Introduction
Winchester Cathedral’s Christmas Market is renowned as one of the best in Europe for its bustling atmosphere, stunning location and handpicked high-quality exhibitors, attracting visitors from around the world each year.
Problem
How can they measure the success of their 2023 Christmas Market compared to 2022, and how can they improve it further?
Solution
Utilise Place Informatics’ cutting-edge visitor data analytics and customised event reports.
Benefits
- Event Planning: Analysing data from past years’ Christmas events reveals vital information about peak attendance times by day of week and overall visitor movement flow within the market area. This identifies visitor hot and cold spots, allowing for optimisation of stall placement and layout through visitor behaviour analytics and heat maps generated by GPS footfall data for data-driven decisions to create a harmonious flow through the market.
- Visitor Attendance: Christmas Markets are a leisure experience in addition to Christmas shopping attracting much wider catchment areas. Utilising your event visitor origins through postcode and catchment area data, allows you to create targeted marketing and promotional campaigns to the optimal demographic segments, to increase reach and future visitor numbers.
- Spend Potential: Christmas Markets bring a much wider demographic group to the host town, attracting new customers of all ages and backgrounds to the festive markets and are an increasing attraction for higher spenders. Visitors spend potential by postcode and catchment area data allows you to understand the spending potential of your actual visitors, what percentage of higher-spend visitors you attracted and indicate those you may have missed.
- Event Performance Analysis: Benchmark results against previous years’ events including growth in footfall, dwell time and unique visitors by postcode for the duration of the event and measure success against other host towns’ Christmas Event. Use this data as a competitive advantage to market to the correct audience to create maximum exposure, and increased spending and relay positive results to local retailers to increase support and include evidence to increase funding opportunities.
Results
By analysing past visitor behaviour and footfall data, Winchester Cathedral identified which marketing channels and messages were most effective and enabled them to target people in the catchment areas who were not yet visiting. By understanding how their visitors moved through the market, Winchester Cathedral made informed decisions and allocated resources confidently and efficiently, redesigning the layout to improve visitor flow and accessibility. By using the data Place Informatics provided, Winchester Cathedral were able to place promotional messaging in strategic locations and identified that they needed to extend their hours on weekends to accommodate more visitors.
Conclusion
By leveraging reliable visitor behaviour data for its Christmas Market event, Winchester Cathedral could measure its success in several ways, benchmark these results against previous years and compare its success with other towns’ Christmas Market events. These findings were utilised in their decision to extend visiting hours on Saturday and Sunday, change their previous layout and use data-driven results in their marketing to store holders to secure the best brands and as a compelling tool for future financial support.
