Insights from venue data keep visitors coming back for more

Are you in the business of running a museum, theme park, historic site or sports arena? If so, do you delight your guests at every turn? Do you know their desires, their preferences and their behaviors? Does your insight into visiting patterns help you predict and prepare for peak times? Most important, are you doing everything you can to drive ticket sales and boost overall revenues?

Treat your customers as a fount of data

Consider your own behavior when you’re out at a venue—do you purchase tickets in advance, or do you wait to buy them at the gate? Either way, your behavior produces data for the venue. Do you buy a parking ticket when you arrive? More data. Do you take in a special attraction or attend a show while you’re there? Still more data. Do you purchase merchandise—or perhaps something to eat or drink? The data keeps flowing in. If you use a mobile app to help you navigate attractions, manage wait times or take advantage of special promotions, that’s more data, too. And if you upload photos to Facebook while you’re there or share the fun you’re having to a social media site, the data just keeps multiplying.

When you visit a venue, you never stop generating data, whether through your interactions with your host or through your social behavior. And all the while, you’re creating the potential for the venue to leverage the data you generate to uncover insights that can make your experience as enjoyable as possible, keeping you coming back—and bringing others with you.

Realize insights from real-time data

Customers’ experiences can produce enormous amounts of data, all streaming in real time. For example, modern ticketing systems produce highly complex data that can be integrated with customer relationship management and social media data to create a 360° degree view of visitors to a venue. Even for budget-limited organizations, cloud-based advanced analytics solutions can provide invaluable insights that can become an integral part of how a venue enhances and personalizes its marketing efforts and delights its visitors to keep customers coming back again and again.

Historic Environment Scotland, which operates 78 historic and monument sites across Scotland, is a noteworthy example of how a company can leverage advanced analytics in the cloud. Thanks to big data analytics, Historic Environment Scotland is able to gain in-depth understanding of visitors to each of its locations, including knowledge of who they are, where they come from and what they do during their visit. Equipped with such insights, it can then adapt its marketing strategy to appeal to an ever larger market segment while enhancing the visitor experience to encourage return visits.

To learn more about how you can get an all-around view of your customers, read the full case study of how Historic Environment Scotland began uncovering insights using data created by visitors to its sites.

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