Reimagining and future proofing the visitor attraction industry through data intelligence.
Understanding what marketing tactics and messages resonate with visitors that results in a ticket or experience booking is one thing, but gathering and interpreting the data from your visitors, that can lead to optimising your business, is entirely another.
Yet, this is precisely what cloud-based audience engagement platforms can deliver.
The retail sector has led much of the way for industry in terms of utilising technology to enrich the shopping experience – from product discovery to checkout. One of the key tools making this a reality is beacon technology, or ‘beaconology’ as it is becoming known.
Driven by the increased access and use of smartphones, the global ‘beaconology’ market is expected to exceed USD 35.15 Billion by 2027 at a CAGR of 44.1% by 2027 – this according to a paper published in 2020 by Emergen Research. The market value and influence of this technology, however, is worth much more, especially if one considers the scope of the visitor attractions sector, which is increasingly benefitting from the use of this type of technology, and the rapid adoption of IoT, to drive customer loyalty and customer experience.
Beacons are small, battery-operated wireless devices that transmit a Bluetooth low energy signal to smartphones within a certain radius. They are a major driver of what we call ‘proximity’ marketing and data conversations and insights.
These beacons transmit a constant signal that can’t be seen by the naked eye. However, this language is picked up by someone who has downloaded an ‘app’ onto their smartphone, and whose device with Bluetooth enabled, is able to recognise an action prompted by the beacon signal, which via the app can trigger a pre-programmed action from the audience engagement platform.
If this is in a retail environment, then shoppers could be served with whatever adverts, special offers, discounts, or incentives that have been pre-scheduled into the platform's triggering feature.
Now, think how this same principle can be applied to visitor attractions and you begin to understand the opportunities that can be further explored across the experience economy in connecting and conversing with their audiences, and eliciting certain responses and behaviours from them, and/or rewarding them.
Hello, is anyone out there?
We started this blog talking about the best place for a new on-site concession. So, how would this technology, just one feature of a fully integrated audience experience platform, apply to knowing where the optimal place would be to locate a snack shack, mobile concession, or a display or new exhibit or ride ?
Here’s the next step. Let’s presume you have seen the benefits of digitally transforming your visitor attraction (be it a zoo, wildlife park, museum, aquarium, theme park), and have attraction management software like the n-gage.io audience engagement platform.
This platform allows you to upload all manner of multimedia content. This content, which can contain more information than any static information or digital signboard, and can be unlocked in different stages, formats, and levels of engagement, can be triggered by proximity of the visitor via a beacon.
The visitor could be passing a wildlife park enclosure or joining a queue for a theme park ride for example and spend some time enjoying the experience. Based on location tracking technology the device communicates with a nearby beacon through the highly customisable visitor app, sort of a silent “hello is anyone out there, yes, I am,” conversation.
This then unlocks certain pre-programmed content or triggers an action for the visitor, for example to learn more about what they are seeing, or receive a special offer push notification or a discount voucher directly into the mobile app’s digital wallet.
Each interaction builds a layer of data into the audience engagement platform’s insights engine. As the layers build, the operator can start to create a picture of their visitor movements and engagement. This helps the operator (you the visitor attraction or leisure industry professional) segment your audiences so you can begin to further personalise experiences and create more personalised offers, incentives and notifications based upon actual on-site visitor/audience behaviour.
Another example of beacon technology at work, is using data intelligence to suggest other similar experiences or exhibits. Let’s say your visitors would like to get from Point A to Point B. With built-in wayfinding, the app can help navigate visitors to their destination. Along the way, there are even further opportunities for engagement based upon their behaviour.
The visitor and their family have an enriched, interactive, and enjoyable experience that has essentially been tailored more towards them.
Intelligent Insights
Once visitors have left, having had the best experience, there is an opportunity to continue that engagement. Maintaining visitor engagement off-site is just as important to help build loyalty and where the n-gage.io insights functionality can help to further segment audiences based on actual visitor behaviour to personalise off-site in-app communications.
For the curator, operations or marketing manager, this on-site data intelligence helps to build audience segments and profiles that can then be matched to specific offers and messages created in the platform.
For example, the operator at a wildlife park can instruct the system to: “Tell me about the visitors who spent longer than XX number of minutes in this area, or attended this keeper talk so we can send a live or pre-scheduled message once they’ve left about purchasing a personalised animal experience. (you get the picture). The information that comes back can be used to determine who gets a ‘special’ offer, and who is likely to take that offer up. The length of time spent in front of any display/exhibit etc is called “dwell time” and is an important metric in the armoury of the visitor attraction.
However, in the context of this piece, we want to know more about where people are spending their time and whether the experience in question would benefit from having another concession on-site.
Because the experience app is tracking visitor movement via GPS and beacons (once uploaded onto the visitors smartphone), the n-gage platform can track how long visitors are spending at a specific point and where the concentrated footfall patterns are over a given period to help determine the positioning of a new concession. Once in position, the app can then be further used to continue to promote the newly sited concession with special offers and notifications.
For the wildlife park, zoo, aquarium, museum etc, audience data from the platform helps to better curate and plan visitor flow, and personalise offers and incentives to drive revenues. In industries such as the retail sector, this level of data intelligence can be used to help with future tenant marketing or even retail store positioning.
The n-gage.io platform is the all-in-one, cloud based attraction management software and audience mobile app helping the global attraction, leisure and entertainment industry to improve operations, enhance audience engagement, gain valuable insights and increase revenues.
To discover more benefits and how n-gage.io can increase and sustain your audience engagement, get in touch or let us show you – book a demo today.