Case Study: Historic Environment Scotland improves visitor insights and campaign targeting with IBM Analytics

Historic Environment Scotland keeps the nation’s heritage alive by tempting visitors back

Historic Environment Scotland, an organization responsible for safeguarding and promoting Scotland's historic sites, faced a challenge in maximizing visitor numbers and revenues. They lacked visibility into visitor patterns and preferences, which hindered effective marketing and staffing. They turned to IBM, implementing its IBM Cognos Business Intelligence software to gain these critical insights.

IBM, through its partner Avnet, deployed a cloud-based analytics solution on the SoftLayer platform. This provided Historic Environment Scotland with deep, actionable insights into visitor demographics and behavior, enabling optimized pricing, targeted marketing, and better crowd management. The result was a dramatically improved reporting speed—from 45 minutes to 5 seconds for some reports—and a significant enhancement in operational efficiency and visitor experience.

Historic Environment Scotland

Nick Thomas

Head of Commercial Performance and Systems