How Switching to Built Mighty Helped Visit Seattle Maximize Marketing Efforts

SERVICES

WordPress Development

TECHNOLOGY

Custom Applications, WordPress

INDUSTRY

Tourism

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.

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

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

HOW WE DID IT

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.

We used Visit Seattle’s retainer hours to stay on top of small tasks like:

Cleaning up the backend to address frequent downtime and slow load speed

Building sub-domains for holiday websites and promotional landing pages

Refining content blocks to give the team more flexibility during updates

Recommending and installing tools to increase accessibility for users

We also used their roll-over hours or increase of monthly hours to tackle larger projects like:

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

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

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.

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