Wisconsin Travel Best Bets
CASE STUDY: Brand Development | Digital Marketing | Content Creation
Project Overview
Many of our clients benefit from their participation in Wisconsin Travel Best Bets, a cooperative marketing group that allows destinations throughout the state to partner together to test outside-the-box approaches to marketing and stretch their dollars to reach larger audiences. We established Wisconsin Travel Best Bets shortly after P+B launched, and in the years since, it’s proven to be a valuable tool for us and our clients alike.
01/ Brand Development
A one-stop shop for travel info
We have always considered Wisconsin Travel Best Bets as a go-to destination for state travel information, and it has been a good way for us get the word out about our clients. Wisconsin Travel Best Bets allows us to pool resources to try new things that we can then implement for our clients (we have done photo and video contests, big giveaways, regional mailers, Instagram ad campaigns, and more). Recently, we wanted to make Wisconsin Travel Best Bets even more helpful to our clients, website visitors, and e-newsletter subscribers, so we launched an extensive rebrand that touched on all aspects of the organization.
We developed Wisconsin Travel Best Bets more than 15 years ago as a way for our destination clients to cooperatively attract new travelers and media attention while pooling their resources. The marketing vehicles have evolved over the years but allowed us to stay in front of travel and marketing trends. It's another example of how P+B effectively uses partnerships in destination marketing.
Susanne Thiede-Barnet
Principal
02/ Digital Marketing
Reorganizing our website
Our Wisconsin Travel Best Bets website hadn’t seen significant changes in a few years, so we decided to do a full redesign to make the site more visually impressive and much easier to use for visitors. This included coming up with an eye-catching new look for Wisconsin Travel Best Bets as a whole, updating hundreds of articles (and writing new ones), and using some of the stunning photography we’ve shot for clients over the years.
Using themes to highlight destinations
We restructured the site and made it easier for visitors to find what they were looking for—we categorized articles into distinct themes like Outdoor Recreation, Food & Drink, and Attractions. Each of these categories had more specific subcategories (for instance, Beaches & Boating, Wisconsin Favorites, and Art & Museums), allowing us to incorporate many different client destinations into a single article, thus expanding our clients’ reach.
Client-specific content
We also realized we had an untapped resource of in-depth content about our clients: the articles we had written over the years for our client websites and e-newsletters. Our talented website designers developed a clever way to share articles across multiple sites on our servers, and we combed through hundreds of articles find the best ones to share on the new Wisconsin Travel Best Bets site, which gave our client sites more exposure as well.
Trip ideas, events & more
In conjunction with the new website, we restructured our bimonthly e-newsletters for Wisconsin Travel Best Bets. The newsletters feature a lead story, which incorporates multiple partner destinations, and highlight upcoming events and attractions across the state—not just in our client destinations. Another key feature of the newsletters, Trip Ideas, comes from the same section of the redesigned website, which features itinerary-based articles.
Wisconsin Travel Best Bets gives us a chance to play around with fun projects and designs that might be a little outside a single client’s brand or budget. It’s also a great way to bring awareness and exposure to our client destinations by helping them reach a larger audience.
Jessi Johnson
Lead Graphic Designer + Developer
03/ Content Creation
Helpful content for visitors
There was a lot of copy to work with on the website, as we had more than a decade’s worth of posts to choose from. We cataloged and updated articles covering the themes we thought were the most important and added dozens of articles that had originally appeared on our partner destination sites. The new content we created was meant to catch the attention of visitors, with headlines like “Where to find some of the state’s best pizza” and “Our travel experts pick the Northwoods’ best adventures.”
