A place of innovation, energy, and culture, Manchester wants for nothing. With its two newly launched sites — Visit Manchester and Meet in Manchester — this city-region welcomes all visitors, whether they’re here to explore at their leisure or get down to business.
Manchester: the Place for Everyone
Renowned the world over as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, 2024 has already seen Manchester named as a must-see destination for visitors around the globe. While its heritage is certainly a draw, Manchester offers so much more than a static glimpse into the past. Indeed, the city centre is a place brimming with museums, galleries, bars and restaurants while the Greater Manchester area — a place of market towns, green space and traditional pubs — is a bucolic antidote to this intense urban buzz. What’s more, the region’s excellent transport links enable all visitors — be they leisure travellers, event planners or their delegates — the chance to move easily through this cityscape and all that it has to offer.
Marketing Manchester: Many Routes, One Goal
By redeveloping both of these sites, Marketing Manchester — the city-region’s Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO) — sought to satisfy an ultimate goal of raising the profile of the Manchester area at both a domestic and an international level. While Visit Manchester and Meet in Manchester — the sites which deliver the agency’s tourism activities and its convention bureau services, respectively — were still enabling the DMO to undertake its digital activities, both were last redeveloped in 2017 and in need of an update.
In refreshing the technology and design of these sites, long-time Simpleview client Marketing Manchester was looking to continue its goal of increasing digital activity in order to drive visits and economic benefit into the city. By undertaking this project, Marketing Manchester aimed to be recognised as a world-leading DMO, becoming the definitive Greater Manchester organisation for any area tourism, hospitality and leisure businesses seeking to increase their domestic and international reach. Additionally, their aim was that these redeveloped sites would serve as platforms from which to launch global marketing campaigns and channels to deliver income via a sustainable economic model.
As such, the DMO sought to build a set of websites to deliver the kind of innovative, inspirational and cutting edge digital activity to inspire people around the world to visit Greater Manchester. But in addition to this, these refreshed sites would also need to meet the DMO’s crucial objectives of increasing visitor traffic numbers in the year on year sense.
Simpleview Functionality: Meeting the Brief, Staying in Sync
In order to meet this brief, the redeveloped Meet in Manchester and Visit Manchester sites — launched in late 2023 and early 2024, respectively — were built using a wide span of functionality. As well as using Simpleview‘s CMS and DMS, a number of additional modules — including booking integrations, CrowdRiff and AudioEye — were implemented during this complex build process to deliver not just two new sites, but two new sites that are perfectly in sync with Marketing Manchester’s overall aims and objectives.
Offering his comments on the development of both Visit Manchester and Meet in Manchester, Stuart Aitken, Head of Digital at Marketing Manchester, said, “The sites look fantastic and everything has just been easy from start to finish.”
