Whim Digital

I was hired by Whim Hospitality in 2018 to oversee the organization’s digital marketing efforts. The company was especially excited about modernizing their efforts with SEM and PPC campaigns. Upon arrival, I learned that the company’s websites were running on an outdated ExpressionEngine CMS that had been designed five years previously with a marketing team unskilled at digital. The original site was incredibly dated and lacked modern capabilities, such as the ability to build a custom landing page in house.

SEO/SEM Strategy

The digital infrastructure was not prepared for any kind of paid digital marketing campaign and it was recommended that new sites be designed, and that they be migrated to WordPress CMS.

This gave the organization more ability to create custom niche landing pages in-house that would help its SEO ranking for strategic search terms. Rather than stating that Whim Catering can prepare Indian cuisine, the website can now build a custom landing page to improve a search engine’s quality score for search terms such as Indian Catering, Tandoori Chicken and Naan.

Customer Pathway

I was also lead on creating the customer pathing for our digital experience. So much of the original site was trying to be “all things to all people” that web viewers were getting lost in the barrage of long blocks of copy and scrolling past photo galleries to find the one answer they came for. Oftentimes, a site visitor would get lost in the clutter and leave the site before reaching a desired CTA. For example, a customer for florals had to scan past blocks of content on catering in order to find the floral content they sought.

This new system optimize a customer experience in as few clicks as possible. It also needed to be built with the ability to scale and respond to the business’ future needs, as had not be done in the past.

Ecommerce

On the previous site, Whim Hospitality has no point of sale. It’s main purpose was to serve as digital brand awareness, with “call us for details” as the only call-to-action. This was problematic, especially due to the the customer behavior of our rentals division.

Many of its customers chose their rentals vendor by browsing an online catalog of rental inventory. Unfortunately, Whim did not have the technical capabilities to make this digital transition, instead it put a word document online with its pricing, but no photos to compare and shop.

I worked with the tech platform that managed our inventory (Point of Rentals) and contracted web developer to create an ecommerce portal on the new Whim Hospitality website that created a real-time shopping experience for customers. This inventory represents more than 12,000 items and more than $10M in value.