Data & Content: A Perfect Partnership for Cultural Institutions

At Guru, we spend a lot of time helping our partners make sense of visitor data — which exhibitions draw people in, how visitors move through a space, and whether marketing efforts are paying off. But data on its own only gets you halfway. For meaningful data, you need content. Engaging content is what gets visitors interacting in the first place, and it is what helps the numbers make sense when they come in — leading to more informed decisions across departments.

Museums, zoos, science centers, and other institutions get the most out of data when their incredible content takes center stage. We believe data and content are symbiotic: linking great content — audio tours, videos, and the stories only your institution can tell — with data is key to understanding visitors, building future exhibitions, strategizing marketing efforts, and more.

Why content comes first

1. Better content leads to better sample sizes

Great content encourages more visitors to engage with the museum — and with their mobile tour. The more visitors engaging with content, the more accurate the data will be. If there is more to explore in the museum, there is more to learn about your visitors and the success of your exhibitions.

2. More than just numbers

Engagement metrics can tell you that visitors averaged 55.6 minutes in the app on site — that is the real figure across 31 measured institution-years in our own portfolio — or that one gallery holds people twice as long as the one beside it. Linking your measurement tools to content is what tells you why.

3. Strategizing future content with data insights

Understanding content placement and its effect on visitor flow will help you strategize for the future. Insights on which content leads to higher visitor dwell time can benefit multiple departments, from curatorial to marketing to merchandising.

Museum innovators agree — museums are already using data analytics to fix real problems. But to collect accurate and impactful data, we first need to engage the visitor. And when it comes to engagement, content will always be timeless.

Curious how content and data work together in a Guru app? Take a look at our CMS and analytics tools, or drop us a line at solutions@guruexperience.co.