The first online Visitor Attraction Conference has just wrapped up, and I can firmly say it was a great success. The two-day conference was full of invaluable insight that we use to ensure that we provide best-in-class marketing for our clients, but if you missed on attending, then don’t worry I have put together what I feel are this year’s top takeaways.
Obviously, a key topic across every talk this year was COVID-19. Coronavirus has had a devastating effect on our industry and naturally, we have wanted to be positive about things getting better sooner rather than later.
Most of the talks at VAC this year weren’t as optimistic and highlighted that COVID isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. We need to stop talking about ‘a Post-COVID world’ as it is premature, and we won’t have one until we have a globally accessible vaccine, so instead, we will just adapt, rebuild and optimise. We’ve been hit very hard before, but the sector has incredible resilience, so we will get through this.
During lockdown, digital channels have been integral for tourism businesses to excite and entice their audiences with engaging content on their social media. The sudden shift into becoming a content production business on top of running an attraction was a learning curve, but for some, it reaped massive benefits.
When lockdown began to lift, new domestic visitors to attractions were listing that it was, in fact, their social activity and presence that encouraged them to visit. This was especially true for attractions that ‘love-bombed’ and targeted local audiences through paid social advertising, which has been a key driver for ticket sales.
It isn’t just the domestic audience that has been responding to this boost of online content. Recreating The Chelsea Flower Show a Digital Experience was a large undertaking for the Royal Horticulture Society, but after it’s launch it streamed in over 120 countries worldwide and created newly engaged international audience that will have the UK front of mind, once travel opens up again.
Digital booking has been a key challenge for many visitor attractions, especially those that had a large reliance on visitors who would spontaneously visit them without pre-booking. For example, Castle Howard has shown a 75% increase in online ticket sales since lockdown, which means that your website and your booking process are more important than ever.
Kelly Molson from Rubber Cheese ran a great talk on improving your website’s journey and making sure that your booking process follows the ‘3 click rule’. She suggested these 5 tips to success:
2020 was already set to be the year of the staycation, but quite how much that was going to be true, no one could have predicted. 97% of visitors are coming from a domestic audience, and although many businesses, especially those in London, rely on international visitors there are still key audiences that can fill capacities.
Jon Young from BVA-BDRC ran down some of the new audiences and opportunities for visitor attractions:
One thing that was stressed repeatedly throughout the conference, is that people are returning to attractions because they want to experience things with friends and family more than ever. Attractions create the backdrop for peoples happiest memories, and your advertising should focus on that as the primary message.
Overall people’s enjoyment of attractions has decreased due to safety measures, but still, people are willing to recommend attractions at the same level. New visitors are increasingly being swayed by word of mouth this year, so make sure to ask for and implement feedback and use reviews as a powerful tool to create reassurance and encourage people to visit.
Your front of house staff have always been one of the most important aspects of a visitor’s experience, in fact, on TripAdvisor, a 5-star review is 4 times more likely to mention a positive interaction with a member of staff. Their importance has dramatically increased in recent times as they are the ones that welcome, reassure and protect potentially nervous guests.
Digital and pre-booked tickets can also provide an opportunity for you to train front of house staff in skills outside of purely selling tickets; Castle Howard, for example, has shown great success in encouraging teams to up-sell membership at the box office when scanning digital tickets.
Studies have shown that visitors are becoming more unforgiving on safety measures that are deemed ‘over the top’ if it dampens the experience they were expecting. So, it’s important to conduct a review and see what you can safely open and for aspects that would be unsafe to do so, use digital to help.
Castle Howard underwent a huge project and installed WiFi into the site, so they could develop a Digital Guide that streamed straight to peoples phones and have the same tour experience they normally would. Similarly, Blackpool Pleasure Beach developed an e-guide as well as a new e-ticketing system which allowed guests to plan their day by keeping track of wait times, as well as pre-book food.
Technology isn’t always the answer, and you should always focus on training teams with any new tools you implement, as some guests may have difficulty and will need help from staff. Gulliver’s world found that digital queuing wasn’t proving effective to encourage social distancing, so instead, they invested in new character distancing marshals to treat staying apart more like a game to get children on-board.
As we are going into a typically quieter period, it is good to think of strategies that will help your business through the winter. Christmas will provide a great opportunity for many, but it’s important to not just focus on a 2-week period that will be hyper-competitive, and instead, you should think about your entire Autumn Winter strategy.
Anthony, our CEO at Digital Visitor, says thinking of yourself as an e-commerce business is a great way to come up with alternative streams of revenue. If you could only be based online, what would your attraction sell? Castle Howard for example created partnerships with the local farm shop to improve their sales offering and the National Marine Aquarium developed an education product to sell to schools who are reluctant to visit at the moment.
I hope that this quick run-down has been useful, and for any further information on anything I’ve mentioned or advice on how to implement them into your marketing activity, please drop me a message.