Attractions are all about telling stories to their visitors and the visitor experience depends on that story being told through staff, onsite shows, exhibits and a well-planned journey that earns 5 stars on trip advisor. Ironically, attractions often fail to tell that story as well through their marketing. Websites are the starting point of your storytelling to your visitor, they draw people in, get them to book and have the ability to reinvigorate people if they have visited before with a new tale to tell.

Start with your story

Attraction marketing managers should review content that has been around for many years and grown overcomplicated or dull. Often website updates are loaded without a higher-level view of all the content from a visitor’s perspective. Websites can become sluggish, cluttered and confusing if the story of the attraction is not placed front and centre at all times. Yes, the visitor needs to buy tickets, but they also need to be enticed to hit the ‘buy now’ button.

An attraction marketing manager should walk the attraction with visitors on a regular basis to hear feedback and to remind themselves of what the magic is that people love about visiting. Sitting in the attraction café is always a great idea to listen to what people loved and how they experienced the story. By doing these simple steps websites can be reviewed to make sure that magic also starts with the website. Good stories can be told in text, photography and video on a website. Get creative, tell your story and the latest website technology (our speciality with LOOP) can then make that tale come to life and swiftly guide those inspired to buy tickets.

Change your story with the seasons – at speed

Every attraction has seasonal flux, the best way to deal with shoulder season revenue is to create a different offer from the vanilla of the hero offer.  There are the standard Valentines, Half Terms, Easter, Halloween, Christmas and Twixmas periods and these can be themed and offer tremendous opportunity to deliver different stories still firmly fixed in the brand of the attraction. These can be experience based or food and drink based. The KEY thing is to overhaul your homepage to be totally committed to the seasonal focus at any one time. Don’t make your Christmas extravaganza a deep link three clicks down on the side menu to find. Change ALL the look and feel of the homepage. This is simpler than it sounds. With a strong website structure this should be a case of switching out the hero graphic, video and text with changed designs. If your website has a string template structure (as is the basis of LOOP) this can be prepared by the marketing team months in advance and ready to go swiftly as seasons change.

Attract the new visitor and bring back return visitors

Revenue gold is created when visitors return regularly. New visitors are important but capturing data and telling new seasonal or special event stories to those who have already visited has significant value. A good website will capture data and reach previous visitors on their phone with compelling stories to return.  Good websites are adaptable, simple, have strong robust structures and work at speed for google credit and SEO recognition. A returning visitor does not need to start your journey again but needs to shortcut to swift booking for a new event. They know you so look after them; surprise and delight them for  being part of your attraction family.

Talk to us about improving your storytelling and providing a better website experience using our LOOP platform that can be implemented in weeks rather than months, and keep an eye out for our follow-up post for how to deal with seasonality from an SEO perspective.

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