Visit Norway: Meetings & Events

About the project

VisitNorway is a website that promotes Norway as a travel destination by offering engaging content across 15 languages. The website brings millions of visitors to Norway, and in 2016 was awarded the world's best tourism site. 

NoA Ignite has been Visit Norway’s digital partner since 2011. Innovation Norway (the official Norwegian governmental body that runs VisitNorway website) chose NoA Ignite PL to work on upgrading and expanding “Meetings & Events”, the B2B section of the Visit Norway website. The website targets business representatives and event organisers from all over the world, by presenting the different Norwegian MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Congresses & Events) services.

Thanks to our expertise in content creation and optimisation, and UX design, we were able to deliver a content-rich website that would bring the “Meetings & Events” in line with VisitNorway’s strategy. Now, the “Meetings & Events” website gives a clear overview of all elements of Norway’s MICE tourism industry and detailed information about how to organise meetings and events. It also offers plenty of inspiration why you should choose Norway as the destination of your event. 

The challenge

Although some of the pages related to MICE tourism industry were already available on VisitNorway, the “Meetings & Events” section lacked search engine visibility, clear structure and content strategy. It was not very intuitive, and users found it difficult to look for the information they needed. VisitNorway struggled to attract the B2B event organisers through their website and this is why they decided to give it an upgrade. 

The client was looking for a cost-effective solution that could be easily implemented within three to four months. This would allow an early validation with the users and leave room for potential iterations afterwards. The solution also had to be flexible and easily scalable, as “Meetings & Events” would continue to grow in the near future.

Our approach

Before embarking on the project, NoA Ignite PL ran an audit that resulted in some key findings and recommendations for content strategy and for building the new “Meetings & Events” website. The deliverables of the audit included tone of voice, target group analysis, information architecture, key user flows and key messages for each business segment and target groups. The audit also helped to identify the six key page templates that were already in use in the SimpleView CMS, and could be reused in the process of building the MICE section. This approach helped a lot to deliver a solution quickly. The audit also included some SEO recommendations, as the client aimed at increasing their visibility in the Google search engine.

Thanks to the audit and our expertise in the SimpleView CMS, we were able to deliver a fully-functional and cost-effective MVP of the website within just four months from the start of the project. Such a short time-to-market was possible thanks to the information architecture and templates that were already prepared in the audit recommendations. This gave the team time and space to mainly focus on strategy and content creation. 

The audit also resulted in some ideas for further development of the MVP, such as a dedicated chatbot, personalised content and an event planner. The flexibility of the MVP allows to implement these easily into the MVP at any given time. 

Collaboration

The key to the project success was a close collaboration with the client with regard to content creation and review. To achieve that, some basic processes were established that helped both teams work efficiently, such as: 

1. defining the workflow - from drafting the brief to publishing the final page in SimpleView, 
2. applying an iterative approach to content creation (content adjusted to the business needs and input from the client), 
3. setting up weekly meetings with the client team, and
4. coordinating the work with good project management practices and tools such as Jira and Sharepoint. 

These processes facilitated communication between both teams. They allowed to mitigate any potential risks and made the whole content creation process a lot smoother. 

Result

Another main success factor of the project was that every idea that came out of the audit took into account the existing technical features. This helped to roll out a fully-functional MVP within just four months. 

The new “Meetings & Events” website tries to inspire the users and put them on the right track to organise a business event in Norway. Its structure gives easy access to the most relevant info, such as: 

• Why Norway (general info on Norway and events organization)
• Corporate and associations (organisation of business events)
• Sports and cultural events (organisation of sports and cultural events)
• Case studies (examples of all sorts of events organised in Norway). 

The users can also easily find other information such as listings of destinations, venues and partner organisations operating in MICE industry, as well as media resources and contact info.

Thanks to inspiring copy and beautiful visuals of Norwegian landscapes and sights, the website makes it hard not to consider Norway for your next business event.