By Simon Jones, Managing Director
Across the visitor attraction sector, audience segmentation is hardly a new idea. Most organisations now have a far more sophisticated understanding of who their visitors are, what motivates them, and why they choose to engage. And yet, despite all of that progress, a surprising amount of digital media spend is still being wasted. Not because the sector lacks insight. Quite the opposite.
The problem is that many attractions understand their audiences brilliantly inside strategy documents and audience development plans, but far less effectively inside Meta Ads Manager, which is increasingly where visitor decisions are actually being made. That disconnect is becoming expensive.
At Navigate, we’ve spent the last year working with attractions and cultural organisations to bridge that gap properly. And what we’re finding is remarkably consistent. When audience segmentation is translated effectively into digital media strategy, campaign efficiency improves dramatically. In some cases, organisations are able to reduce media spend by close to 50% whilst maintaining, or even improving, results. For a sector under constant pressure to deliver more with less, that shift matters.
Why understanding audiences is no longer enough
Over the past decade, the visitor attraction sector has invested heavily in audience insight. Much of that has centred around Culture Segments, the psychographic framework developed by MHM, which has become widely embedded across museums, heritage organisations and attractions because it moves beyond basic demographics and starts to explain motivation. Not simply, “Who visits?,” but, “Why do they engage in the first place?”
As a result, Culture Segments now influence everything from programming and interpretation to pricing and long-term planning. Across the sector, organisations have become significantly more audience-aware. But digital advertising often remains surprisingly broad:
Age ranges, generic interests, geographic catchments and standard lookalike audiences.
In effect, attractions are speaking with nuance strategically, but advertising with a megaphone operationally. And increasingly, that matters.
Because visitor behaviour is now fundamentally digital. Families browse attractions through Instagram before visiting. Older audiences compare reviews on Google. Visitors watch TikTok videos, check opening hours and search “things to do near me” before making decisions, often within the same few minutes.
Digital is no longer simply a marketing channel. It is the environment in which visitor behaviour now exists.
Bridging the gap between insight and execution
Part of the challenge is structural. Culture Segments are built around motivations, values and attitudes. Digital platforms, meanwhile, optimise around behaviours and signals. Those are not the same thing. Meta does not inherently understand concepts like “Expression” or “Affirmation” audiences in the way the cultural sector does. Without a process for translating one into the other, segmentation remains strategically useful but digitally disconnected. That’s why many organisations end up with a strange contradiction: deep audience knowledge sitting alongside relatively generic media execution.
In response, Navigate has been working with MHM to build a more structured approach to translating Culture Segments into digital targeting models that platforms can actually optimise against. Importantly, this is not simply a case of attaching personas to a few interest categories and hoping for the best.
The process involves identifying behavioural signals that align with the motivations behind each segment, whilst ensuring creative reflects the emotional triggers and values of those audiences. Because targeting alone is only half the equation. Creative relevance matters just as much.
An “Expression” audience and an “Affirmation” audience may both visit the same attraction, but the reasons they engage, and the messaging that resonates with them, can be fundamentally different. And when campaigns reflect those differences properly, the results improve very quickly.
We first applied this methodology alongside the National Museum of the Royal Navy, where segment-led campaigns combined refined targeting with creative tailored to audience motivations. The impact was immediate:
- 62% increase in click-through rate
- 50% reduction in cost per click
- 43% improvement in return on advertising spend
Since then, we’ve applied the same approach across a range of attractions and cultural organisations with similarly strong results.
A wildlife attraction achieved a 63% reduction in cost per conversion alongside a 109% percent increase in return on advertising spend. Meanwhile, a World Heritage Site recorded a 68% reduction in cost per click and a 124% increase in return on ad spend. What’s interesting is that these results are not being driven by dramatically larger budgets. They are being driven by relevance. The platforms are simply responding more effectively to clearer audience signals and more aligned creative. Which, in hindsight, makes complete sense. Because digital advertising performs best when platforms understand not just who audiences are, but what genuinely motivates them.
Final thought
The visitor attraction sector has spent years building a more sophisticated understanding of audiences, and rightly so. But insight only creates value when it changes behaviour, including the behaviour of marketing systems themselves.
Right now, many organisations still have a disconnect between how well they understand audiences strategically and how precisely they reach them digitally. That gap is increasingly where budget disappears. The work being undertaken with MHM demonstrates that this disconnect can be closed, and that when it is, the impact is measurable, commercially significant and surprisingly immediate.
At Navigate, we’re already helping organisations make that transition across museums, heritage sites and visitor attractions of varying scale and complexity. Not through bigger budgets or louder campaigns, but through sharper audience alignment and more intelligent execution. And in a sector where every pound of media investment matters, the ability to reduce wasted spend whilst improving performance may become one of the most valuable competitive advantages an attraction can build over the next few years.
By Simon Jones, Managing Director, Navigate
Simon Jones is Managing Director at Navigate and has spent more than 35 years helping visitor brands grow audiences, revenue, and market presence. Formerly with Merlin Entertainments and We The Curious, he now advises attractions, destinations, and hospitality brands on strategic marketing, commercial growth, and long-term visitor engagement.
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