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How Switching to Built Mighty Helped Visit Seattle Maximize Marketing Efforts

Now we have a team that’s readily available.

There’s trust on our end that Built Mighty has the best solution for whatever problem we bring to the table.

–– Kristin Gillespie, Director of Content Strategy,

About Visit Seattle

Visit Seattle is a private, non-profit destination marketing organization that connects more than 1,000 local businesses, products, and services with a lucrative visitor market.

The Challenge

PRIORITIZING WEB PROJECTS IN-HOUSE

As the primary tourism bureau for the city of Seattle, Visit Seattle uses their WordPress platform to speak to multiple audiences — domestic and international leisure travelers, tour operators, meeting and event planners, and media. That’s why the marketing team is constantly coming up with new ways to reach and engage users.

But Visit Seattle’s in-house developer, who was managed by the IT department and responsible to the entire organization, simply didn’t have the bandwidth to prioritize their requests. As a result, planning and executing on ideas that would drive growth became a serious challenge.

When that developer left in 2018, the team saw an opportunity to find a new development partner that could help them continuously build the website out with features, updates, and changes as needs arose.

All the marketing work and campaign launches we do are time sensitive.

But we would submit requests to our in-house dev and never even get a timeline. To not be a priority and have everything else stacked up on top, it just didn’t work.

–– Kristin Gillespie, Director of Content Strategy,

I wanted our site to be nimble enough to address whatever we wanted to address, when we wanted to address it.

It shouldn’t be static. It’s the vehicle to execute all our different ideas and priorities

–– David Newman, Creative Director,

The Solution

AN AVAILABLE TEAM WITH A FLEXIBLE RETAINER

After considering several other agencies, Visit Seattle knew they had found a reliable partner in Built Mighty.

Built Mighty got them started with a flexible 40-hour monthly retainer, which includes a dedicated account manager and bi-weekly check-ins, where the marketing team can bring up new ideas and pain points.

From there, Built Mighty proposes solutions and draws from a network of developers with differing expertise to assemble the right team for each project, whether it requires technical ability or a more customer-facing aesthetic touch.

Built Mighty has a great network at their fingertips.

Being able to pull the right person into each project is so valuable.

–– Kristin Gillespie, Director of Content Strategy,

Visit Seattle not only uses retainer hours to stay on top of small tasks:

Cleaning up the backend to address frequent downtime and slow load speed
Refining content blocks to give the team more flexibility during updates
Recommending and installing tools to increase accessibility for users

They can also roll over or increase hours to tackle larger projects:

An event console that auto-publishes data to the site calendar
An interactive map that uses custom data to show the number of steps between hotels and conference centers
UX wireframes to improve the customer journey for evergreen video content
The Results

SETTING PRIORITIES AND MEETING GOALS

With Built Mighty on board, Visit Seattle’s marketing team has gained the ability to plan ahead, meet their website goals, and stay on track with their marketing efforts.

The consistent check-ins have helped them prioritize. And knowing they have a dedicated team taking care of the website has freed up their time to focus on other aspects of the job, like the social media, publications, and collateral pieces that drive growth for the organization.

Visit Seattle has even been able to leverage their bank of hours with Built Mighty to execute on the web portion of projects initiated by their advertising agency, saving the organization tens of thousands of dollars in the process.

There are a million web developers that do WordPress

But the relationship of trust combined with the cadence of communication with Built Mighty is really what makes our jobs easier.

–– David Newman, Creative Director ,

We have so much more confidence.

Just knowing we have Built Mighty working on our website allows us to truly develop and move Visit Seattle forward

–– Kristin Gillespie, Director of Content Strategy,

Work with a team that feels like part of yours

We’ll keep your tech running smoothly in the background, so you can focus 100% on your business.

Your team is about to get a whole lot mightier.

If it sounds like we might be a good fit, send us a message. We’ll get back to you within 24 hours. And then we can hit the ground running.