Marketing Objectives:
Clearly state your marketing goals.
What did your company strive to achieve using this piece or program?- Maintain a high level of reach and influence. Maintain visitphilly.com’s status as one of the Top 3 most-visited city destination websites in the country. - Refined Content Strategy: Build the upgraded visitphilly.com with a sustainable digital content strategy that prioritizes reasons-to-visit- and things-to-do- focused content. - Optimized for Search–Develop the upgraded website to be optimized for organic search. - Optimized for Social–Develop the upgraded website to be optimized for social. - Optimized for Site Speed–Site speed is critical to the success of websites today so we need the upgraded visitiphilly.com to be optimized for site speed. - Stronger Connections between Visitphilly.com and Uwishunu.com–The upgraded visitphilly.com should surface visitphilly.com content and uwishunu.com content on a single landing page. - Enhanced Email Integration–The upgraded website should continue to be our best tool for adding new subscribers to our email list of 200,000+.

Target Audience:
Who was/is the target audience?
Characterize the composition, size, and location of your target audience.Visitphilly.com invites all travelers to visit the region, but our marketing specifically targets leisure travelers from North America — those who come to Philadelphia to have fun. We have had website visitors from all 50 states and more than 220 countries in the last year. Our website targets a psychographic – people who want to travel – rather than a specific age group or income. Our website is also charged with being as equally helpful to a first-time visitor from far away as it is to a frequent visitor from nearby, so we built the site to be useful to people at various stages of the trip-planning process – inspiration, researching, planning, booking, visiting, etc.

Research, Planning, and Implementation:
What market research was conducted prior to planning the piece/campaign? Describe how you planned and produced the creative asseets with the mobile canvas in mind.We did an extensive content audit before the redesign to assess what content types on visitphilly.com had the most effective return against our mission goals. We used Google Analytics to help assess what content types were the highest performing. We looked at metrics like pageviews, scroll depth, navigation analysis, hotel widget usage rates, bounce rates, and time on page to evaluate what templates were performing the best. We used our findings to help develop a more sustainable digital content strategy for the redesigned visitphilly.com, in which we removed hundreds of underperforming listing pages from the website in favor of focusing more on high-performing article pages. This strategy supports VISIT PHILADELPHIA goals, maximizes internal efficiency and delivers a modern online experience for visitors to the website.

Message:
What is the key message intended for the piece/campaign?
What differentiates your piece/campaign in the marketplace?- Future-Facing Approach to DMO Website Strategy–The upgraded visitphilly.com delivers Visit Philadelphia with an evolved destination website. - Cinematic & Visually Striking Design–The new design places an emphasis on visuals to build image and drive visitation, and present Philadelphia as a fun, vibrant place to visit, making an impact on website visitors quickly. - Beyond Responsive Design–The upgraded website’s design and UX work seamlessly across devices to ensure the website delivers a compelling and effective user experience no matter the user’s device. - Refined Content Strategy–We built the upgraded visitphilly.com with a sustainable digital content strategy that maximizes internal efficiencies and reflects evolving internet usage, while still delivering against the company’s core objectives. - Simplified Navigation–We built a website with user navigation that adapts to evolving usage trends and is positioned flexibly for future usage evolution.

Results:
Which of your original goals did you achieve and how?
How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign? Entrants should provide quantifiable results of their tactics or campaigns.In the 160 days since launch in 2018 (vs the same time period in 2017), visitphilly.com has: - Received more than 5.5M visits, or more than 1M visits a month, maintaining our position as a Top-3 most visited city destination website in the country. (Source: similarweb.com). - Received more than 1.57M visits from social platforms, including 1.5M visits from Facebook. This is a 110% increase over 2017. - Received more than 2.9M visits from Search. Search is still our top driver of traffic to visitphilly.com post-launch. - Received 3.6M visits from mobile devices. This is 66% of all visits post-launch, up from 59% mobile in 2017. - Had more than 31,000 new subscribers sign up on the redesigned visitphilly.com, an increase of 100% over 2017. - Has sent more than 210,000 clicks to Visit Philadelphia’s events-focused blog, uwishunu.com, an increase of 57% over 2017. - Has improved site speed; the average server response time is now .22 seconds–a 54% improvement over the old website.

Project Analysis:
Please provide a brief background on the project and your efforts to preserve the destination’s natural, cultural and historic heritage.

Objectives and Goals:
What did organization set out to achieve in undertaking this project?

Creativity and Innovation:
What new and innovative ideas did you incorporate in either your method of outreach or in the implementation of the project that you think could inspire others committed to sustainability in the tourism and travel industry?

Communication:
How did you communicate your actions to the public, the media and other key stakeholders and what was the aim of the message?
How did you generate publicity in order to build awareness of, or support corporate values on your sustainability initiatives.

Results:
How did you measure the effectiveness of your efforts and what direct and tangible results did you achieve?

Leadership:
Please list the individual in a leadership role responsible for the project and how would you characterize their commitment to promoting preservation and sustainability best practices in the travel and tourism industry?

URL #1:http://visitphilly.com

URL #2:https://www.visitphilly.com/articles/philadelphia/top-things-to-do-with-kids-in-philadelphia/

URL #3:https://www.visitphilly.com/articles/philadelphia/exploring-philadelphias-delaware-river-waterfront/

DivisionDigital Marketing

Sub-categoryDigital Single Item

CategoryWeb Site

Entry TitleVISIT PHILADELPHIA Official Visitor Website - visitphilly.com

Innovation Analysis: Please provide a brief background on the project and why you feel it fits the definition of innovation, what the breakout implications are and how it was an industry disruptor.

Sources of Innovation: Did the innovative project result from chance, from research, from inspiration from outside the industry, or from some other source?

Goals and Objectives: What were the goals of the innovative project, and were they met? Were they tied to a business plan? A larger campaign? Or to get specific result (such as views, shares, influencer engagement, or bookings)? And what obstacles did you encounter in the execution of the project and how did you overcome them?

Classification

Situational AnalysisAt the start of 2017, visitphilly.com was one of the Top-3 most visited city destination websites in the country, according to data from similarweb.com. It was one of Visit Philadelphia’s most powerful marketing vehicles. However, visitphilly.com was aging. The last major overhaul of the website was in 2010. Since then we had been making incremental updates and enhancements, including a project to retrofit the design to work responsively in 2013/14. Our content managers were working in an outdated and inefficient content management system (CMS) and the Visit Philadelphia Press Room was on a completely different server and equally outdated CMS. And so our goal with the Visitphilly.com Upgrade was to develop a future-facing, sustainable and highly effective DMO website for 2018 and beyond that delivered a compelling, inspiring and uncomplicated user experience on both the front-end and back-end.

Research, planning, and implementation:
What market research was conducted prior to planning the piece/campaign?
Describe how you planned and produced the creative assets with the mobile canvas in mind.

Message:
What is the key messages intended for the piece/ campaign?
What differentiates your piece/campaign in the marketplace?
What helped you breakthrough on mobile?

Results:
What original goals did you achieve and how?
How did you measure the effectiveness of the piece or campaign?
Entrants should provide quantifiable metrics tied to real business results (eg brand lift, leads, or bookings generated).

Results:
How did you measure the effectiveness of your efforts and what direct and tangible results did you achieve? Please be as specific as possible and share the full impact of your efforts in CSR. Understandably, maintenance is another major part of CSR. If you have continued to actively and consistently work on your CSR process; please add those actions to your results description.

Leadership:
To keep your CSR efforts thriving, you need momentum and passion, which has to come from the top. Please list the individual in a leadership role responsible for the project and how would you characterize their commitment to promoting corporate social responsibility in the travel and tourism industry?