Are your screens doing too much at once? Walk around any theme park, museum, or heritage site, and you’ll find screens showing maps, menus, promotions, and event schedules. These are all fighting for attention. Guests can quickly become overwhelmed by too much information, leading them to stop reading altogether.
Done properly, visitor attraction digital signage should guide people through your site and keep them informed as the day unfolds. There are three things your screen should do, and they should be kept separate so each one lands at the right moment in the visitor journey.
Maps: Wayfinding screens to guide visitors
If visitors can’t find the next show time, the cafe, the toilets, or the special exhibit, nothing else on your screens matters. Your digital signage content strategy should centre around wayfinding. This stops people wasting time searching for amenities, which helps improve dwell times and secondary spend.
Let’s be clear, the fix isn’t more signage. You don’t need to install more screens to improve wayfinding. Instead, you need to make your existing signs more effective. That means entrance screens and decision points should carry one clear map or directional prompt. Don’t be tempted to add promotions here.
Practical tip: Use animation to your advantage. A static floor plan might be overlooked, but an animated screen with a direction cue is harder to ignore and faster to process.
If a visitor can’t read and act within five seconds, your wayfinding is failing. Cut back the content until the guidance is clear at a glance.
Moments: Content that reflects the day
Your screen should reflect the most important information based on the season and time of the day. Reminding people of morning event times is most useful to visitors at the beginning of the day, and events that sell out should say so or be taken off the screen.
Similarly, your screens can reflect timely promotions (such as a lunch deal), wayfinding updates, upcoming showtimes, and queue information. Having this real-time information in front of guests at the right time of the day will help drive spend while keeping customer satisfaction high.
Practical tip: Think of event screens like breaking news. The moment the information changes, the screen should too.This kind of content doesn’t require a full CMS overhaul or dedicated in-house resource. Updates to event timings, last-minute changes, or weather-dependent messaging can be pushed remotely in minutes across every screen in the venue.
Monetisation: Helpful offers and promotions
Secondary spend is where many visitor attractions make their margins. Whether it’s café upsells, gift shop prompts, fast-track upgrades, or season pass offers, screens can do a lot of work here. But for this to be effective, the content needs to be well-timed and well-placed.
Digital signage in visitor attractions can increase sales when used to promote food, upgrades, and add-ons. The simplest way to think about monetisation screens is by location and guest mindset:
- Entrance: welcome message and wayfinding highlights
- Junctions and corridors: directions and live queue times
- Food and drink areas: daily specials and upsell prompts
- Show arenas and stages: countdowns and what’s on next
- Exit and gift shop: season pass offer, retail prompt, review request
That structure keeps promotional content purposeful rather than scattered. Guests encounter offers at the moment they’re most likely to act on them.
Keeping it all running
The teams managing visitor attraction screens are often the same people running events, handling guest queries, and managing queues on the busiest days of the year. Manually updating slides isn’t realistic when you’re short-staffed in August or running three extra events across a bank holiday weekend.
A managed screen content service means your team sets the brief, approves the creative, and the screens run. Seasonal changeovers, last-minute event updates, and promotional swaps don’t require you to pull anyone away from the floor. When something changes — and in visitor attractions, something always changes — the screens can reflect that quickly.
If your screens are showing the same content they were three months ago, they’re not working for you. Get in touch, and we’ll show you what they could be doing instead.