Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau

The Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau (GMCVB) aims to increase travel demand to the region and maximize benefits for the local community, including boosting local industries and quality of life. For that, the organization wanted to modernize its website, improve functionality, streamline API calls, and improve performance. Kentico Gold Partner Ntara was responsible for the technology and development of the new miamiandbeaches.com and Miles Partnership agency created the design.  

Challenges

GMCVB promotes its partners (e.g., hotels and restaurants) to people considering work and travel in Miami. To do so, they need accurate, reliable, and data-rich content. The website had to integrate with a customized CRM and nearly two dozen other systems.  

The GMCVB site was already on an older version of Kentico. The organization wanted to remain on the platform because of its highly regarded content management capabilities but needed to future-proof its solution and use digital marketing features, mainly personalization. “It was an opportunity to start from scratch, conducting research before doing any design or development,” says Briar DeHaven, Senior Account Director at Ntara.

Solution

Xperience by Kentico, the new hybrid headless digital experience platform, turned out to be the perfect fit thanks to its:  

• Super-fast admin interface
• Future-proof architecture that would grow with their needs
• .NET 8 and the latest technology
• Digital marketing capabilities

Ntara cooperated with the Kentico Customer Success team and used the new digital experience platform, Xperience by Kentico, to build a 3,500-page site. The project took 18 months to complete and became the first large-scale deployment on this platform. The site serves four persona groups and allows for navigation switching between "leisure" and "meeting planner" site visitors.  

Kentico's flexibility enables the marketing team to work efficiently with content and to leverage persona-based marketing automation and personalization features when the time comes. The in-house team can customize the improved user experience to reach the right audiences with the right message at the right time.

Result

GMCVB’s website is now faster and more responsive. It can receive code updates without being taken down for maintenance. Hosting costs reduced dramatically, and the number of API calls dropped —significantly improving search speed and overall speed of the backend site. For example, the time of a SimpleView data import from the CRM has decreased from five hours to five minutes.

The regular new feature refreshes of the DXP bring new ways for GMCVB to deliver on its mission to maximize economic impact to the community, ensure industry resiliency, and elevate the residents’ quality of life. “We are so happy that our website miamiandbeaches.com is powered by Xperience by Kentico,” said Josie Llado, AVP, Digital Marketing at GMVCB. “The fast, intuitive user interface lets us manage our content with ease and connect with our community better.”

The marketing team can now add new themes to the website without the help of developers, which results in more consistency in design and better overall governance of the site. Kentico’s marketing features will allow GMCVB to reach their different persona audiences with personalized messaging, increasing the performance of their website and resulting in happier customers.