Get closer to your visitors using Geo-Mapping
12/11/2019 By Katie Vosper
Geographical mapping of visitors can help you to pinpoint locations where residents are more inclined to visit your attraction. This keeps your marketing spend efficient and tells you where your current audience lives But plotting visitors on a map often tells us little more than where our marketing budget has been focused in the past. What many marketeers want to know is where to focus next.
Over the last year, I’ve had a few conversations with clients who have expressed dissatisfaction with their customer location intelligence. Either they don’t have any, or their commissioned analysis lacked detail about where to invest marketing budget. So we’ve put together our top tips to help anyone needing to prioritise the locations they market to:
- Be specific with your agency on how you want to use the data from the start. Are you planning outdoor advertising, direct mailings, or is a digital approach more likely? This influences how important population density is in prioritising areas to target.
- Draw from other data sources to enrich the findings. Include your visitor research and census data, for example.
- Filter out trade or other business ticket purchases (e.g. tours or societies buying tickets in bulk). These would be targeted through different channels and if not identified can bias findings.
- Check for saturation in your locality or other areas you have targeted. While it’s great to know that you have a healthy local audience, there is little value in further marketing investment once you near saturation point.
We help some of the UK’s largest visitor attractions with their geo-mapping challenges including Hampton Court Palace (HCP). HCP had ambitious targets for visitor growth and wanted guidance on where to focus their marketing spend. We used geo-mapping analysis to identify the postal areas and postal districts offering the greatest growth opportunities. We were able to tell Historic Royal Palaces which areas were close to saturation and identify a range of new opportunities.
If you are interested in geo-consultancy, then do get in touch.
