The Challenge
Valef Yachts, founded in 1969, is a pioneer in the Luxury Yacht Charter Industry in the Mediterranean. The digital realm has given rise to an ever-growing tide of new competition encroaching on Valef’s business. The client commissioned me to redesign their outdated website, help with the problem of decline in search ranking positions, and to develop a new overall digital marketing plan to better compete in the current marketplace.
Digital Strategy
Creative Direction
UX/UI Website ReDesign
Publishing Platform UX/UI Design
Content Strategy Implementation
The Approach
Understanding our client’s business and its competitors is the first step in the path to a project’s success. Initial market research helped us drive the conversation to better assess the marketplace and more clearly identify Valef Yachts’ position in it. Through a series of interviews and collaborative immersion workshops with the client, we identified the opportunity to position Valef above the sea of newcomers with authoritative content and production values on par with the megayacht players in the space but with a more personalized boutique feel. The new positioning creates an aspirational yet attainable brand image appealing to a broader customer base. We also determined that celebrating Valef Yachts’ brand heritage was an essential differentiator and we set out to reinforce the valuable role nautical knowledge, experience, attention to detail and personalized customer care plays in chartering luxury yacht vacations on the Mediterranean Sea.
Content Strategy & UX/UI Design System
Workshops with the client helped define target customer personas and mapped out their user journeys to develop the brand story in a manner that speaks to each and every target group. Wireframing was instrumental in working out the site structure and content-flow to take users seamlessly through the entire search and discovery process. Lead capture opportunities are peppered throughout the redesigned site’s (14) page templates and dozens of reusable components.
The site’s “Yachts” section features over 100 Luxury Yachts for Charter with day rates ranging from £1,000/day to over €114,286/day. The Filtering mechanism offers a wide range of options for different Target customers. The new site is fully responsive and optimized for mobile.
Increasing Online Visibility & Site Ranking with a Data-driven Content Marketing Strategy
We developed the “Valef Travel Guide” to provide a platform to; increase domain authority in the category, to fuel the outreach and backlinking efforts and to help attract more traffic through organic search and other content marketing tactics. We achieved this by identifying and ranking keywords and search terms for the yacht charter industry. We created a laundry list of queries & topics based on traffic volume, competition levels, and where users are in the buying cycle to create content that is topically siloed and designed to capture the specific search queries. From that data, we identified search parameters for the different target customers and applied importance and value for particular keywords, phrases, and groups of words. We then developed a content calendar strategy to use as a guide for creating and publishing relevant, keyword rich content over time to power up the new digital marketing plan and increase the flow of traffic into the Valef digital sales funnel.
Visit the New Valef Yachts Website >
View the Valef Travel Guide Publishing Platform>
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