6 content ideas for the acquisition stage of the new visitor lifecycle
Now that you’re on your audience’s radar, thanks to effective strategies at the Reach stage of the new visitor lifecycle, it’s time to initiate contact and turn potential visitors into actual visitors.
However, you might find that your visitors’ interests and motivations, their goals and their pain points have altered since the early months of 2020. Hygiene, crowd control and fee flexibility are likely to be much higher up their list of priorities and your messaging needs to adjust to stay in step.
Find out more about ‘Creating the New Visitor Experience’
Some things haven’t changed. Personalisation of content is still key. You don’t want to run the risk of turning off potential visitors by bombarding them with overwhelming amounts of irrelevant information. As ever, effective content marketing is about interaction and engagement – making the right kind of contact at the right kind of frequency.
With that in mind, here are 6 ideas for content topics to encourage audience segments to click through to your booking page in the new normal.
1. Pre-bookable facilities
Pre-bookable time slots are an accepted part of the new normal for visitors by now, but don’t forget to share content about any other newly pre-bookable options at your VA, from on-site experiences and tours to car parking.
Families will appreciate information that highlights how the requirement to pre-book benefits them directly – more time having fun and less time queuing or ‘debating’ what to do next.
2. Sustainability
Interest in living a sustainable lifestyle was already on the rise before the global pandemic – think back to the headlines grabbed by David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II, Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion – but it increased further during the lockdown as people shared and were encouraged by stories of clearer skies and nature reasserting itself.
Raising awareness of your VA’s sustainable practices can give you the leading edge over a competitor, so shout about your attraction’s environmentally-friendly approach. You could cover anything from how your VA supports the local community to how it’s helping combat plastic pollution. Just make sure you’re not guilty of greenwashing before you share.
3. Booking T&Cs
The unpredictability of life in the new normal has paved the way for a slew of new terms and conditions around booking tickets.
Budget-conscious visitors and anyone nervous about what the next few months might bring – so, most people then – will welcome information that helps to clarify new policies offering greater flexibility around refunds and cancellations.
4. Hygiene
Health and hygiene is at the front of everyone’s minds in 2020. Before the global pandemic, you likely wanted to keep your cleaning teams and procedures out of sight. Now, visitors find the sight of enforced mask wearing and painstaking cleaning rotas reassuring. The same goes for hygiene-themed content you can push out at the acquisition stage.
Elderly and vulnerable visitors in particular might be swayed to book when they hear about thorough cleaning schedules that don’t get in the way of having a good time at your VA.
5. Customer-facing tech
Shine the spotlight on any new technology that your VA has introduced since re-opening after lockdown. This could be anything from contactless paypoints across the site to apps that reduce queuing times or allow visitors to pre-order food from on-site restaurants.
The emphasis should be on how this tech helps visitors by making their visit more convenient – quicker, less crowded, cashless, for example – as well as safer.
6. COVID-19 FAQs
Directly address any practical concerns about COVID-19 on your VA’s website, and link to these from every email and newsletter as well as sharing them on social media. At a minimum, your website should include a message on the homepage to reassure potential visitors that your VA is going above and beyond to address concerns, and a continually updated page dedicated to answering FAQs around COVID-19.
You could also consider publishing blog posts to highlight any new steps such as extra hygiene measures, and an informative virtual or video tour of any one-way systems and social distancing measures in place.
Aren’t these topics rather…dry?
At first glance, these might seem rather dry topics for consumer-facing content – but they don’t have to be. The right content type can make every one of these topics engaging. Consider infographics, live streaming, podcasts, downloadable before-you-visit checklists and off-the-cuff interviews with some of your VA’s friendliest faces as well as the more obvious webpages, blog and social media posts. Finally, remember that not everything has to be fun and entertaining. Potential visitors appreciate clear, upfront information that gives them the reassurance they need to convert to actual visitors just as much as they love a good cat video. Well, almost as much!
Reinvent how your visitors interact with your attraction – visit our ‘Creating the New Visitor Experience’ hub.
