MeetingSteward.com delivers company event intelligence through tools and consulting services for anyone planning a company or association meeting.

Co-founder Dan Litvinoff approached Growth Panel six months ago with a simple question: “Can the Growth Panel tools and marketing process guide my team and I — corporate meeting planning experts but novice marketers — through the process of building a website from scratch and transitioning our entire business online?”

The Journey

Dan and his colleagues were not only starting from scratch with the website & internet marketing; they also needed to build a brand. And they weren’t interested in hiring a mom & pop web-designer to create brochureware — a tombstone website; they needed a well-architected storefront that would transition their lead flow from offline outbound to online inbound.

The process was lengthy, but they were willing to move slowly to get it right. His team started with Competitive Positioning. “The meeting planning industry is separated into four sets of competitors: a handful of big service companies, a handful of websites similar to Orbitz and Expedia for making reservations, the hotels themselves, and millions of mom and pop meeting planning consultants.”

“The Competitive Positioning module helped us clearly define the market segments we’re pursing and create focus around our positioning strategy and the mindshare we need to capture,” Dan commented. “It was an eye-opening experience. Most of this information was floating around in our heads, but there’s tremendous value in organizing it into the right sequence to develop a strong positioning strategy that guides our actions and decisions.”

The Meeting Steward team then shaped their brand strategy, creating their brand architecture, their personality traits, their brand means and their brand promise. “We always thought of a brand as a logo and colors. Since we’re a B2B company, we learned how important it is to define how we’d like to convey our brand to the market at all touch points, and more importantly, what we need to do day in and day out to make that a reality.”

After completing their brand strategy, the team completed the creative briefs using the Copywriting and Graphic Design module to deliver to Growth Panel’s partner Identity Studios for creation.

The balance of the Meeting Steward teams’ work focused on three modules: Messaging, Websites and Search Marketing. “The Website module was incredibly detailed. It was a bit intimidating at first because none of us have designed a website’s architecture before. On-page SEO is very important to us. We think of it as our foundation. If it’s strong, all the off-page SEO work will provide exponential benefits over time. We spent a lot of time determining our keywords and working them into the URL structure and page content. After that foundation was complete, the team at Identity Studios delivered the impactful design we were looking for. Then it was all about the messaging and writing the content,” Dan continued.

After his team completed the entire website spec and signed off on the website design from Identity Studios, they used the Vendor Selection module to find an independent programmer, Claire Williams, to code the site.

Results

“Because of Growth Panel, we were able to create the website we envisioned for a fraction of the cost the full-service vendors were quoting. Granted, we performed a lot of the work ourselves, but I viewed it as an investment that will continue to produce returns. A week after go-live our WebsiteGrader ranking was 77, which was a higher score than most of the web-development firms that were quoting us thousands of dollars for the on-page SEO work. I honestly think we now know more about SEO than they do.”

“There’s simply no substitute for the power of the Growth Panel tool set, the marketing process and the depth of the modules. Well, maybe there is, but we didn’t have the budget to hire a six figure marketing director, a big creative agency and a quality SEO firm.”

“Now we have much of that intelligence in-house, so it’s an asset to our company.  The Competitive Positioning module alone delivered far greater value than the entire cost of an annual subscription. For the next 6 months, we’ll focus on the Search Marketing and Marketing Campaigns modules to drive traffic to the site. We’ll pepper in some activities from Publicity, Direct Mail and possibly some Business Development.”

“If you would have told me 12 months ago that my team would be able to handle all these activities in-house, and handle them well, I’d have said that you’re crazy. Now it’s reality, and the Growth Panel tools enabled us to accomplish this.”

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 22nd, 2010 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.