‘Tis the season for reopening theme parks and summer attractions in the Northern Hemisphere! And it’s also the season for launching theme park and amusement park marketing campaigns.
Your attraction might be the epicenter of fun, and returning visitors already know this. Still, they’re tempted to check out your competitors. And then there are the millions of other travelers and adventure-seekers who haven’t yet had the pleasure of experiencing your event.
What makes your amusement park or other super-fun activity the place to be in summer 2023? Identifying your value proposition is one thing, spreading that message is quite another.
Here are 9 ways theme parks can grab the attention and loyalty of visitors this summer — and all year round — in two categories, digital and analog.
Digital theme park marketing
When you think about marketing, no doubt you first think about digital marketing – all the ways you can promote your theme park online. Truthfully, it seems like there are more options every day for digital marketers. But since you have a limited budget, and limited time for marketing, you have to focus.
Here are five of the most effective digital marketing tactics for theme parks.
1. Optimize your website
To make sure all your digital marketing efforts are worthwhile, first things first: optimize your website. This might sound like nitpicky marketing jargon, but a well-done website is critical for down-to-earth reasons.
If people can’t find your site, they’re unlikely to buy tickets directly from you. This is a big problem – you’ll miss an entire audience primed to buy online. To make sure these folks can find your site easily, you have to play nice with search engines like Google. It helps to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist, but if you don’t have that kind of budget, there are things you can do on your own to improve your site’s SEO, such as keyword research, so you can pepper your marketing content with the right words and phrases.
Equally important to finding your site is being able to easily use it. If your checkout flow is clunky, people get distracted and frustrated in the process of buying tickets and sometimes wander away to never return. Making sure it’s easy for people to use your site, and especially your checkout process, is key to ticket sales, and that includes on a mobile device. Design or choose a site template that’s mobile-responsive and enables easy e-commerce.
In general, make sure your site loads quickly, works flawlessly, and makes intuitive sense to people landing on it for the very first time. Do all the buttons and links work? Are there hangups in the search functionality? Having an optimized website is a baseline for any theme park looking to attract new and returning visitors.
2. Make a strategic impression with social media
If you don’t have your own hashtag, are you even a theme park? Not these days. From #findyourfun (Fun Spot Orlando) to #magicishere (Disneyland), smart theme park marketers come up with catchy hashtag slogans to use across social media platforms.
Visuals, too, are key to grabbing people’s attention as they scroll. Imagery can have a huge impact in an endless feed of distracting posts, and people are far more likely to remember information that was paired with imagery in a post. That includes graphics, memes, and photos, but more importantly, it requires video. According to Hubspot, video has become the primary form of media used in content marketing.
On Instagram specifically, Reels are the hot new marketing tool. Quick video clips of up to 60 seconds can be edited to include music, sound dubs, filters, and other eye-catching effects. One super helpful feature of Reels is that you can create them from one account and add them to another – which comes in handy when working with a partner or influencer.
TikTok continues to be a strong contender in the theme park marketing orbit. With 5.4M followers, Disney Parks is obviously a leader in this category. Appealing not necessarily to kids but to their parent buyers, Disney’s TikTok includes info on unique places to stay in the park, where to get a good portrait souvenir and how to make a great sangria.
@disneyparks Disney Foodie Hot Tip 🍷 You gotta try this Sangria University at #DisneyWorld 👀 #Disney #DisneyParks #DisneyEats #Drinks #Sangria #Class #Restaurant #CoronadoSprings #Flight
♬ original sound - Disney Parks
In 2023, Sprout Social also predicts that the top-performing content on social media platforms will include edutainment, high-quality video production, and employee advocacy – all trends within reach of amusement park marketing teams. If you’re feeling intrepid, these are some tactics to explore.
3. Get highly targeted with social media ads
In one respect, theme parks have it easy with marketing, because it’s never hard to find the right target audience: families during school holidays, friend groups on weekends, and school outings. To make the most of this obvious segmentation, take advantage of the highly specific targeting available with social media advertising.
Amusement park advertising can be targeted toward the exact audience you’re trying to reach with a digital marketing campaign. When advertising a loyalty program, you can also dial in on an audience within a certain geographical radius of your theme park, or within specific demographics: say, parents of young kids with a history of purchasing tickets to events online.
There are a lot of different kinds of paid advertising on social media these days and a lot of platforms to take advantage of as well. As you explore options, here are three things to keep in mind:
Tip #1: Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is often a good place to start for those new to running social ad campaigns. You pay each time someone clicks on the ad to get to your website or landing page. You can set a parameter around how much you want to spend, but in this model, you literally get the views you pay for.
Tip #2: Ad retargeting is a smart way to take advantage of people’s browsing behavior. If someone has visited your website or social media page but did not buy a ticket or otherwise complete a transaction, they will continue to see social ads for your amusement park to remind them you’re there. This type of advertising has been proven highly effective.
Tip #3: Facebook and Instagram are both owned by parent company Meta, which makes it easy to set up social media ads across both at once.
4. Launch a seasonal-specific campaign
For most theme parks, gearing digital marketing campaigns around the summer season is a natural fit. The weather is right, the kids are off school and people are looking for fun things to do outdoors.
On the other hand, there are a lot of fun things to do in the summer, so if you’re not aggressively on the radar of your audience, you could get passed over when they’re making plans. Launching a digital marketing plan around the summer season is a smart approach – even better if you can get more specific.
In the Northern Hemisphere, seasonal cultural events abound, from the iconic Running of the Bulls in Pamplona in July through Oktoberfest. Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen launched a video campaign called Summer Is Finally Here that received special creative mention on Ads of the World’s website.
Amusement parks that piggyback their marketing onto one of these world-famous celebrations can take advantage of a precedent that’s already been set for good times. Because summer celebrations tend to be visually vivid, even technicolor, social media platforms that offer superior visual formats, like Instagram and TikTok, are particularly good places to launch such season-specific campaigns.
5. Get serious with your email marketing
With all the high-tech ways to reach consumers today, email is still king. It’s consistently ranked as one of the most highly effective marketing platforms – not surprising, with the number of global email users expected to reach 4.48 billion by 2024.
Email is a great way to stay on the radar of people who’ve visited your park in the past or have it bookmarked for their bucket list. To grab the attention of visitors-to-be, the standard practice is to offer a promo code or another perk for signing up for the newsletter.
Email marketing in general is a low-pressure, regular reminder of the fun to be had at your venue. It’s also a pretty low-stakes marketing method, with email marketing software being fairly inexpensive, email addresses easy to obtain through your registration process, and templates making design possible for anyone. Just be sure you’re following the rules of email marketing regulation, which your email software provides guidelines for.
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Offline theme park marketing
Digital marketing is incredibly effective, but it only works if you have something to promote in the first place. That’s where offline marketing efforts come in. Here are five ways to underpin your digital marketing efforts with substantial marketing tactics and programs.
6. Entice visitors with special deals
Along with summer season marketing campaigns come special promotions and deals. Yes, people are ready and willing to travel and have adventures this time of year, but again, they have a lot of options. Make yours the most bang for their buck.
Tivoli Gardens is the world’s second-oldest amusement park, founded in 1843. There’s a lot of history there, but the marketing at Tivoli Gardens is thoroughly modern. The park’s pass page offers a library of options for visitors, from the basic entrance fee of 155 DKK to special deals for school groups that start at less than half the basic ticket price.
At Gardaland, a popular amusement park and resort in Northeast Italy, you can skip the ticket line by buying tickets in advance. New offers for summer 2023 include a combined amusement park, hotel, and aquarium package.
These types of special packages and deals aren’t just an economic incentive for visitors. They also let visitors feel in control of their experience, with enough options that people can curate how, when, and where they participate. There’s a psychological factor at play here. While conventional wisdom has always held that people feel overwhelmed when they have too many options, not having enough is often worse. A new study of over 7,000 people found that “choice deprivation” is the most common and unfortunate consumer experience.
Find that sweet spot in your pricing that gives people choices — but not too many choices.
7. Create loyalty programs
On a similar note, consider developing a prestige program like Disneyland Paris’s Disney Premier Access, which allows members to habitually skip the lines at popular attractions like Big Thunder Mountain and Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain. The Land of Legends theme park in Istanbul offers a special annual pass called the Legendary Card: 365 days a year of unlimited entry. At Universal Studios in Hollywood, the Platinum Annual Pass means no blackout days for prestige members, 15% off food and merch, and shorter queues all around.
Nearly every theme park in the world has some sort of all-access pass. These loyalty programs bring in new visitors and, importantly, get them to come back.
Who takes advantage of unlimited passes and premier access? Locals, a lot of the time. This makes this theme park marketing tactic especially important in a time when travel restrictions are still in effect in plenty of places. Marketing your loyalty programs to local audiences is a smart way to capitalize on your efforts year-round – not just during peak holiday seasons.
8. Television advertising
TV has changed a lot in the last decade or so. Most people today watch television differently than they did when cable networks ruled the airwaves. Instead, they stream what they want, when they want it, on demand, via a variety of digital services. Instead of launching one episode a week as traditional broadcasters did, on-demand services like HBO NOW and Netflix now often release an entire season at once, encouraging people to binge-watch and helping build intense hype around certain shows and programming.
For advertisers, this new paradigm has opened up a lot of opportunities when it comes to targeting specific audiences. The consulting company Deloitte predicts that this shift to digitized content will result in an increasing focus on personalized ads: “leveraging consumer data will enable stakeholders to hyper-target their ads and context."
This is true for advertisers of all kinds, but for amusement park marketers, it presents a specific opportunity to showcase the thrill of the experience in video to a select captive audience. The 2023 Disney World commercial “Thrills” and the 2022 Six Flags commercial celebrating “40 Seasons of Thrills” are two good examples of theme parks squeezing a lot of exciting information into 30 seconds of airtime.
Another example to inspire you: Thorpe Park Resort’s splashy 2023 TV ad, showcasing the UK theme park’s record-breaking roller coaster collection, water park, special summer-season events, and onsite hotel and restaurants — a lot of enticing information packed into just under a minute!
9. Work with OTAs and travel sites to get more exposure
Of course, when you work with an online travel agent (OTA) like Tiqets, you get more exposure by virtue of their built-in audiences, which are generally rather large. In a typical OTA partnership, the OTA gives you a dedicated page on their site that can be easily surfaced in a search.
OTAs offer a few other particular advantages in your marketing. For instance, they often have blogs and other promotional material where they promote their attractions. They may also allow you to set up OTA-specific special offers for your visitors, such as a “skip the ticket line” entry to Gardaland Amusement Park.
At Tiqets (an OTA), we support our attractions with campaigns such as virtual tours of their venues promoted on the Tiqets site and social media platforms. Right after the pandemic, the marketing campaign Summer of a Lifetime encouraged people to get their spark back with the best museums and attractions around the world and prominently featured the venues we partnered with in the campaign. And last year, we co-sponsored Feast in the Flowers with Keukenhof, the famous Netherlands botanical gardens, where the winner received a trip to a special, one-of-a-kind dinner event in the gardens.
These are just a few examples of how an OTA like Tiqets can boost your theme park’s marketing efforts and help you reach a wider audience with collaborative campaigns.
