August 19, 2008

Alpine Meadows and Homewood Mountain Resort Website Launches

Two more out the door!

Drawing on our collective experience with destination and ski resort marketing, we are pleased to bring you the recently redesigned web sites of Alpine Meadows and Homewood Mountain Resort. While both properties are located in Lake Tahoe and owned by JMA Ventures, these mountains possess their own unique set of attributes, attract different demographics, and project distinct personalities akin to their branding platforms. 

Scope:

All Twelve Horses website projects begin with fundamental questions that define the scope of the project:

• What are their strengths and weaknesses?
• What are the unique differentiators?
• Who is the target audience?
• What does the website need to achieve?

We combine the answers to those questions with the primary objectives such as:

• Increase Lift Ticket Sales
• Grow the Customer Database
• Build Participation in Clubs and Ski Schools
• Achieve More interaction with Social Media Marketing

These initial steps were taken to ensure a cohesive strategy and a finished product that was properly aligned with the client’s expectations and their branding guidelines.

Branding & Design

Generally, the client has built the base for their brand before pursuing a web project, but website design and online marketing strategies often help them refine or refresh that brand platform as they further position themselves for the web.

For instance, with the Alpine Meadows website we focused on giving the website a real personality. It is designed to help the visitor feel comfortable. Other competing ski resort sites are often very boxy, heavy on promotions, and only rely on photography for positioning. We instead centered the site and used graphical elements and labeling to support the primary objectives. Alpine’s brand is about being authentic and pure and even a little rough around the edges. We hope the design communicates that it is a skier and snowboarder’s mountain first and a resort second.

Homewood’s positioning is decidedly different. The design really reflects the move towards more of a resort community, and if you visit their website you can learn more about their Master Plan. But as you can see the site design is clean, accessible, and supportive of the primary objectives that were defined. If you were familiar with their old website, you will immediately notice the heightened sophistication in combination with earthy tones indicative of its mountain environment.

Strategy & Functionality

Beyond the design, we were able to re-purpose much of the strategy and functionality to save the client time and money. In other words, the client did not have to pay the same amount for the second site. We were able to build efficiency into the project by, for instance, making use of similar applications and giving administrative control over both websites through one single content management system.

Beyond being able to manage the templates and content on both sites, as well as apply administrative control, both properties make use of the following:

• Multimedia Gallery Application that pull content from Flickr and YouTube.
• Snow Report Application that is prepared to send email and fax condition reports via MessageMaker to participating media, partners, and websites.
• Calendar Application for upcoming events.
• Press Release Application for news.

Online Marketing:

Both Alpine and Homewood make use of similar online marketing strategies by:

• Managing customer information and pushing relevant messages through our multi-channel marketing platform.
• Using blogs to project personality, feature additional content, and assist with search engine optimization.
• Interacting with new audiences outside their traditional channels by participating in social networks such as:
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Facebook

Many of us here at Twelve Horses are already getting excited with the prospect of new snow coming soon to both our Reno and Salt Lake offices. When we are not making turns, we will be actively engaged in the progress clients like Alpine and Homewood achieve through the combination of our online marketing and messaging products and services.

See you on the hill!

Posted in Client Announcements, Reno-Tahoe, Service Industry, Social, Travel & Tourism, Web & SEO