Saugatuck Douglas Convention & Visitor's Bureau
Saugatuck, Michigan is truly the hidden gem of the Great Lakes. Known as America's first inclusive destination, it's the go-to summer retreat for travelers from Chicago, Detroit and beyond. With its stunning beaches, sprawling sand dunes and an impressive number of James Beard Award-winning restaurants, Saugatuck offers an array of experiences that attract visitors all year round. The Saugatuck Douglas Area Convention and Visitors Bureau recognized untapped potential in promoting the destination beyond its peak summer season.
Rigid Templates Were Limiting Year-Round Tourism Growth
Despite Saugatuck's charm across all seasons, the CVB's digital presence wasn't capturing the area's full potential. The website suffered from inflexible, generic templates that made it nearly impossible to showcase seasonal experiences or drive off-season visitation. Every content update required workarounds, broken event links went untracked and the editorial team struggled with a clunky system that wasn't built for their specific tourism marketing needs.
More critically, the site focused heavily on summer activities, missing opportunities to promote shoulder season attractions like autumn festivals, cozy winter getaways and spring outdoor adventures. For a destination competing with other Great Lakes tourism markets, this seasonal blind spot was limiting revenue potential and failing to showcase Saugatuck's true year-round appeal.
Strategic Content Architecture with Seasonal Focus
Working in partnership with creative agency Concept A, we took a strategic approach to transform both the user experience and content management capabilities. While Concept A handled visual design, our team focused on user experience strategy and technical development to solve the CVB's operational challenges.
We began by conducting discovery sessions with the CVB team to understand their content workflows and seasonal marketing goals. This revealed that the biggest business impact would come from empowering them to promote experiences across all four seasons while streamlining their daily content management tasks.
Our strategy centered on three key innovations: flexible content templates that could adapt to their specific needs, a dynamic seasonal navigation system and location-aware features that would enhance the visitor experience both before and during their trips.
Key Solutions That Transformed Tourism Marketing
Flexible WordPress CMS with Smart Templates: We migrated from the rigid, generic platform to WordPress with the intuitive Block Editor, giving the editorial team complete control over content creation. We carefully mapped existing content while introducing expanded structured data fields for operating hours, locations and special events. This enabled dynamic features like scrollable maps and proximity-based recommendations.
Dynamic Seasonal Content Strategy: We created dedicated seasonal landing pages and implemented a robust tagging system that automatically curates and promotes relevant content throughout the year. The new seasonal navigation ensures visitors planning summer trips also discover spring hiking, fall festivals and winter retreats, maximizing year-round booking opportunities.
Location-Aware Mobile Experience: We developed the innovative "I'm in Saugatuck" feature that provides real-time, location-specific content to mobile users actually visiting the destination. This includes up-to-the-minute event listings, weather forecasts and timely local updates, creating a more connected and spontaneous visitor experience.
Measurable Growth in Engagement and Seasonal Interest
The transformation delivered immediate improvements across key metrics. Overall content engagement increased by 160%, demonstrating stronger visitor interest and interaction with the site's offerings. Average engagement time per user improved by 11.8%, indicating that visitors are finding more relevant, compelling content.
The seasonal strategy proved particularly effective, with the new fall landing page generating significant traffic that previously didn't exist. This represents new opportunities for off-season bookings and revenue that the destination couldn't capture before.
The improved content management system eliminated the daily frustrations that were slowing down the CVB team's marketing efforts. They can now quickly update event information, track broken links and create compelling seasonal campaigns without technical barriers, allowing them to focus on what matters most: promoting Saugatuck's unique attractions.
What This Means for Destination Marketers
If your tourism website is stuck promoting only peak-season activities, or if content management feels like fighting against your platform instead of working with it, you're missing revenue opportunities in shoulder seasons. The key is building flexible systems that can adapt to your destination's unique seasonal rhythms and empower your team to market year-round experiences effectively.
