The Membee Directory As a Tourism Trip Planner
The Mark Twain Country website uses a Membee Directory very effectively as a tourism marketing tool. The Chemung County Chamber of Commerce, who manage this site, have gone far beyond just putting a directory widget on a page. They have turned the directory into a Trip Planner for visitors to the area. Trip Planner When …
The Mark Twain Country website uses a Membee Directory very effectively as a tourism marketing tool. The Chemung County Chamber of Commerce, who manage this site, have gone far beyond just putting a directory widget on a page. They have turned the directory into a Trip Planner for visitors to the area.
Trip Planner
When a visitor gets to the Mark Twain Country home page and clicks on one of the links like: Stay, Wine&Dine, or Explore they are presented with direct links to search results in the directory. If a visitor clicks on the Stay button and then chooses the Hotels, Motels and Inns link they are sent into the Membee directory right to a page that displays all of the listings with a Hotels/Motels category. This saves site visitors clicks and gets them to the information they are looking for really quickly. And fast is good when you are putting site visitors in touch with your members.
 Click through to a Hotel’s listing and from there visit the hotel’s website to book a room
| Visitors can:Use the “Add to My Trip Planner” link
Use the “Send a Message” link to send an email to the businesses directly to ask a question
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How does Chemung do it?
Effective categorization
Search based links behind the navigation menu
- Great Site Design
Thanks to Kamala Keely for giving us some insight into how the staff at Chemung County Chamber of Commerce manage the Mark Twain Country Tourism and Chemung County Chamber directories.
How do you keep the directory current?
| This is one of greatest things about the directory – it's integrated. We only update once in the member record and as long as that's current so is the directory. This saves us time. With our old website we had to manually enter the changes into our website. Now we get twice the work done in 1/2 the time. | “Now we get twice the work done in 1/2 the time.” |
Chemung has 2 directories – why?
We keep a directory for the Chamber of Commerce which is a business directory but for the tourism site we feature different tourism based businesses in multiple directories. All of our tourism partners fit into specific categories like "Family Fun" or “Mark Twain”. We do this because, for example, an Art Museum might want a listing in our Chamber directory but, in order to appear in the Mark Twain directory, they must have some connection with Mark Twain. The descriptive text that they post in the Chamber directory is more general but on the tourism site they post a description customized to talk about Mark Twain.
What kind of reaction have you had to your directories?
“The completely "tricked out" listing impresses our clients! “ | The completely "tricked out" listing impresses our clients! Our member services staff simply show prospective clients directories on our competitor's site and then show them an example of what they could have with us. That sells them. |
| I Love New York is one our tourism marketing partners and they said that ours was one of the most beautiful tourism sites that they had seen. The public has told us that they find it to be very user friendly. It blows away the competition with the amount of information each listing can contain. |
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Do you have any “Best Practice” ideas that you would like to share?
The Chemung Chamber holds information sessions for members to help them get the greatest benefit possible from their listings. We help them develop the listings to take advantage of the depth of the directory.
Has the change to your directory generated more site traffic?
| We have definitely seen a bump in traffic. We are doing a lot more business than competitive sites. There were large increases in views, usage and time spent on the site more than doubled. The directory statistics have been a great tool for our staff too. We pull stats every month and the stats help us to see what people are searching for. |
Do you have something you want to share with the Hive?
We love to share the great things our users are doing with Membee or on their websites. If you would like share your inspiration and be featured in an upcoming Membee blog just get in touch with us by emailing us at support@membee.com to tell us your story.