The CEDA team is incredibly excited to showcase the new look of our regional website, ManawatuNZ.co.nz, a major project that has been under development for the last few months.
Those who call Palmerston North city and Manawatū home know it is the best place to live: we’re a warm and welcoming community, known for incredibly friendly locals and a perfect balance of urban diversity and rural roots.
Having an alluring regional website with beautiful imagery, a good user-experience and enticing information on what to see and do, where to eat and stay, as well as the hidden gems of the region, is one of the most powerful marketing tools the region has. For someone who has never been to Manawatū, this website may be the first impression they have and so this website is our digital front-facing window to all that’s on offer here.
This fresh look is Stage One of an evolving journey and has included a rebuild of some elements to enhance the user experience, operator listings, photo shoots across the city and region, working with tourism operators and reviewing content. Stage Two will be a continuous journey of developing and sourcing fresh new content and imagery and sharing our stories.
“We will be working with partners, businesses, tourism operators and local advocates to build engaging content, identify more of our regions hidden gems, and tell our stories,” says CEDA Acting Communications and Marketing Manager, Janet Reynolds. “We are also connecting with our key national partners, including Air New Zealand, AA Traveller Digital and travel bloggers to showcase Manawatū through a visitor’s eyes.”
A next step in this project is to raise locals’ awareness of the website. Our locals are our region’s biggest advocates and we want to ensure they know and explore our region and have a valuable experience that they’ll want to share with their friends and families, potential visitors and new residents.
We’ve partnered with MoreFM to do this, with a campaign called Face of Manawatū, where locals can send in selfies or group photos of family and friends which will then be used to create a giant mosaic billboard depicting Manawatu’s unique landscape, made up of hundreds of faces of Manawatū locals.
ManawatuNZ.co.nz plays a major role in how the team at CEDA showcases living, working, visiting and doing business in the city and region, and sits alongside our other work in the visitor sector space such as media features, digital and print campaigns targeted at visitors, helping tourism operators enhance their digital profile to reach new customers, supporting rural communities with visitor information signs, and helping to grow overall visitor numbers.
