Visitor bureau updating website
Hanson Dodge tapped for job
Milwaukee soon will get a new front door — of the digital variety.
Visit Milwaukee, the area’s convention and visitor bureau, is partnering with local marketing agency Hanson Dodge to create a new website that they hope will draw more travelers to Milwaukee.
It’s a major effort for Visit Milwaukee “that will have a huge impact on our organization for the next five to 10 years,” said Megan Suardini, the bureau’s vice president of marketing and communications.
While the look of the current Visit Milwaukee website, VisitMilwaukee.org, was updated in 2014, the underlying software platform has been the same for several years. That’s about to change.
“We’re totally starting from the ground up,” Suardini said.
Exactly how the new site will look and function hasn’t been set. The bureau and Hanson Dodge first will tap meeting planners and travelers to get a sense of what they’d like to see, Suardini said.
However, likely upgrades include such things as enhancements for mobile users, technology to support virtual reality video and moredetailed interactive maps.
On the current site, tourists looking for, say, local beer gardens can plot them on a Google map. That capability may be enhanced so the traveler can see not only where the beer garden is, but also what restaurants and bars are nearby.
“At this point I can’t say what the bells and whistles will be, but we are feeling really great about our partnership with Hanson Dodge,” Suardini said.
She also said the site will have “a very clean, modern” look and make good use of the more than 10,000 photos and videos in the bureau’s library.
The current site is typical of many visitor bureau sites that are “midway between the past and present,” said Greg Oates, senior editor at Skift, a travel-industry news and research firm.
Oates likes the fullwidth image slide show on Visit Milwaukee’s desktop site, and the way it targets different audiences for meeting planning.
“However, good CVB sites today resemble a travel media portal with rich, engaging storytelling, versus the pedestrian billboard sites of old merely directing traffic to partners,” he said via email.
While the Milwaukee slide show photos are appealing, the overall content “doesn’t offer a sense of what makes Milwaukee special or unique,” Oates said.
“The best sites today also have sophisticated maps to direct travelers to different neighborhoods,” he said. “Also, the content should have more descriptive titles.”
Ten agencies bid on the Visit Milwaukee website upgrade, including national firms. Suardini said Hanson Dodge impressed the bureau with its “multiple awards for being first to market on innovative digital solutions.”
And while the agency has worked with national brands such as Trek, it also knows Milwaukee and has a “passion for the city,” Suardini said.
She said traffic at the bureau’s website has grown by 65% over the last five years and now stands at 1.5 million annual visits. About 1 million of those are from unique visitors, Suardini said.
The new site is expected to be ready by the end of this year.
Suardini would not say how much the update is expected to cost.