The Full-Funnel Playbook for Experience Brands

Experience brands are paying more to reach fewer bookers. Privacy changes blunted ad targeting. At the same time, more guests now plan with ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, which answer the question before anyone clicks through.

No single channel fixes that. What works is a full-funnel system: creator-led video at the top, clear machine-readable answers in the middle, paid media that captures and protects demand at the bottom, and retention that turns one visit into three.

This playbook walks through each stage. It's built on a decade in performance marketing and more than £100M in sales driven for our clients.

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Why are experience brands paying more for fewer bookings?

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Two things broke at once, and only one of them shows up in your dashboards.

Most owners who come to us describe the same pattern. The ads are still running and the budget hasn't moved, but bookings are sliding, and nobody can say which week it started. Over the past two years we've unpicked it at indoor skydiving venues, multi-site leisure operators and high-ticket hospitality brands, and experience businesses feel it hardest because the ticket price invites deliberation and the decision is an emotional one.

First, privacy updates weakened targeting and pushed media costs up. That hurt, but it showed up in the reports, so you could at least plan around it.

The second change is harder to see, because it happens before anyone reaches your site. A fast-growing share of guests now plan with AI. Among US travellers, use of AI tools for trip planning rose from 38% in 2024 to 55% in 2025 (Skift US Travel Tracker, via McKinsey).

Ask one of those tools for the best family day out in Manchester, or whether indoor skydiving is safe for a nervous child, and you get one synthesised answer. If your venue isn't in it, you never make the shortlist, and none of your attribution reports will record the loss.

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How is AI search changing the way people find experiences?

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AI now answers the question on the results page, so fewer people click through. The brands the answer names get the shortlist.

In Pew Research's study of real browsing data, Google users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when it didn't. They clicked a link inside the summary itself on just 1% of visits (Pew Research Center). By December 2025, Ahrefs found an AI Overview cut clicks to the top-ranking page by 58% (Ahrefs).

Worse for experience brands, question searches are the ones most likely to trigger a summary. Pew found 60% of searches starting with who, what, when or why produced one, and that's how nervous first-time bookers tend to search.

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What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

GEO is the work of making sure AI models can find your brand and feel safe citing it when they answer a question. Models build their answers from structured data and from what reviews and other sites say about you. Your homepage hero image is invisible to them. What counts is whether clear, checkable facts exist about your prices, age limits, safety record and how the experience actually works.

That's an uncomfortable shift for anyone used to buying the top of the page. You can influence what the models say about you. You can't control it, and you can't raise a bid cap to fix it. Citation share comes from consistent information spread across review sites and press coverage, backed up by your own public FAQs, until the models treat you as the safe answer.

Studio 34 POV: Measurement here is still immature, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Our approach is rough but useful: we run each client's core discovery queries on a schedule, track how often they're cited, and report that as a top-of-funnel metric next to CPM and view rate.

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How has influencer marketing changed for experience brands?

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It's moved from paying for reach to paying for production.

The old model was sponsorship. You paid someone with a big audience for one post and hoped for a spike. We stopped recommending it because the unit economics stopped working.

Take an immersive experience venue. A parent planning a weekend rarely sees one ad and books on the spot. They catch a shaky clip on TikTok, spend three days reading up on safety, then search the brand by name, and if nothing catches them on that first scroll none of the rest happens. So the job is volume: dozens of native vertical videos a month, shot by smaller local creators in the formats TikTok, Reels and Shorts already favour. A local creator with a few thousand followers often beats a national name with hundreds of thousands, because their audience can drive to you.

The best of that footage then becomes your paid creative.

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Creative is the targeting now

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Meta, TikTok and YouTube now decide who sees an ad based on how people react to it in the first few seconds. In practice, the asset does the job your audience settings used to do.

That changes how you build creative. Instead of one polished hero spot, you build in parts:

Hooks: several three-second openers, from a first-timer's face to a price on screen
Bodies: short middles that each tackle one thing, such as safety, value or the thrill
Calls to action: book now, gift it, plan a party

The platform mixes and matches them and learns what works for which group of people, taking most of the guesswork out of audience building.

In our own head-to-head testing, smartphone footage of a first-timer laughing in the tunnel beats the polished studio spot on cost and on volume. It happens often enough that we now brief for it by default.

Further down the funnel, the same thinking applies to carousels. Breaking safety rules or package options into simple swipeable cards keeps warm audiences engaged while they make up their minds.

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The middle is where expensive bookings get lost

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It happens in the days between the first click and the checkout, when unanswered questions kill the sale.

A £40 ticket gets bought on impulse, but a £300 booking for six people usually sits in someone's head for a few days, and that's when the questions start.

Can my nine-year-old give it a go? Where do we park? What happens if someone loses their nerve on the day? Is there somewhere for the grandparents to sit and watch?

None of these are marketing questions, which is why they so often go unanswered online. They live with the operations team, or in the head of whoever runs the front desk, yet they decide whether the booking happens. A prospect who can't find the answer rarely emails to ask, and usually drifts off to something easier to book.

The venues we see converting best in this window treat the FAQ page as a sales asset, where plenty of others file it under admin. Every objection answered in public removes one more reason to abandon a basket, and if you mark those answers up with FAQ schema they also feed the AI models from the earlier section.

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What role should paid media play in a full-funnel strategy?

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Paid still closes the sale, but in a well-run account it does four other jobs as well.

Paid search catches people who are already looking, and that's still the most reliable money in the account. The same budget also works harder if you let it:

It's a testing ground. Put creative in front of real audiences and find the hooks that hold attention before you scale spend behind them.
It answers objections. Show the safety policy or the group pricing page to someone who visited and hesitated.
It sharpens targeting. Feed hashed CRM data into the bidding models so they learn what a valuable customer actually looks like.
It stops waste. Exclude active members and recent bookers from acquisition campaigns, so you're not paying to reach people who booked last week.

Then there's where the click lands. Paid traffic should hit a fast mobile page with live availability and the price up front. Offer the photo and video package or a longer flight as part of checkout. It's an easy upsell, and a lot of operators skip it.

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Retention pays for everything else

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For an experience business, a lot of the margin sits in what happens after the visit.

Someone walking out after having done an activity is at peak enthusiasm. Get the photos and video into their inbox while they're still in the car park and a lot of them buy, whereas by day three most of that has worn off.

After that, it comes down to whether you talk to a first-timer differently from someone on their fifth visit. Plenty of venues send both the same email. First-timers need reassurance and a reason to come back, like a birthday or a work event. Regulars want to get better, which means coaching and kit. Splitting those two lists is usually the cheapest revenue an operator has.

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Your 30-day checklist

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Five things you can start this month, without a new budget line:

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google your five most important discovery questions. Note whether your venue is named, and who is named instead.
Source three to five vertical UGC videos and test them against your current best-performing ad.
Collect the ten questions your front desk hears most and answer them on a public FAQ page with FAQ schema.
Add CRM exclusions to strip recent bookers and active members out of acquisition campaigns.
Set up an automated post-visit trigger so photos and video arrive while the visit is still fresh.

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Frequently asked questions

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What is full-funnel marketing for experience brands?

Full-funnel marketing runs discovery, consideration, conversion and retention as one connected system. For an experience brand, that means creator video to get noticed, clear answers to remove doubt, paid media to capture bookings, and post-visit follow-up to drive repeat visits.

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How do I get my venue recommended by ChatGPT?

Make sure clear, consistent facts about your venue exist in places AI models read: your own FAQ pages with schema markup, review platforms, local press and listings. Cover prices, age limits, safety and accessibility. You can't buy a mention, but you can make your venue the easiest one to cite accurately.

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Does user-generated content outperform studio ads?

In our testing on experience brands, it usually does on cost per click and booking volume. Real guests reacting on camera feel trustworthy, and they match what people already watch on TikTok and Reels. Studio footage still has a place in brand and website work.

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How soon should a venue send post-visit photos and video?

While the guest is still on site or on the way home. Enthusiasm peaks straight after the experience, and purchase rates for media packages fall quickly after that. Automated delivery is the simplest way to catch that window every time.

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How the pieces fit together

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Paid ads, social and search all still work. What changed is the journey around them, which now runs through AI answers and habits that barely existed three years ago.

Run creative, AI discovery, paid media and retention as separate projects and budget leaks through the gaps between them. The experience brands growing profitably run them as one system. That's the work we've spent ten years doing, and it's what more than £100M in client sales has been built on.

Want to know where your funnel is leaking? Book a free account audit with the Studio 34 team →

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