A 2017 survey on the annual outlook of the attractions industry revealed compelling insights: visitors who felt engaged at a cultural venue were 44% more likely to return, while 66% were more likely to recommend the venue to others.1 These findings highlight the fact that visitor engagement is crucial not just for entertainment but for creating memorable experiences that foster advocacy.
Evolving Visitor Expectations
In today’s digital era, visitor expectations at cultural venues are higher than ever. Visitors seek personalised experiences that provide value for their time, money, and opportunities to share their experiences instantly on social media.
Challenges in Delivering High-Quality Engagements
Creating personalised, high-quality visitor engagements involves several challenges:
- Skilled Manpower: A shortage of skilled staff often hampers the delivery of customised experiences.
- Sustainability Concerns: Personalised experiences are perceived as costly, both financially and environmentally.
- Content Relevance and Variety: Maintaining fresh, relevant, and varied content is crucial, as visitors often seek new and diverse experiences with each visit.
The role of technology in Enhancing Engagement
While technology can be a potent tool to address these challenges, it is often used in a superficial manner, leading to transient excitement that quickly fades, and ultimately fails to meet the project’s deeper objectives. To enhance engagement without compromising on sustainability or requiring extensive resources, you need to implement well-thought-out, scalable, and cost-effective tech solutions.
Implementing Scalable, Cost-Effective Techniques
Gamification
It is essential to differentiate gamification from games. Gamification involves adding game-like elements to tasks to boost participation, aid information retention, and influence behaviour. You may be surprised to learn that gamification does not always involve screens or complicated UI. This technique could be as simple as using leaderboards to spur competition or social badges to create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out). Gamification adds an element of fun and competition that keeps visitors engaged and motivated.
Leveraging User Co-Creation
A significant trend for 2024 is organic marketing through user-generated content. This technique provides numerous benefits. First, it alleviates the pressure on your marketing team to endlessly create marketing and publicity content. Second, user-generated content is usually regarded as more authentic and trustworthy. Think of it as user reviews that people do not even realise are reviews. Co-created content allow people to advocate for your brand without being aware that they are doing so.
Embracing Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM)
Advancements in Generative AI and LLM have enabled venues to elevate user co-creation, creating highly personalised and engaging experiences that also foster a deeper connection between visitors and your venue. Encouraging visitors to create and share their content fosters a community of advocates, provides visitors with shareable memories, and promotes your venue organically at a fraction of the cost.
By leveraging these trends, tools, and techniques, venue owners can enhance visitor engagement in 2024 and beyond, transforming casual visitors into passionate advocates.
Case study: Lead generation, first party data, digital trail
Visitor engagement strategies can be mapped seamlessly to your business objectives and goals, creating experiences that are impactful and adaptable. Whether you want to create a brief minute-long engagement – perfect for the current popularity of short-form content – or an extensive, immersive hour-long journey, the possibilities are endless.
The Esplanade – Pip’s Trail
HOL implemented a digital trail at the Esplanade incorporating in the strategies outlined in this article into a seamless, holistic experience. This gamified narrative takes on the form of a treasure hunt, engaging visitors across all trail stations while educating them about the Esplanade’s story.
We incorporated a story featuring the Esplanade’s mascot into the experience. Our objective was to tie the six stations together seamlessly, transform visitors into brand advocates, increase the time spent in the space, boost cross-sell opportunities, and membership conversions.
Storytelling gamification
We created a popular gamified experience featuring the unique architecture of the Esplanade. Known for its distinctive design, the roof of the Esplanade requires special maintenance, which we highlighted in a fun and engaging way. We gamified the information by creating a game that required users to stop birds from pooping on the roof. This simple game presented the core message – it takes a lot of work to keep the roof clean and free from bird droppings – in the users’ minds.
Subsequently, we introduced users to the R.A.T. (rope access technicians) using a combination of multimedia formats such as videos and graphics. This created an ‘Aha!’ moment for users because they gained better understanding of the importance of their roles in the game.
User co-creation
For the Esplanade, one of their key objectives was to enhance the marketability of their free-to-watch stage located at the Esplanade Concourse. The challenge was to find an organic and effective way to promote this space without relying heavily on traditional advertising methods. We knew that we could not expect anyone to randomly ask their friends to visit the Esplanade.
The solution had to be tied to something visitors genuinely enjoyed and wanted to share with friends. This would be a better way to convert them into advocates for the space. We faced the challenge of creating an engaging experience that would not only promote awareness of the Esplanade Concourse but encourage visitors to spread the word as well.
To address this, we implemented a user co-creation strategy as part of the Esplanade’s digital trail. Visitors were given the opportunity to take a selfie and superimpose their faces onto a caricature of a performer on stage. They could customise their virtual stage by adding stickers featuring the Esplanade’s branding.
This interactive experience served multiple purposes:
- Encourage shareability through personalisation: Visitors loved personalising their caricatures and stages, which made them more likely to share their creations on social media.
- Create publicity organically: By sharing their images, visitors indirectly endorsed the Esplanade Concourse. This helped to generate genuine publicity for the venue.
- Attract a wider audience: As these personalised creations were shared across social media platforms, they created a social media blitz, drawing more attention and driving increased foot traffic to the Esplanade Concourse.
This strategy effectively leveraged user co-creation to convert visitors into brand advocates, enhancing the visibility and marketability of the Esplanade’s offerings in an engaging and authentic manner.
Furthermore, the digital trail opens up numerous opportunities for first-party data collection and lead generation. We can gather valuable insights, such as identifying less visible or accessible locations within the space, determining peak visiting times, and understanding visitor behaviours. These insights empower space owners to make informed decisions, enhancing strategies both inside and outside the experience.
Conclusion: Demonstrating success through data
We obtained compelling statistics that proved visitor engagement success from the digital trail we created for the Esplanade. For instance, the average online user dwell time is 10 minutes, surpassing the industry benchmark for web apps, which stands at 2 to 4 minutes. The entire experience is designed to be completed in approximately 45 minutes. To date, more than 1,300 participants have embarked on this journey. We also recorded a membership conversion rate of 8%, which is substantially higher than the industry benchmark of 2 to 5%.
We are proud to share the accolades we received for PIP’s Trail @ The Esplanade:
Silver Award
Mobile App – Family & Kids Category
Finalist
Culture or Leisure
[1] PGAV Destinations conducted the study in partnership with H2R Market Research and Blooloop. The survey results was published in Voice of the Visitor: 2017 Annual Outlook on the Attractions Industry. Participants of the poll comprised 1,500 US leisure attraction visitors who had either visited an attraction in 2016 or were open to doing so in 2017. Read the full report at pgavdestinations.com/insights.
