Self Guided Tours
Introducing Hidden Gems, a new location based treasure hunt and competition engine.
The perfect complement to any Visitor Engagement App, Hidden Gems is a fun new way to drive traffic to specific locations. It can also increase dwell times and local spending, and encourage user registration for prize draws.
Participants are invited to seek out and unlock the hidden gems located in and around their neighbourhood.
Along the Hidden Gems trail, players are automatically alerted when a Gem is nearby. The Gem could be under a café table, in a gallery, on a Coffee shop counter, or inside the local Hair Dressing Salon.
At each location, an audio commentary provides the player with clues on where the Gem may be hiding, as well as history and interesting facts about that location.
When a Gem has been discovered, the player simply scans it to unlock and add to their collection.
Instant rewards can be provided to players along the trail, including discount tokens, and giveaways
Once a player has collected enough Gems, they become eligible and can register to enter the weekly or monthly prize draw. Prizes are drawn automatically and winners announced via the App.
The Hidden Gems competition engine can be easily adapted to any precinct or public attraction and adds a fun new layer of engagement for visitors. It also gives placemakers, historians and marketing professionals a new way to encourage visitors to explore more and discover new places in and around their local neighbourhood.
Self Guided Tours
As we start to emerge from the COVID forced lockdowns, we have been approached by several councils as they are starting to think about promoting the assets that they already have in their own backyard…
- heritage trails
- mural trails
- silo artwork
- hiking
- walking
- cycling trails
We believe there is a great opportunity to use technology to improve delivery of services, and provide smarter, safer environments for visitors to regions and public attractions.
Using a visitor’s own smartphone to delivery self guided tours and general visitor information has a number of key advantages over traditional brochures and paper based materials, the most obvious one being the cost savings in printing, and the ability to maintain currency of information.
Apps will make use of the self guided tours concept to deliver a variety of rich stories and content streams to visitors based on the selected tour. Tours can be created and maintained by your staff and updated dynamically, based on seasons, themes, special events and more. This allows content curators to create immersive, rich content that highlights specific stories and interpretation, for example, history, indigenous, conservation, careers, language specific etc.
Once a tour has been selected, content relating to that trail will be automatically delivered to the visitor when passing beacons, geo-locations and other trigger points.
Our Experience
At Specialist Apps we have been working with a wide range of local councils, public institutions, precincts and attractions, helping to develop Visitor engagement Apps. Recent clients include Mid Murray Council, the City of Port Adelaide Enfield, and the City of Port Phillip, the Skyrail, the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, Taronga Zoo, Melbourne SEA Life Aquarium and the National Museum of Singapore.
The Benefits
There are a range of major benefits and pain points that can be addressed through a visitor engagement
- Interpretive self guided audio tours with rich extension possibilities for rich media etc
- Foreign Language Audio Tours with Visitor Information
- Visitor Way Finding through interactive maps that provide much richer, localized context and highlighting points of interest.
- Visit Planning – Day planning tools that allow visitors to get the most out of their day.
- Education and deeper immersion – providing detailed information (e.g. about plants and animals in and around the rainforest, relevant conservation issues and more)
- Cost and environmental savings through the reduction of printed materials
- Greater social media interaction through the active encouragement of experience sharing to witter, Facebook, Instagram and WeChat
- Eradication of on-going repair and maintenance of specialized audio tour hardware
- Simplification of logistics and removal of need to manage specialized audio tour hardware.
- Extending the life of engagement with a visitor beyond a single visit through on-going promotions
- Ability to cross promote to other councils and the broader region
- Ability to extend and enhance further with Augmented Reality and other quick wins (e.g.native animals)
An effectively promoted Visitor Engagement App can also provide significant insights into visitor habits, preferences, demographics, and dwell times at key locations. There is a wealth of BIG DATA available via Heat Maps, usage reports and trend analysis that will assist management staff when reviewing allocation of resources and future marketing priorities.
Want to know more?
We would love to chat to your further as regards how this could apply to your business or organisation, and to share with you some of our existing visitor engagement apps.