Finding a location for your favourite memory
Imagine: you are looking for a location to celebrate the most beautiful day of your life, your wedding. Or perhaps you are looking for a venue to celebrate your company’s success or to organise an inspiring conference. You probably have some specific requirements in mind that the venue must meet. But how do you search for and find that one ideal location? And on the other hand, as a venue owner, how do you reach your target audience in a way that convinces them to choose you?
That is what High Profile Locaties (HPL) does: bring together venue seekers and venue owners. HPL wanted to make all websites (the corporate HPL website, locaties.nl, inspirerendelocaties.nl and toptrouwlocaties.nl) and the personal admin portal for venue owners easier and more efficient to manage, increase the websites’ findability, improve the conversion rate of the websites and make the platform scalable in order to achieve growth ambitions. Time for an impressive digital transformation, which we tackled together with HPL as one team.
Make the HPL websites and the personal admin portal for venue owners more manageable, findable and scalable.
An impressive digital transformation, with a renewed digital strategy, one premium and scalable digital ecosystem, a new brand positioning with a recognisable and scalable (visual) identity, targeted marketing campaigns and a proper data setup.
About High Profile Locaties
The goal of High Profile Locaties (HPL) is to turn special events into favourite memories, by connecting venue seekers and venue owners. People who are looking for a location to host a private or business event, can find a venue on one of the three websites (locaties.nl, inspirerendelocaties.nl and toptrouwlocaties.nl) where venue owners offer their location(s). Business events can be conferences, trainings or company parties, and private events can be weddings, birthday parties or fancy 21 diners.
An impressive digital transformation
Our common goal was clear: to help HPL grow even further by making their platforms more manageable, findable and scalable. That means, to help even more venue seekers find the right location, gather even more venue owners on the platform, help them reach one or more target audiences through the websites of HPL and receive relevant requests.
During several strategic sessions, we had a look at the organisation together with HPL and defined a new digital strategy, including a new brand positioning. We also created a roadmap for a smooth implementation. For example, think of developing the new platform, composing new brand guidelines and motion principles, revamping the location inspiration guide and promotional material for venue owners, creating content for awareness and activation campaigns and setting up a proper data infrastructure.
Our blended team got to work. In total, more than 65 iO colleagues were involved in this project. This includes strategists, various developers, data specialists, designers, content creators and marketing experts.
The results speak for themselves
Better manageability, both for HPL and venue owners
To improve manageability for both HPL and the venue owners, we developed a completely new digital ecosystem. We built all websites and the admin portal for venue owners on one platform and connected all data.
This means venue owners need up to 50% less time for managing the content of their location(s). Through extensive user tests with venue owners, we improved the user experience on the admin portal. For example, owners can now manage multiple venues on the same portal. And if a venue is suitable for both private and business events, you can use the same portal to show different content that matches the target audience on multiple websites. Think of pictures, videos and certain location features. The portal also gives owners access to extensive statistics to measure their performance.
For HPL, better manageability means they can be an advisory partner for venue owners in an easier and more efficient way. For example, HPL can now see what owners have entered in the CMS and what their performance is on the platform. This enables HPL to contact venue owners directly to provide tips and advice on how to make their venues even more relevant.
Another major advantage for HPL is that they can now independently manage filter options in the CMS, one of the most important functionalities to facilitate the search for venue seekers. Additionally, HPL now has one single overview of all data, making it easier to make data-driven decisions, for instance, about marketing campaigns and website optimisations.
The right location for venue seekers, high-quality leads for venue owners
The benefit of more efficient manageability? It helps HPL to also work on their online findability more efficiently. We have improved this in three ways:
Through the awareness and activation campaign ‘Blink Aan’, inclusief de campagnewebsite blinkaan.nl, HPL has become more visible to venue owners who have not yet listed their venues on one of the HPL websites. They are encouraged to contact HPL.
In the admin portal, owners are stimulated through gamification to complete their location pages as much as possible. For each section, a percentage tells owners how complete that section is. And when it is fully completed, they get to see a celebratory animation as a kind of reward. The completeness of the profiles not only helps venue owners, but it also indirectly benefits HPL, because the pages are easier to find on Google.
To become more visible to venue seekers and increase traffic to the websites, we implemented performance marketing, such as awareness and activation campaigns and social media posts, but also SEO. We gave HPL the opportunity to create virtual pages and capture search intents for specific events in specific places or regions (for example 'A client meeting in Rotterdam’). HPL has already made over 250,000 pages, often placing them at the top of Google’s search results. Once venue seekers are on the platform, we improve the conversion rate by continuous conversion optimisation.
"I'm glad I chose iO. I couldn't have managed this with any other agency."
Ronnie Witjes, CEO at High Profile Locaties
The possibility to realise growth ambitions
While developing the new ecosystem, we consistently took scalability into account to enable HPL to grow even further in the future. For example, to achieve a higher number of visitors or expand to other countries or markets.
The websites are always live and easy to expand, because we built the platform based on a microservice architecture. This means the platform consists of various separate parts, making it relatively easy to scale up or down, or to replace components when a different technology better suits HPL’s growth. Currently, the platform includes Umbraco as the CMS, Elasticsearch for the search functionality and Azure Cosmos DB as data storage.
We also considered growth ambitions when designing the (visual) identity. Together, HPL and iO worked on a comprehensive brand architecture, including mission, vision, promise and message. Based on an inspiring brand story, we created a strong visual identity that is being applied across all websites. And while every website has its own branding, it is still recognisable as a part of HPL. This makes it relatively easy to add new websites in the future.
Grow even further in the future
Growth ambitions? HPL certainly has those. The first steps are to continue optimising traffic, conversion rate and usability. Thanks to a well-organised data setup, we can develop features and campaigns that directly contribute to HPL’s business objectives. For example:
Making content more relevant by applying personalisation techniques;
Providing venue owners with more insights into their performance by expanding statistics in the admin portal
Making the search for a location even faster through a wizard
Allowing venue seekers to send out multiple requests to multiple venues from their favourites list
Automatically translating the content on the location pages using AI.
Proudly celebrating successes together
We celebrated the success of this impressive digital transformation as one team. During a launch event, we thanked all colleagues from both HPL and iO for their commitment and looked positively towards the future.
How we helped High Profile Locaties grow
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