Clashing audiences? Understand motivations to keep everyone smiling

Do you understand why an individual visits your attraction? And how that differs from someone else? This understanding is critical in managing multiple audiences.

If lots of people are visiting you, that's lots of different needs you may have to fulfil. Their motivations won't necessarily be the same and neither will their expectations of what makes a great day out.

Some will want peace and quiet, others will relish the buzz of busy-ness; families might want planned activities, individuals may prefer to explore unhindered; everyone might want lunch at 12.30. How do you manage that?

Clashing visitor segments can damage everyone's experience and impact on how people feel about your place. You need to notice and understand the differences and consider what each needs for a great day out.

This is part of audience development and although you might need to ask your visitors, there's already lots of examples that will give you an insight.

Here's one from Visit England:

https://www.visitbritain.org/visitor-segmentation and another from the agency Morris Hargreaves McIntyre: https://mhminsight.com/culture-segments.

At both the RSPB and National Trust, I worked with tailored segmentation models that highlighted visitor motivations. They were really helpful in planning and delivery activity, but you can keep it really simple.

Here's five tips:

1. Take time to look around at different times of day, week, month, season. Who do you see?

2. Track visitors around your site. What are they doing? Where do they stop?

3. Identify places and times of day where different audience groups come together. Can you observe any challenges?

4. Do some research. Ask visitors about their motivations and interests and look at the emerging themes.

5. Use this knowledge to plan your operation and activities to target specific segments of your audience to maximising the experience and reduce any clashes you see.

Audience segmentation can be worth an investing in and doing it well, but it can also be done very simply and within the resources you have. Audience insight and development is something I can help you with to drive more visits and increase engagement with your offer.