The evolution of Visit Flanders
Such organizational challenges can’t be solved by just introducing another new tool. It requires strong governance, great teamwork, and efficient tooling to support the teams in meeting their goals.
Visit Flanders: a multi-branded DXP
A powerful platform for Visit Flanders to carry their vision, enforce the ultimate visitor experience and give the team the tools to grow at their own speed.
The Case
Challenge
A fragmented website architecture consisting of different technologies with no overarching architectural vision.
An inconsistent visitor experience and suboptimal decentralized management.
Solution
Dropsolid Experience Cloud as a DXP so their teams can build, maintain and evolve their digital experiences for external stakeholders on one central infrastructure.
Result
The switch to a multi-brand platform with Dropsolid Experience Cloud.
Different teams can now grow their digital maturity at their own speed, without losing the centralized IT management.
The fragmented website architecture of Visit Flanders
Over the years, different teams and departments had each created a wide variety of websites and web services (front-ends), providing all kinds of information (from different back-end systems) in different formats (some middleware) to a wide range of stakeholders. This made Visit Flanders struggle with a fragmented website architecture consisting of different systems with no overarching structure.
An inconsistent visitor experience and a suboptimal decentralized management
Because of the fragmented architecture, the visitor experience on their platforms was highly inconsistent. Next to that, there was the high cost on the total organization in terms of subscription and hosting costs, staff training, maintenance, and security. Visit Flanders decided to start a search for a flexible and scalable system that:
- is visitor-centric while serving a wide variety of stakeholders,
- offers consistent digital experiences to all stakeholders on multiple channels,
- allows different departments to create and maintain their own websites and email campaigns without depending too much on developers.
Dropsolid Experience Cloud as preferred DXP
Visit Flanders selected Dropsolid Experience Cloud as their Digital Experience Platform (DXP) that teams can use to build, maintain and evolve their digital experiences for external stakeholders on one central infrastructure.
It is integrated in the digital ecosystem of Visit Flanders via a middleware that allows for the internal applications to use the same back-end systems such as the CRM.
A multi-brand platform with Dropsolid Experience Cloud
The team of Visit Flanders, together with Dropsolid Digital Agency, launched www.toerismevlaanderen.be as the first of many websites on the platform. We also migrated the entire multi-brand email marketing programs to Dropsolid Experience Cloud’s marketing automation tool, Mautic, using rebranded and responsive email templates in just 9 weeks time.
A centralized IT management while teams grow at their own speed
At Visit Flanders, the different teams now grow their digital maturity at their own speed, without losing the centralized IT management. Since they’re working with Dropsolid Experience Cloud, different teams are creating sites, landing pages, lead funnels, and email campaigns. While one team is just building informative websites on the Drupal CMS, another team is experimenting with personalized digital experiences across multiple sites and email campaigns.
We can speed up our time to value with new sites, site evolutions, and campaigns. All teams can benefit from the re-usable components and templates, a central email marketing platform, personalization engine and Digital Asset Management solution, etc.
The result after 3 months in the project?
- 200.000+ emails were sent in the first months.
- 50+ content editors are collaborating on the platform.
- Visit Flanders is now in control of all its websites running on a secure central platform, allowing them to control, optimize and forecast IT budgets.
IT benefits
Keeping an overview of all websites and applications.
Adding more integrations over time.
Ensuring all external business applications meet up to compliance and security standards.
Continuing to work in an agile way on their IT roadmap driven by just a few central platforms.
Decreasing the TCO of their digital ecosystem and keep the maintenance costs under control.
Local team benefits
Growing their digital maturity at their own pace.
Re-using central components and templates.
Building, maintaining and growing their own sites.
Launching email campaigns (with Mautic).
Central marketing team benefits
Keeping an eye on analytics across different subsites.
Collecting deep visitor insights across different websites.
Leveraging the collected insights to the local teams for personalization (with Unomi) across all sites and channels.
Ability to add more digital channels to the marketing mix over time such as sms, mobile, chatbots, etc.
About Visit Flanders
Visit Flanders wants to reinforce the positive power of tourism.
We do this as a strategy and knowledge-driven government department. We help Flanders flourish as an innovative and high-quality travel destination that inspires residents, entrepreneurs, and visitors. How do we achieve this? By informing and supporting all above stakeholders according to the principles of traveling to tomorrow.
Our ultimate goals? To become a flourishing destination.
