About Project

Situation:
An Agency Serves the Hospitality & Travel Community Through Its Website
In March of 2020, as the pandemic unfolded, the impact on bars, restaurants and hotels was immediate and devastating, with mandated closures and furloughs across the country. Hanna Lee Communications, which serves the hospitality and travel sectors, saw its revenues decline by 90%. Rather than retreat, the agency began brainstorming ways it could help the hospitality & travel community, starting with our clients, including those whose PR retainers were on hold.

We analyzed our website, www.hannaleecommunications.com, and saw how much traffic the pages devoted to our clients were generating, averaging 200 a week. While websites are traditionally vehicles for companies to market and promote themselves, we thought they could accomplish much more. Given that our agency is always focused on helping its clients increase their sales, with the shift of sales to delivery and e-commerce, it dawned on us that our website could be a powerful referral page to help drive business to our clients, both current and former, as well as those in New York City and across the U.S.

We proceeded to link each one of our spirits clients to their Drizly site and restaurant/bar clients to Seamless, Grubhub, DoorDash or Caviar, along with reservations via Resy and OpenTable. We are not aware of any other PR agency that is leveraging its website to benefit its clients in this direct and powerful way.

Strategies:
Leverage the Hanna Lee Communications website as a means of helping to drive sales for its clients and former clients

Objectives:
Maximize e-commerce and delivery sales for clients and former clients
Reinforce the positioning of Hanna Lee Communications as an innovative agency that cares about the hospitality & travel community and supports it in pioneering ways, like reimagining its website as an engine of e-commerce and delivery

Execution:
The website was overhauled with direct working links to e-commerce and/or delivery inserted for each client and former client

Results:
While we cannot track the number of orders that were driven by our website referrals, we have received very positive feedback from our clients, as well as prospective clients, that we are leveraging our own website on their behalf
While initially inspired by the pandemic, the agency is committed to this approach moving forward