hostinvaughan.ca
Hostinvaughan.ca is a microsite developed by Tourism Vaughan, the City of Vaughan’s destination marketing organization, that is targeted towards planners in the meetings, events, conferences and sports sector. The site includes event venue and supplier listings and information on the City’s hosting services. The purpose of the project is to equip planners with information and reasons to select Vaughan as their event destination to drive overnight stays. Direct impacts include direct spending, jobs spanning the planning to production and execution of events, delegate travel spending. Indirect impacts could include venue-specific items such as energy used. The Municipal Accommodations Tax is collected on each hotel stay hotel and growth occupancy from events will positively impact the MAT collection so we can continue to market and grow the tourism sector in Vaughan.
Hostinvaughan.ca is used to present Tourism Vaughan as the destination marketing organization to meeting planners who will be able to use Tourism Vaughan’s services when looking for a location to host a meeting or event. To ensure that we present a meetings-ready destination, we have included a comprehensive venue listing, supplier listing, reasons to host in Vaughan and information on what makes the city an excellent hosting location. The expected outcomes (immediate or future) are to generate meeting leads for the destination where planners will use Vaughan’s businesses for their event.
The target audience is meeting, conference and event planners for corporate and non-profit events including sports events. All of the content on hostinvaughan.ca is written and organized with this audience in mind. In particular, we understand this is a busy audience and they want to get to content as efficiently as possible. The new website has allowed us to not only significantly improve our web presence but advance it to focus on the B2B side of the work we do in tourism.
This project has generated over 36,000 users since its inception in Fall 2021. The majority of users are generated through organic search, and are from the Toronto area. There is future economic impact to be enjoyed as opportunities for leads to come through via the RFP tool or through planners directly contacting us.
One of our biggest obstacles was figuring out how to balance the audience’s needs and differentiate hostinvaughan.ca from visitvaughan.ca. To keep messaging clear, we kept all leisure and visitor-related content at visitvaughan.ca.
Another obstacle was figuring out how to best organize the information in a way that is easy for users to find and navigate. We worked together with our web developers to categorize listings of event venues and develop menu options that would make the user experience as smooth as possible.
Hostinvaughan.ca is a website that provides opportunities for local venues and suppliers to be highlighted and showcased to planners, while showcasing everything the City of Vaughan has to offer business guests. And with the opportunity to submit RFPs, along with the advertising campaign put towards amplifying the site’s reach, lead to this being a sustainable site yielding desired results.
We consider the Hostinvaughan.ca website worthy because:
- From the very beginning, we were uncompromising in our pursuit to build a comprehensive, easily navigable, and beautiful website for our business audience.
- We integrated interactive customer experience throughout the website.
- It has a clean and bold look that showcases our visual identity in interesting ways.
