Flexibility is Key for Visitor Attraction Summer Advertising
Flexibility is Key for Visitor Attraction Summer Advertising.
As we now enter step 4 of the lockdown roadmap, flexibility is key for your visitor attraction’s summer advertising. Gone are the days of committing huge amounts of advertising spend to ‘above the line’ marketing activity. Event advertising for visitor attractions in a Covid-19 world needs to be flexible and smart.
Digital advertising breaks the boundaries of traditional marketing, not only can it reach wider audiences in a highly cost-effective way, but it also provides the flexibility to alter or stop your adverts at the click of a button. With the threat of new Covid-19 variants coming and going, you need the option to turn advertising spend on or off… without penalties.
Digital advertising also enables your campaigns to go live without planning months in advance, which is important as predicting consumer behaviour can be tricky in an unpredictable world.
Whether you’re a zoo, farm park, theme park or museum, read on to find out how we have prioritised the best digital platforms for Visitor Attraction Marketing and what role they play in the marketing mix.
Facebook and Instagram Advertising
Facebook and Instagram are known as the king and queen of digital advertising, not only do they provide strong and measurable results, but they also offer the flexibility to alter your summer advertising at any time.
Last Summer we achieved an average cost per transaction of 39p for Facebook and £1.08 for Instagram. This is far better than previous years when we always knew a percentage turned up at the entrance – we just didn’t know how many!
Facebook and Instagram are both great for targeting and building custom audiences, including remarketing or those who have engaged with your social channels. For 2021, however, there are additional challenges. Apple are increasing their privacy controls and the IOS update means that customers can now opt out of tracking, resulting in a percentage of your advertising sales now unable to be tracked, although they will still happen, you can’t measure them.
At Agility we are Facebook certified, which means we have a complete understanding of Facebook advertising, from building a strategy to implementing it and analysing the results. Facebook and Instagram would always be our ‘go to’ network above any other social advertising.
YouTube
Although YouTube advertising doesn’t lead to as many conversions as Facebook and Instagram, we highly recommend YouTube Instream adverts. Not only are these adverts flexible with the ability to alter at any point, but you also only pay if they watch your ad for longer than 5 seconds.
YouTube Instream adverts are a great option for your summer advertising as they will give you amazing awareness and you are likely to obtain a cost per 30 second video view of only 4p. You can obtain click throughs to your website via this medium, but it is best for awareness.
Google Display
When considering summer advertising for you visitor attraction, Google is another effective online advertising platform that provides you with great flexibility as well as multiple advertising options.
Google Display are the adverts that appear on third party websites who sell their advertising spaces through the Google display network. Google Display adverts are great for awareness as they can reach your target audiences whilst they are browsing the internet. Plus, they are highly cost effective with a cost per click often being less than 10p.
Don’t forget, Google Display adverts are responsive which means they do the hard work for you! Google will automatically adjust your adverts’, including the size, appearance, and format to fit available ad spaces.
Google Search
Another Google advert option that we highly recommend for your summer advertising is Google Search. Google Search adverts appear as text on search results. However, you need to be very targeted with your keywords, test your adverts and ensure a high-quality score for your landing page, otherwise, you can soon find you are paying a high cost per clicks for poor quality key phrases.
For our clients pre-Covid, we ran finely targeted advertising campaigns for their niche in attractions all year round. For example, we ensured we dominated ‘seaside theme park’ or ‘children farm Buckinghamshire’ searches.
Another often forgotten tool we recommend using is ‘negative keywords’ on Google Search that will stop poor quality traffic coming to you.
Pinterest is the creative younger sister of Facebook and Instagram and is a flexible and inspirational platform to increase brand awareness and engagements.
Pinterest is far down the list in terms of network choices but shouldn’t be forgotten. It has less targeting potential than the other platforms but 459 million monthly active users. According to a Hootsuite study, the biggest target audience for Pinterest are women aged 25 – 34, which represents 30% of ad audiences (https://blog.hootsuite.com/pinterest-statistics-for-business/), which is a common demographic for visitor attractions.
Although, we believe it should not be your core spend, it is a great additional add on if your capacities increase or you have the budget to test something new.
Email & CRM
When considering flexible marketing options for your summer advertising, emails should be number 1 really! Encouraging visitors to return for those attractions in non tourism areas through email always generate a high ROI.
The key to Email is to make sure you are telling the audience something they may not know. Asking them to simply buy a ticket is unlikely to engage them, but tell them what is reopening for Summer, Summer opening hours and any new Summer activities is likely to have a larger impact.
For those in tourism areas, why not segment your list based on where they live and send different emails to those that live for a day trip and those who will travel further.
Mailchimp and Constant Contact both offer some type of CRM targeting and some online ticketing companies even allow you to send an email to any abandoned carts.
Tik Tok
TikTok is the latest social media trend and with over 1 billion users worldwide, it’s definitely one to watch. This platform isn’t just about pranks and viral dances, it is also an emerging platform for flexible digital advertising which gives you the option to potentially reach millions of users worldwide.
With TikTok you have the flexibility to be able to independently manage each of your advert campaigns on the platform. It also allows you to be creative with flexible budgets and performance targeting.
Similar to Facebook and Instagram, TikTok includes a tracking pixel to monitor your adverts performance, allowing you to track conversions.
Tik Tok now have a programmatic platform and have just launched a guide for Small to Medium Sized Businesses. However, unlike other digital campaigns, any advertising on TikTok should be viewed as a complete test.
Flexibility is key
Summer advertising for visitor attractions in a Covid-19 world needs to be flexible and smart. Digital advertising enables this flexibility whilst also achieving strong results. Through using flexible digital platforms from Facebook to Tik Tok, you will be able create a strong marketing strategy to drive engagements and increase conversions.
How we can help
At Agility we’re proud to say our passionate team implement over 500 data driven digital campaigns every year across the Visitor Attraction and Day Nursery sectors. We can create and monitor digital campaigns across different networks including Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snap Chat, Tik Tok, Pinterest, Twitter or Spotify.
If you like this article, then we recommend reading:
The Rise of Programmatic Advertising and Why Your Attraction Should be Using it and Using and Collecting Postcodes for Visitor Attraction Marketing
This blog was written by Anita Waddell, MD of Agility Marketing, a boutique marketing agency specialising in Digital Marketing for Visitor Attractions.
