Marketing Objectives:
Clearly state your marketing goals.
What did your company strive to achieve using this piece or program?From a pure marketing perspective, the primary goal of the website relaunch was to grow our unpaid traffic through inspirational content, clean site architecture, optimized site speed, feature parity between devices and using proper markup & schema. We also tapped internal brand marketers to rethink our digital brand voice through production of new content, imagery and standards to ensure that our brand was aligned and consistent across all channels.

Target Audience:
Who was/is the target audience?
Characterize the composition, size, and location of your target audience.Omni Hotels and Resorts targets two high-level segments of guests – group business and transient travelers. Group makes up the majority of Omni’s business where sales teams and event planners reserve large blocks of rooms for conferences, wedding and events. Transient (or leisure) travel is the second segment and the primary audience of the website redesign. These individuals are generally 35-54 years old, a manager or thought leader making around $150K+ annually. 60% of this segment are males and 40% are females with families and children living in the United States.  Given the proliferation of price comparison sites in the travel industry, transient guests have more options when booking which highlighted this group as having the largest growth opportunity. And as we continue to see mobile outrun desktop traffic, providing a more efficient inspiration > education > booking flow was the top area of focus.

Research, Planning, and Implementation:
What market research was conducted prior to planning the piece/campaign?We approached this as a multi-phase project, with very discrete actions & deliverables driving requirements for the subsequent steps. Upon kickoff of Phase I, we spent the first 90 days operating as a research project, where we ran a full UX audit, competitive review, customer journey mapping exercise and design thinking workshop. This led our strategists and designers into Phase II, where we developed an initial sitemap and wireframe, which after many rounds of review materialized into a hi-fidelity visual design. Approvals of this deliverable led to Phase III, where our cloud architects began building new QA/production environments, back/front-end engineers began developing the codebase and our content team began prepping/staging the future-state experience. And the tail-end of this phase was the initial deployment of our new website! We're now in Phase IV, where we develop operational models for site maintenance and continuous improvement/optimization of the customer experience.

Message:
What is the key message intended for the piece/campaign?
What differentiates your piece/campaign in the marketplace?The key objective of our new site design is to provide the customer with everything they need throughout every phase of the journey—dream, plan, book, stay and post-stay (and to make that journey as frictionless as possible). At Omni, we focus on letting customers tell us what they want—rather than us telling them what they should want. Using this mentality, we utilized session data from the customer click-path on our previous site to determine the sequence of content on our new design. We let the data drive our decision-making instead of relying on subjective opinions.

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.

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.We began measurement immediately after launch, with hourly tracking of commercial & behavioral metrics relative to an annual & 8-week lookback baseline. We also pivoted this data against device, customer groups & marketing channels to find pockets of success and opportunity. And to cover for any gaps in our digital analytics tagging, we utilized our session replay tool to review true user sessions and build deeper funnels (ex. booking engine fallout). It's a bit too early to gauge success of our traffic targets, as these were intentially built as a 6 month ramp, but we began to see immediate conversion improvement post-launch. Highlights: - 12% increase in the booking rate in the first 10 days - Hit our highest mobile conversion rate for the calendar year on Day 6 of the relaunch - Hit our highest desktop conversion rate for the calendar year on Day 15 of the relaunch

Research, Planning and Implementation
What research was conducted prior to planning the initiative? Describe the step by step efforts to plan and implement the initiative in a way that would allow others to be able to duplicate your efforts. Were their individuals or teams that offered leadership to ensure effectiveness?

Message and Communication
What were your key messages? How did you differentiate your messages? What was the purpose of the communications? How did you communicate your actions to the target audience? What other stakeholders or media did you approach for assistance?

Results and Impact
What results had the greatest impact on your target audience? What results were directly tied to the HSMAI Foundation Mission? Which of your original goals was achieved? Please comment on the process and the outcomes. What measures were used to determine success? How was the data collected? What is the status of the initiative now – will it continue? Was it effective? Will it be used continuously? Will you help others use the initiative to help the industry meet its needs for exceptional talent? How?

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).

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?

Entry TitleOmni Hotels & Resorts Website Redesign

DivisionDigital Marketing

Sub-categoryDigital Single Item

CategoryWeb Site

Classification