Ocean Media Group transforms digital business with two dedicated Affino sector-focused hubs

Ocean Media Group (OMG) is evenly shared across two very specific sectors - Housing and Weddings / Bridal. They were looking for a unified platform which they could deploy across all their digital properties both for the front end and the audience CRM, and which would harmonize the running of those digital businesses, while improving on scalability, manageability and productivity.

OMG was looking to transform the way it rolls out events, whilst also creating the best brand hubs, digital publications and audience engagement. This also needed to start happening fast as the first events to run on Affino would need their promotional sites up in less than one month.

Collaboration

Affino worked closely with the OMG digital, design and bridal teams to launch the first of the bridal sites, namely the London Bridal Show.

OMG brought to the table the design which was already quite tightly defined for how the desktop version of the London Bridal Show site should look. Affino then transformed that to a fully rounded responsive design which could be rolled out on Affino with the minimum of adjustment.

One aspect that was clearly going to need to be custom-developed was the Bridal Directory - since Affino had no core components which at the time exactly matched the design and functionality being considered for the bridal event directories.

The Affino and OMG teams effectively tag-teamed one another with quick handovers of firstly designs, then content from OMG to Affino, which in turn led to the roll out of fully responsive Skins and initial site structure. Next Affino trained up the OMG team for populating the ongoing and additional content after having done all the initial content import and population.

Once the initial site was built and launched, Affino moved on to training and assisting OMG, whilst OMG took the lead on designing and building all the following event sites. The second site was broadly in place less than one week after the first, and did not take long to adjust for the eventual launch less than a couple of weeks after work commenced on it.

Solution

OMG has been able to drive almost the entirety of the promotional events sites using just core Affino, and by using the existing team resources which were already in place - with just a little additional concerted Affino training and consultancy.

It has been highly impressive how quickly the OMG team went from observing the initial site build to rolling out sites entirely in-house.

The main development for the custom bridal directory templates was a two step process. The first was to make sure it worked great on the London Bridal Show site, and then Affino effectively ’packaged’ the templates so that they could be easily used with new styling across any number of bridal sites.

The Affino team has also developed a direct integration with the on-site event booking partner platform so that when users register on the events they’re both registered within Affino, with all the benefits of Affino’s sales and marketing automation and analysis, and the details are pre-filled on the event booking platform for a seamless customer journey. The integration then round-trips the registration to trigger conversion events in Affino for full sales funnelling across multiple different funnels. This was also packaged and can be deployed by the OMG team across all their sites.

Success

The focus was originally on the Bridal side of the business, but emphasis is now starting to shift more towards transitioning the various housing digital properties. The following 7 sites have already been rolled out on Affino, with an almost equal amount being progressed currently:

www.thelondonbridalshow.co.uk
www.theharrogatebridalshow.co.uk
www.whitegallery.com
awards.bridalbuyer.com
www.cihhousing.com
www.homesevent.co.uk
www.stationerymatters.news

OMG is nowadays rolling out events sites as needed on Affino with minimal involvement from the Affino team. This is going to evolve as the gears start to shift to launching bigger and more significant sites on Affino, with more and more activities being managed in Affino - including all the audience management, online registrations, digital messaging, seminars and ticket sales. All of which will be debuting in imminent upcoming sites.