Service (SaaS) tool designed to revolutionise your audience's interaction both on and off-site. It provides valuable data and insights into visitor behaviour, enriches content, enhances learning, improves accessibility, and diversifies revenue through marketing, rewards, and redemption programmes.

Operating as a standalone, cloud-hosted solution, an AEP allows you to create, customise, and control digital audience experiences via a dedicated, branded app on visitors' smartphones. This simplifies digital transformation by offering a solution that is simple to configure and quick to deploy, requiring no technical expertise. Traditionally, visitor-facing mobile apps demanded dedicated teams, high costs, and lengthy development cycles.

AEPs power mobile-optimised apps that create a seamless, 'portable' audience experience, enabling continuous engagement even after visitors leave. This allows attractions and venues to remain 'always open' digitally.

Digital transformation is vital for the longevity and growth of the experience economy. Whether you develop solutions in-house or partner with a specialist provider, here are the top 10 essential criteria when selecting an AEP partner and platform.

1. Simplicity of Implementation

An AEP is specifically designed to streamline your digital transformation journey. With cloud-hosted platforms, you gain control over creating and customising your audience app, incorporating your branding, content, and marketing activations. Everything is centralised, providing access to valuable insights and data on audience behaviour, including dwell time, content engagement, and offer uptake. This also allows for tracking off-site engagement, such as at home or in educational settings.

Some cloud-hosted AEPs are 'oven-ready', meaning they can be deployed quickly with minimal technical skills, requiring only your content.

2. Ease of Operation

For long-term success, an AEP must be simple to customise and control, especially with limited resources. Traditional barriers to digital transformation include a lack of technical skills, expertise, and the time needed for deployment. A well-designed AEP handles the technical complexities, allowing you to focus on strategic usage.

3. Guaranteed Uptime

Technology is only effective when it's operational. Built-in redundancy is essential. Cloud-based architecture inherently provides resilience against unexpected events, ensuring engagement can continue uninterrupted, even during challenging times.

4. Performance and Speed

In the 21st century's data age, vast amounts of information are generated continuously. Automation and rapid processing capacity are critical for operations, particularly in visitor attractions where guests expect real-time information. A well-developed AEP optimises audience engagement and enhances the visitor experience.

5. Adaptability and Integration

AEP developers specialise in processing large datasets, enabling operators to segment data into actionable tools for behavioural analysis, marketing, ongoing engagement, and edutainment. Technologies like beaconing offer new ways to measure engagement, from dwell time and footfall to triggered content.

The diverse needs of the visitor attraction industry require platforms to be adaptable and 'API friendly', allowing integration with other essential software plug-ins for services such as e-ticketing or food ordering.

6. Comprehensive Functionality

The ideal platform should offer a wide array of functionalities within a single solution. This includes content enrichment, learning modules, gamification, wayfinding/mapping, digital trails and tours, iBeacon triggering, object recognition, immersive content, reward and redemption tools, push notifications, day planning features, and pre-booking for events or meals.

Essentially, it should encompass anything that makes audience engagement immersive, entertaining, educational, highly personalised, and relevant.

7. Actionable Insights and Data Analysis

Beyond generating data, the key lies in its application. Measuring audience engagement behaviour both on and off-site provides invaluable insights to improve the visitor experience. For attractions like zoos or museums, this can mean tracking dwell time across the site, individual collections, or exhibits, eliminating the need for traditional visitor surveys.

The platform can also facilitate education and learning through simple quizzes completed on or off-site, with redeemable rewards. Understanding audience behaviour more deeply allows for enhanced engagement strategies.

8. Flexibility in Deployment

Ideally, your chosen AEP should support an audience experience developed on a native app or a progressive web application (PWA), or both. The mobility of your experience is vital for extending interaction between the operator and the visitor. While optimised for mobile, an AEP's app should also function seamlessly across tablets and desktops, particularly in educational contexts.

9. Reliable Support

Customisable cloud-hosted platforms are typically designed for intuitive user journeys, requiring minimal technical support post-onboarding. However, ensuring support is available when needed is crucial. Partner with a provider that can offer additional value through customisation, updates, and bespoke services like content creation.

10. Transparent Costing

Many software and cloud-hosted solutions operate on a SaaS model, licensed annually or monthly to spread investment costs. When comparing cloud-based solutions to custom builds, remember that custom audience engagement apps vary widely in specification. Consider not only the project cost but also the deployment timeline.

Cloud-based AEPs can be licensed from approximately £800 per month, whereas custom app builds often require significant six-figure investments or higher.