Lastminute’s media business arm Travel People has today its own Content Management System (CMS), ContentHUB.
The product, aimed primarily at travel and ecommerce brands, is designed to make it easier than ever for marketers to attract, engage and convert customers by creating web pages to host content, and monetise it with built-in digital advertising.
Borne out of lastminute.com group’s own need for an advanced but user-friendly system for marketers, ContentHUB is built with advertising at front of mind. Powered by Travel People’s programmatic capabilities, users can effortlessly integrate IAB and native ad formats into their web pages to instantly start monetising their content, without the need to rely on the external plug-ins required by many other content management systems. The sites are conveniently optimised for mobile, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).
Its technology means it is architecturally sophisticated at the back-end, but users can quickly and easily modify content without the technical or coding skills required by other platforms – empowering commercial and marketing teams to be self-sufficient. Users can easily customise layouts with drag-and-drop functionality, enabling them to create different web page structures to suit their needs and integrate everything from video to social feeds.
The launch follows a successful pilot within lastminute.com group, which developed ContentHUB to build its own branded microsites, hosting destination pages and seasonal campaign content, while simultaneously integrating digital advertising, travel deals and content from WAYN, its travel social network.
In research conducted by Travel People, in partnership with London Research, more than half (51%) of senior marketers and business leaders surveyed said their companies don’t use their main web CMS to create microsites. Of these respondents, half (50%) claimed that it’s too difficult to create custom templates, while over half (53%) find it requires too much technical support. Meanwhile, over a third (37%) of respondents that abstain from using a different CMS for microsites put this down to the amount of time it would take to train their staff to use it.
Commenting on the new platform, Alessandra Di Lorenzo, Chief Commercial Officer – Media and Partnerships at lastminute.com group, said: “We know how important it is for travel or ecommerce companies to have a solid content strategy that supports customer engagement and drives up customer return rates. Yet many brands we’ve spoken to face the same challenges as we did when it comes to managing their content and rolling out dynamic, data-driven and ad-optimised microsites at scale. That’s why we’ve combined our competencies and experience in media monetisation as well as travel, technology and design to produce a platform that is functional and aesthetically pleasing – but also very competitively priced.”
The cloud-hosted platform is particularly well-suited to managing websites with multiple brands or languages consistently and at scale. This makes it the perfect solution for travel and ecommerce brands – although other companies can benefit from the platform as well.
In addition to its modern design, ContentHUB allows brands to enhance customer engagement by easily integrating features such as parallax scrolling, video content, featured deals, and social widgets – linking to content from networks such WAYN, Spotify and Instagram – as well as customised widgets.